Te Riri ki Waikato: The Waikato War Revisited

VUW History Programme Seminar, Friday 3 May 2013 
 

The History Programme at VUW warmly invites you to attend a seminar by Dr Vincent O'Malley, HistoryWorks: Te Riri ki Waikato: The Waikato War revisited

 

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the invasion of Waikato, rightly described by Alan Ward as ‘the climactic event in New Zealand race relations’ history. It is tempting to assume that, between James Cowan’s sprawling narrative and James Belich’s more contemporary, concise and insightful analysis, we know all we need to about that conflict. In fact, there is a great deal more that can be explored. Drawing upon recent research for the Waitangi Tribunal’s Te Rohe Potae inquiry, Vincent O’Malley will discuss some of his new (and sometimes surprising) findings concerning the war, its origins and aftermath. 

 

Vincent completed his PhD in NZ Studies at VUW in 2004 and has published widely in the area of Crown and Māori historical relationships, including his 1998 book, Agents of Autonomy: Māori Committees in the Nineteenth Century (Huia Publishers), and (with David Armstrong) The Beating Heart: A Political and Socio-Economic History of Te Arawa (Huia Publishers, 2008). His latest book, The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākeha Encounter, 1642-1840 (Auckland University Press, 2012), explores the process of mutual discovery between Māori and Pākehā, from initially unpredictable and sometimes violent encounters, through to more peaceful and stable relationships in the two decades or so before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. He is a co-founder of the Wellington-based research consultancy HistoryWorks.

 

Venue: History Programme, VUW. Old Kirk 406 (F. L. Wood Seminar Room)

 

Date: 3 May

 

Time: 12.10pm

Uncle Toms and Kupapas: ‘Collaboration’ versus Alliance in a New Zealand Context

Later this year I will be attending a conference at the University of Bern, Switzerland, on the theme of 'Cooperation under the Premise of Imperialism'. Many of the papers to be presented at the conference will be exploring the role of indigenous agents in imperialism throughout Africa and Asia. In my case, I will be discussing the role of kupapa in New Zealand history. I hope to write more about this later on, but meanwhile, by way of providing some insight into my main arguments, what follows is the abstract to my paper.

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The term ‘collaboration’, used in its historical sense, carries unquestionably pejorative connotations. One thinks immediately of those who collaborated with the Nazi regime during the Second World War. Depending on one’s cultural context, the Campbell’s role at Glencoe might also come to mind, or any number of other examples of groups seen as acting in a manner contrary to the national interest.

In the New Zealand context, the label is one applied to those Maori tribes (iwi) who fought on the British side during the New Zealand Wars of 1844-1872. Here, too, the term has negative connotations. In fact, although the act of fighting on the British side against other Maori considered rebels is often described as a form of collaboration, the tribes and individual chiefs concerned are hardly ever called ‘collaborators’. Most commonly, they are simply termed ‘loyalists’, with or without quotation marks.

Such terminology can be seen as reflecting the historical usage of this word (alongside phrases such as ‘friendlies’) in the nineteenth century; but its use can perhaps partly also be attributed to the realisation that the branding of Maori as ‘collaborators’ by historians and other scholars would be highly controversial. In fact, however, the stigmatisation of such groups within Maori society itself is well known. It is common to hear of Maori today who are too ‘whakama’ (ashamed) to name their tribe for fear of being labelled as ‘Uncle Toms’ (or worse). ‘Kupapa’, the usual Maori word for those who fought alongside government forces, is a widely employed contemporary term of abuse, used to describe politicians and others considered guilty of selling out or betraying their people.

This need not be the case. Those Maori tribes who fought on the Crown side during the wars fought alongside the Crown rather than for it. The distinction is one of more than mere semantics. They fought to pursue their own tribal imperatives, rather than simply those of the Crown. That being the case, it is misleading to describe their actions as a form of ‘collaboration’, with all of the cultural baggage that this terminology brings. A better description would be alliance. For these tribes were very much allies of the Crown rather than soldiers fighting for it. They had their own battles to fight and their own motives for fighting them. These motives included settling old scores with other tribes, preventing the confiscation of their lands by the Crown, securing payment and reward for their services, enhancing the mana (prestige or status) of their tribe through victory, and in some circumstances pure self defence. One thing such groups were not is passive tools of the Crown. A considerable degree of Maori agency was evident throughout the New Zealand Wars.

‘Loyalty’ in practice was much more than a one-dimensional cardboard cut-out notion of blind adherence to the Crown. Indeed, at a fundamental level the aspirations of tribes considered loyalists were little different from those of the iwi they fought against. All of the tribes — whether ‘loyal’ or ‘rebel’ — sought to retain land and mana. The difference was that some chose to try and achieve these goals in alliance with the Crown. The decisions and actions of such groups in the mid-nineteenth century reveal much about the persistence of a Maori worldview throughout the colonial era. And those notions of an alliance with the Crown carried through into the twentieth century, when the most ‘loyal’ tribes were at the forefront of substantial Maori involvement in the two world wars — even as other iwi who had suffered invasion and land confiscations made clear their ongoing bitterness at such brutal treatment by refusing to serve in the armed forces of the same Crown that had caused them so much misery.   

Whether the strategy of alliance paid dividends for those groups who opted for such a path is, however, a moot point. Though one historian has suggested that Kupapa Maori communities ‘mostly prospered’ in the wake of the wars, the evidence suggests altogether more limited gains. Loyalist tribes soon found themselves under pressure to sell their lands to the government as further evidence of their ongoing allegiance to the Crown, for example, and themselves suffered land confiscation and significant socio-economic disruption notwithstanding their alliances with the government. A direct comparison with former ‘rebel’ Maori tribes points to little real difference in outcomes over the long-term, even if iwi deemed loyal were able to extract some small concessions, such as the creation of dedicated Maori seats in Parliament, during the period when the Crown became most reliant on their military and logistical support. 

In summary, this paper will argue that the notion of collaboration is not only an inaccurate one in a New Zealand context. It is also a deeply Eurocentric concept, implying as it does that Maori actions in the mid-nineteenth century were entirely governed by and revolved around an imperial presence, rather than reflecting older and pre-existing tribal imperatives. Some Maori communities opted to ally themselves with the Crown out of a range of motives, few of which had anything to do with whether they supported the imperial project. Ultimately Kupapa groups fared little better than those tribes they fought against, whose own goals and objectives were often surprisingly similar. Recognition of these realities can contribute not only to a more nuanced understanding of the nature of indigenous responses to imperialism, but at a practical level can also assist to lift the stigma sometimes still unfairly attached to iwi considered Kupapa.

Christchurch's Temple of Truth: Religion, Sex and Fraud in the 1890s

Ministry for Culture and Heritage Seminar:

 

Please join us on Wednesday 3 April, 12.15pm (just after Easter) at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, L4 ASB House, 101 The Terrace, to hear

Professor Geoff Rice on:

Christchurch's Temple of Truth:

Religion, Sex and Fraud in the 1890s.

 
Christchurch in the 1890s was visited by the extraordinary phenomenon of a much-married American evangelist, Arthur Bently Worthington, who proceeded to set up a new cult of revivalist Christianity. He gathered a large and enthusiastic following, whose liberal donations enabled him to build an impressive ‘Temple of Truth’ on Latimer Square. However, opposition from the established churches and rumours of sexual scandals, together with a controversial change of ‘wives’, made him flee to Tasmania. Amazingly, he returned and tried to make a comeback, but only caused public disorder and the only time the Riot Act has been read in Christchurch. This illustrated talk is a preview of one chapter from Professor Geoff Rice’s next book, Christchurch Crimes and Scandals, 1875-1900 due to be published in 2013.

Book cover of Christchurch Crimes (2012)

Professor Rice retired from the History Department at the University of Canterbury in 2012. His previous publications include Black November: the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand and illustrated histories of Christchurch and Lyttelton. His whimsical tribute to a numerous group of heritage losses in the Christchurch earthquakes, All Fall Down: Christchurch’s Lost Chimneys, appeared in 2011 and last year his Christchurch Crimes : Scandal and Skulduggery in Port and Town, 1850-1875 was published by Canterbury University Press.

Venue: L4, ASB House, 101 The Terrace, Wellington at 12.15pm.
Everyone is welcome - talks are for approximately one hour.

Maori Monument or Pakeha Propaganda?

Ministry for Culture and Heritage Seminar:

We're delighted to invite you to hear Ewan Morris at our first public history seminar in 2013 at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, L4 ASB House, 101 The Terrace, Wellington at 12.15pm on Wednesday 6 March.

Māori Monument or Pākehā Propaganda?

The Memorial to Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui, Whanganui

Statue in memory of Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui, also known as Major Kemp, at Wanganui, 1912. Image courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Reference Number: 1/1-021036-G

In 1912 a memorial to the rangatira and soldier Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui (Major Kemp) was erected in Pākaitore/Moutoa Gardens, Whanganui. It consists of a statue, four bronze panels depicting battles in which Te Keepa was involved, and eight separate panels of text.
The memorial was the subject of a series of court cases in 1913-14, resulting from the unwillingness of Te Keepa’s sister to pay for a statue that she felt did not properly represent her brother. It survived the 1995 occupation of Pākaitore unscathed (unlike the statue of John Ballance), despite the fact that it appears to commemorate Te Keepa as a loyal servant of the Crown. Unusually text-heavy, the memorial seems to invite reading in a quite literal sense. But how should we read and understand this memorial? Is it a Pākehā memorial, a Māori memorial, or a mixture of both?

Ewan Morris has worked on Australian, Irish and New Zealand history. He is the author of Our Own Devices: National Symbols and Political Conflict in Twentieth-Century Ireland (2005), and a co-author of The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (2^nd edition, 2008). He is researching debates about memorials and other symbols in Aotearoa New Zealand and what they can tell us about relations between Māori and non-Māori since 1970. The memorials at Pākaitore/Moutoa Gardens are among the case studies he is examining in this research.
 

Everyone is welcome - talks are for approximately one hour.

New Zealand Historical Association Conference 2013

The biennial New Zealand Historical Association conference is being held in Dunedin from Wednesday 20 November until Friday 22 November. The conference organizing committee is looking forward to welcoming a large and energetic group of historians, archivists and librarians, teachers, curators, and heritage professionals as well as the historically curious.
We have an excellent line-up of keynote speakers: Professor Elizabeth Elbourne (McGill University), author of Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853; Professor Maya Jasanoff (Harvard University), the author of Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 and Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World; and Professor Henry Yu (University of British Columbia), author of Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern America. Associate Professor Damon Salesa (University of Auckland), whose Racial Crossings won the 2012 Ernest Scott Prize, will be the Beaglehole Memorial Lecturer for 2013. Professor Atholl Anderson, noted archaeologist and expert on the history of Ngāi Tahu Whānui, will deliver the Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke Memorial Lecture.

Full story

Early contacts between Maori and Pakeha in Aotearoa/New Zealand

 

• Date: 7 March
• Time: 12.15pm–1.00pm
• Location: Te Wehenga and Malaga Pasifika Rooms, Ground Floor, National Library

Isaac Coates's portraits are a window into a world of contact between Māori and Pākehā. They were created at a turning point in Māori-Pākehā relations, marked by the Wairau Affray – a confrontation over land in June 1843 in which at least 26 people died.

Historian Vincent O’Malley surveyed the history of the period leading up to this change in his recent book, The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642-1840. In this session Vincent, in discussion with Paul Diamond, will survey this period of early contact between the two races, and the enduring historical lessons.

The speakers

Dr Vincent O’Malley, Research Director of HistoryWorks and author of The Meeting Place; Paul Diamond, Curator of the exhibition

Part of the Turnbull Gallery exhibition, Head and shoulders: Portraits of Māori by Isaac Coates.

On Tribalism and Democracy

In a recent comment piece in the New Zealand Herald, Elizabeth Rata argued that tribalism and democracy ‘are incompatible — they cannot exist together as political systems in the one nation’. Tribalism, she further argued, was premised ‘on principles of inequality’, since kin status was what mattered. If chieftainship still exists to be expressed, Rata argued, then ‘so too must the tribal political system of 1840 also exist.’

Morgan Godfery has written a careful reply to Rata’s piece on his Maui Street Blog. But I want to comment further on Rata’s argument that tribalism and democracy are mutually incompatible. Historical Maori leadership structures have always fascinated me. My first book, published back in 1998, was on the role of committees in the administration of Maori affairs (Agents of Autonomy: Maori Committees in the Nineteenth Century). Later I wrote a PhD thesis at Victoria University of Wellington on a similar topic (‘Runanga and Komiti: Maori Institutions of Self-Government in the Nineteenth Century’). Since then I have published several articles on similar themes. Hence my interest in Rata’s comments.

Firstly, let’s look at British-style ‘democracy’ as at 1840. According to the most recent scholarly estimate I could find, following the Reform Act of 1832 an estimated 18% of British males over the age of 21 years were eligible to vote (see Clyve Jones, ed., A Short History of Parliament: England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Scotland, Boydell Press, 2012, p. 262). British women did not gain the franchise until 1918, so in 1840 roughly 9% of the adult population were entitled to vote. Most people probably would not equate a system that excluded 91% of the population from participating with a modern-style democracy. That seems important to bear in mind in any comparison of Maori and British leadership structures at the time of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Well, what was the nature of Maori political structures at 1840? To begin with, as most commentators now agree, it was the hapu rather than the iwi that constituted the primary political entity (though iwi-level organisation later increased in response to the pressures of colonisation). Secondly, as I have argued elsewhere, many early European observers perceived Maori society in hierarchical terms – much like the highly class-bound communities from which they themselves had come – and viewed the authority of the chiefs as absolute. I’ll include here an extract from an article I published in 2011 on this topic (click on this link for the fully referenced version):

John Savage, who after visiting the north of New Zealand in 1805 authored the first work focused solely on the country, described the form of government he observed at the Bay of Islands to be ‘aristocratical, and hereditary’. John Nicholas similarly concluded in his 1817 account of a visit to the islands that ‘[t]he power of the chiefs...is in general absolute’, though he added that ‘in some districts it is restrained by certain limitations, and controuled [sic] in a great measure by public opinion.’ This qualification was more general than Nicholas appreciated. At least some early European observers came close to appreciating the point. Richard Cruise, who visited New Zealand just a few years later, noted that whilst at Hauraki he had encountered ‘a person bearing the title of areekee...who was said to exert a very despotic control over many of the neighbouring chiefs’ but that ‘in the intercourse he maintained with his countrymen, no more respect or distinction was paid to him than to any other chief.’ The missionary Samuel Marsden noted during his first visit to New Zealand in 1814 that ‘there appears to be no middle class of people in New Zealand...they are all either chiefs or, in a certain degree, slaves. At the same time, the chiefs do not give their commands to the people indiscriminately as a body with that authority which masters, in civil life, exercise over their servants, nor do their dependents feel themselves bound to obey such commands.’

Frederick Maning, the author of the classic work Old New Zealand, observed that ‘the natives are so self-possessed, opinionated, and republican, that the chiefs have at ordinary times but little control over them, except in very rare cases, where the chief happens to possess a singular vigour of character, or some other unusual advantage, to enable him to keep them under’. Later observers agreed with these assessments. According to Francis Dart Fenton, writing in 1857:

No system of government that the world ever saw can be more democratic than that of the Maoris. The chief alone has no power. The whole tribe deliberate on every subject, not only politically on such as are of public interest, but even judicially they hold their “komitis” on every private quarrel. In ordinary times the vox populi determines every matter, both internal and external. The system is a pure pantocracy, and no individual enjoys influence or exercises power, unless it originates with the mass and is expressly or tacitly conferred by them.

Although Fenton and other commentators suggested that rangatira could be accorded large powers during times of war, this applied no more widely than to their own hapu. George Clarke, a member of the Church Missionary Society, concluded that ‘a New Zealander in the field of battle is the most ungovernable creature immaginable [sic] for though a Soldier he is quite independent and if he likes he will obey the voice of his leader or he will not’. To the extent that Hongi Hika led any taua, or war party, it was largely a matter of persuasion, reputation, force of personality, and by personal example, rather than in accordance with any recognised authority. The rangatira himself informed Marsden that whilst at war ‘he was feared and respected, but when he was at home they would not hearken to anything he might say’. Henry Williams, in response to a query as to why one war party had not kept a closer former, was informed that ‘it was their usual way for each party to go where they liked, that every one was his own chief. Without any one to direct, not only does each tribe act distinct from the other, but each individual has the same liberty. If one be bent on mischief, he cannot be restrained by the others.’

Rangatira, in short, had great influence over their hapu, but little actual authority beyond that conferred on them by the wider community to implement the will of the group. As Angela Ballara notes, decision-making was ‘a matter of discussion, compromise, and consensus...[which] almost always – save in the case of slaves or client hapu – called for the voluntary assent of the persuaded rather than obedience to any authority’. If there was an incentive to take the word of the chief seriously it lay in the fact that the rangatira was considered the personal embodiment of the mana of the hapu. His misfortunes and reversals would be shared by the wider community and this often created a good reason for both chiefs and their communities to co-operate.

 

So through mechanisms such as regular hui, tribal councils and committees, Maori leadership structures were highly participatory and responsive. Some European observers considered them rather too democratic. It is noteworthy in this respect that women (and even children) were able to participate in these processes. John Gorst wrote in rather scathing terms with reference to runanga that:

The name ‘runanga’ was used by the Maories to denote assemblies of a particular kind, which were in use before ever Europeans came into the country. The Runanga was a sort of council of war, held in war time to discuss war questions. It was formed of the highest chiefs, but inferior men were not excluded, though the reverence then paid to the chiefs forbad the rest to take any prominent part in the discussions. As time went on the Runanga began to take notice of other matters, and to grow more and more democratic, until it degenerated into a promiscuous gathering of men, women, and children, which usurped the whole legislative and judicial function of government.

Joel Polack, writing of the pre-Treaty period, stated that Maori women took ‘an active concern in all business of life. They are consulted alike in public and domestic affairs...and even join the war council, which they at periods aid by their deliberations.’

I could go on (at length) with many more examples and much more evidence. But I think I have made my point: the assumption that Maori society at 1840 was necessarily undemocratic is not grounded in historical fact (that is, if we are concerned with the substance of democracy, rather than merely its form). Probably a better case could be constructed for the undemocratic nature of British government at that time. In this respect, whatever merit there may be in Elizabeth Rata’s other arguments, her juxtaposition of tribalism versus democracy is fundamentally flawed.