Moriori in school

Here's a question for everybody involved in the education industry. I was contacted by MacKenzie Smith, who is studying Pacific journalism at AUT and writing an article about the treatment of Moriori history at Kiwi schools. For a long time many Kiwi kids were taught a mythical, nineteenth century version of Moriori history, in which Moriori were presented as the dark-skinned original inhabitants of New Zealand who were driven to the Chathams and then exterminated by Maori.

The myth of the Moriori as a pre-Maori people was dispelled amongst scholars in the 1920s, after the anthropologist HD Skinner visited the Chathams and proved that Moriori were a Polynesian people who had the same background as Maori but had developed a unique culture on the Chathams during centuries of isolation. But the myth persisted in popular imagination, and was reinforced by an article in an issue of the New Zealand School Journal that was used as a resource by teachers for decades.

Since the 1980s Moriori have been agitating for their history to be presented realistically in schools, and in 2011 the Ministry of Education announced that it was changing the treatment of Moriori in school curricula.

Mackenzie Smith wants to know whether much progress has been made in the presentation of Moriori history in our schools. Are teachers getting it right? Is the old myth clinging on in places? Is the subject even being discussed? Send your answers to Smith at mackerz.smith@gmail.com