Pseudo-history at Dargy museum

[Along with a number of other masochists, including the regular contributors to this blog Edward Ashby and Matthew Dentith, I've been involved for the last year or so in monitoring the activities of the pseudo-historians who argue, for reasons that are more political than scholarly, that New Zealand was first settled by ancient Celts, or South Americans, or Chinese, or 'Waitaha' - by anyone, it seems, but Maori.

Up until now, the pseudo-historians have been discovered lurking in trashy giveaway papers like the Franklin E Local, or on badly-designed websites that tend to disappear when they're subjected to scholarly scrutiny. Yesterday, though, I was dismayed to discover that pseudo-history has gained a foothold in one of New Zealand's larger provincial museums.

What follows is the text of an e mail I've just sent to the director of Dargaville museum: if you feel moved to send your own complaint, you can reach her at darg.museum@xtra.co.nz]

I am e mailing you because I visited Dargaville museum yesterday, and was perturbed by your institution's treatment of New Zealand prehistory.

My concerns focus on the presentation and interpretation of the large pou which forms the centrepiece of your room of prehistoric artefacts. Because I am going to take issue with many of the claims it makes, I will quote the caption which accompanies the pou in full:

Pouto Ki Rongomaraeroa

This ancient 2.7 metre pou carved with stone implements from kauri was discovered in sand dunes near Pouto Point after a storm in December 1991. It is thought to have been the right hand entrance of a Waitaha village known as Matuinga.

The carving, called Pouto Ki Rongomaraeroa, is the only one of its kind to be restored and put on display in a public place.

It is different in type and design to Maori carvings, reinforcing the theory that the Waitaha had different origins and a longer history in New Zealand than Maori. The Waitaha lived in settlements around much of New Zealand's coast.

The carving was found by Dargaville woman Maxine Stringer, and after specialised preservation by Auckland University it was returned and installed in the Museum during a dawn ceremony led by Waitaha kaumatua (elder) Patrick Ruka in December 1996

A storm in 1950 uncovered the remains of a Waitaha village the carving probably belonged to, but sand covered the site again before excavation could take place.

The caption I have quoted gives the impression that there is an intellectually credible theory which holds that a people called Waitaha inhabited New Zealand before Maori and still live here today. I don't think I would be exaggerating if I said that there is not a single scholar of New Zealand's prehistory who would endorse such a 'theory'.

When historians, archaeologists, museum curators, and experts on whakapapa talk about Waitaha, they are referring to the iwi which originally inhabited the South Island. The Waitaha were a Maori tribe, not a non-Maori people. Their control of the South Island was ended by the arrival of first the Ngati Mamoe and then the Kai Tahu tribes. First the Ngati Mamoe absorbed Waitaha through conquest and intermarriage, and then Kai Tahu absorbed Ngati Mamoe through the same process.

Although some Waitaha stories, songs, and sacred places were incorporated into Kai Tahu culture, the group had long since ceased to exist as a distinct entity by the time Europeans arived in the South Island in the late eighteenth century. The 1994 Treaty settlement between Kai Tahu and the Crown affirmed that, because they had taken over the land, absorbed the people they had found there, and lived in possession of the land for hundreds of years, Kai Tahu were the tangata whenua of the territory that was originally inhabited by Waitaha.

Your museum's claim that Waitaha were a pre-Maori people who lived all around New Zealand seems to derive from a series of very eccentric books published by a man named Barry Brailsford. In the 1980s Brailsford enjoyed a reputation as a serious researcher into New Zealand prehistory, but at the beginning of the 1990s he began to make a series of very strange claims about the existence of a hitherto-unknown 'nation of Waitaha'.

According to Brailsford, this 'nation' had been established in New Zealand thousands of years ago by a technologically advanced people with supernatural powers who had journeyed across the ocean from South America to these islands. The people of Waitaha supposedly built pyramids, huge stone statues, and stone roads in their new home, but they were pacifists, and were eventually conquered by the ancestors of the Maori. Brailsford claimed that he was given his 'information' on the 'nation of Waitaha' from a handful of survivors of the nation, but critics like Kai Tahu leader and historian Tipene O'Regan have pointed out that most of these 'Waitahans' were actually Pakeha.

Brailsford's 'theory' of a Waitaha 'nation' has been treated with disdain by serious scholars of New Zealand's past. Brailsford's critics have pointed out that it is very unlikely that a large, technologically advanced civilisation existed in New Zealand thousands of years ago.

The importation of rats and large-scale fires are almost always corollaries of the human settlement of virgin islands, yet analysis of pollen spores shows that our forests were largely undisturbed by man-made fire until less than a thousand years ago, and analysis of ancient seeds suggest that rats did not reach our shores until about the same time. No human remains or artefacts have been found close to, let alone below, the layer of ash left by the last eruption of Taupo eighteen hundred years ago. The huge ancient cemeteries, buried roads, and massive ruined stone structures we would expect to find if the Waitaha theory were true have never turned up. Michael King summed up the attitude of scholars and Maori when he wrote in his Penguin History of New Zealand that 'not a skerrick of evidence' exists to support the theory of a pre-Maori Waitaha nation.

I have been unable to find any information about the 'Waitaha kaumatua' Patrick Ruku mentioned in the caption in your museum. I assume, though, that he is one of the handful of people who have identified with Barry Brailsford's mystical ideas about New Zealand pre-history. The caption in Dargaville museum claims that the pou found on Pouto peninsula is 'different in type and design' to Maori carvings. This is a very odd assertion, because both the function of the artefact and the motifs carved onto it are immediately recognisable as Maori. Anyone who visits a large collection of Maori carvings - the collection in the Auckland War Memorial Museum's Maori Court, for instance - will notice many large carvings which were intended to stand either as gateways to important spaces - marae, cultivations, or burial grounds - or as markers denoting boundaries of one sort or another.

The spiral motif carved on the pou is ubiquitous in Maori art. The relative simplicity of the carving may indicate that the pou belongs to the early period of Maori culture and art, before the more intricate carving style made famous by meeting houses like the Auckland museum's Hotunui evolved. Many examples of early Maori carving have been found in Northland - the Kaitaia lintelpiece, which is the oldest known Maori artefact, is a good example. There is no reason to treat the pou at Dargaville museum as the product of a non-Maori culture.

The reference to the University of Auckland in your caption implies that the institution is in some way associated with and supportive of claims about a 'Waitaha' civilisation. The pou may have undergone some work in the conservation lab at the university's anthropology department, which is open to outsiders, but I am certain that none of the staff or students at the department would want to be associated with the claims you are making about New Zealand prehistory.

I was saddened not only by your interpretation but by your presentation of the pou found at Pouto. It is normal for museums to display pou in an upright position. Pou were intended to stand upright, and museum visitors have a better chance of understanding the function and meaning of an object if it is displayed in the way its makers intended. There are cultural as well as educational reasons for displaying pou upright: because of the mana that the objects had, many Maori find it offensive to see them prostrate. Instead of displaying the Pouto pou in a manner that is educationally and culturally appropriate, Dargaville museum has chosen to lay the object in a container that resembles a glass-topped coffin.

After seeing the pou and the caption accompanying it, I talked with a member of the Dargaville museum staff. When I asked her how the museum could justify its claim about a pre-Maori Waitaha people, she told me, very firmly, that archaeologists had uncovered 'pre-Maori' settlements during digs 'down on Pouto peninsula'. Compared to the rest of Northland, Pouto peninsula has received fairly intensive archaeological investigation, but none of the site surveys and excavations conducted in the region has ever uncovered signs of a pre-Maori civilisation.

When I asked the staff member whether she was aware the scholarly community rejected the idea of a pre-Maori people, she replied 'Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?' She explained that Maori communities and the archaeologists and historians who work with them have a 'vested interest' in suppressing information about a pre-Maori people. When I asked her whether the Dargaville museum had consulted the Ngati Whatua subtribe Te Uri o Hau, who are the tangata whenua of the Dargaville area, about the Pouto pou, the staff member replied that 'the Maoris[sic] aren't interested'.

When I examined the rack of books offered for sale near the entrance to your museum, I was unable to find a single text by a trained historian or archaeologist. I did, however, find two books by Gary Cook, a self-styled expert on 'mystic realms' and 'alternative history' who wanders the backblocks of New Zealand searching for ley lines and 'energy sites'. It goes without saying that Cook's work is not normally found in museum bookshops. In the space where visitors can watch 'educational' DVDs, I found a copy of a 'documentary' called Who Was Here Before Us? in which Cook, Brailsford and a series of other pseudo-scholars expound their strange ideas.

Dargaville museum is a beautifully situated institution with some fine objects in its permanent collection. It has the potential to play an important role in educating New Zealanders about their past. At present, though, the museum is engaged in misrepresenting a large part of our nation's past by promoting the absurd Waitaha myth, peddling works of pseudo-scholarship, and answering visitors' questions with misinformation. I believe that the museum should rectify these faults by forging relationships with scholars experts in New Zealand's pre-history, and with the tangata whenua of the Dargaville area. Museums have a responsibility to represent the past accurately, and under the Treaty of Waitangi they also have a responsibility to work in partnership with Maori when they store and display taonga like the Pouto pou.

I will be sending copies of this e mail to individuals and groups who may be affected by and interested in the misrepresentations at Dargaville museum.

Sincerely
Scott Hamilton

Good bookshop, lousy book

The other day I went to check out the website of the Women's Bookshop, a long-time favourite watering hole for Auckland bookworms. Imagine my dismay when I found that the bookshop was not only stocking but enthusiastically promoting Gavin Menzies' piece of pseudo-history, 1421: the Year China Discovered the World. Here's what the Women's Bookshop site says about Menzies' offspring:

On 8 February 1421 the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, 500 foot long [yep, you read it right, 500 foot long] junks made from the finest teak and mahogany, were led by Emperor Zhu Di's loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was 'to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas' and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. Their journey would last over two years and circle the entire globe...

Gavin Menzies has spent fifteen years tracing the astonishing voyages of the Chinese fleet. Now, in a fascinating historical detective story, he shares the remarkable account of his discoveries and the incontrovertible evidence to support them, bringing together a compelling narrative, ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy and the surviving accounts by Chinese explorers and the later European navigators. It brings to light the artefacts and inscribed standing stones left behind by the emperor¹s fleet,the evidence of sunken junks along its route and the ornate votive offerings left by the Chinese sailors wherever they landed, in thanks to Shao Lin, Goddess of the sea.

1421 is the story of a remarkable journey of discovery that rewrites our understanding of history. Our knowledge of world exploration as it has been commonly accepted for centuries must now be revised. 1421: The Year China Discovered the World is destined to become a classic work of historical detection.

Since Menzies published his book, not a single historian has assented to his claim that a fleet of Chinese ships circumnavigated the world in the 1420s. The maps that Menzies produced to back his claims that the Chinese got to places like Greenland and New Zealand have been exposed as obvious hoaxes. Some of them, for instance, include place names written in the modern Chinese script, which was only developed after Mao came to power at the end of the 1940s (Menzies may not have noticed this small problem because, despite wanting to rewrite Chinese history, he doesn't actually know Mandarin).

Much of the non-cartographic 'evidence' that Menzies cites for his theory is similarly absurd. For instance, he claims that the wrecks of fifteenth century Ming dynasty ships have been discovered up and down the coast of New Zealand. I must keep an eye out the next time I go down to Pt Chev Beach for a swim...

A lot of the evidence against Menzies' claims is presented at this website, which was set up by historians and Sinologists irritated by 1421.

Despite its absurd theses, Menzies' book has become a bestseller in many countries. Partly this reflects a slick marketing campaign by his publishers, who are the same outfit that gave us the Da Vinci Code. A big part of the success of the book, though, is due to the resurgent Chinese nationalism which has been one of the side-effects of the spectacular economic growth there over the past couple of decades. And the 1421 myth has support in high places: in 2003, Chinese President Hu Jintao regurgitated one of Menzies' claims when he told a joint session of China's parliament that his country had 'discovered' Australia.

I know what you're thinking. Why get so het up about a bit of Chinese myth-making, especially when it's being orchestrated by a former Pommy submarine driver who left school at fifteen and doesn't know that coconuts can float across oceans? The Brits have King Arthur, the Americans have JFK - why can't China's burgeoning elite create its own fact-free nationalist myth? And fair enough, I'd say, were it not for the way that Menzies' book contributes to some pervasive, harmful, and - let's not forget - profoundly stupid myths about the history of this fair land.

After working on the Information Desk at a major New Zealand museum for a few months, I can tell you, dear readers, that there is still a bewildering amount of bewilderment about the pre-history of these islands. A lot of the confusion surrounds the question of pre-Maori habitation of New Zealand. Despite a complete absence of evidence, many New Zelanders - Maori, as well as Pakeha - and not a few foreign visitors still believe that Maori conquered an earlier people who had settled on these islands. The pre-Maori people in question varies: I've heard theories about South American, Celtic, Phoenician, Haida, and Portugese settlers who were rudely disturbed by latecomer Maori. (A variant strain of thinking holds that Maori were the first settlers of these islanders, but that they are not a Polynesian people. A co-worker was solemnly informed that Maori were a Papuan tribe, for instance.)

But by far the most pervasive myth of a pre-Maori people is built around Moriori, the indigenous people of the Chatham Islands. Moriori are descended from a group of Maori who travelled to the Chathams from one of the two main islands of New Zealand in or before the fourteenth century AD. It is likely, but not certain, that the travellers came from the southern part of the South Island. The travellers did not return, probably because the trees on the Chathams could not be made into canoes capable of making long sea journeys. In their centuries of isolation, and in response to the unique conditions on the Chathams, the settlers developed a distinct culture and identity.

Perhaps because of the harsh climate of the Chathams, Moriori did not grow crops. Like the Australian Aborigines, they lived as hunter gatherers. Moriori society was more egalitarian than most Maori societies. Slavery did not exist, and elders wielded less power than most Maori chiefs. Moriori society was also distinguished by its pacifism. Early in Moriori history, an elder named Nunuku-whenua forbade war, and placed strict limits on violence. ‘Nunuku’s law’ ordered that fights between individuals must stop as soon as blood was spilt.

Moriori physical culture was also distinctive. Moriori carving was less ornate than Maori carving. Unlike Maori, though, Moriori made dendroglyphs (carvings on living trees). Moriori often made ingenious uses out of simple materials. For instance, Moriori built wash-through rafts (waka korari) out of seaweed and reeds. The rafts floated partially submerged in water, and this gave them considerable stability in the rough seas around the Chathams.


In 1835 two Taranaki iwi, Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama, invaded the Chatham Islands and enslaved the Moriori. By 1862, when slavery was abolished on the Chathams, 1,500 Moriori had died, and only about 100 remained. After they were freed Moriori were unable to recover much of their land, and their population continued to decline. In recent decades, though, there has been a ‘Moriori renaissance’, and in January 2005 the first modern Moriori marae opened on the Chathams.

There is no doubt about the origin of the Moriori. The Moriori and Maori languages both belong to the Eastern Polynesian subfamily of Polynesian languages, but they share many similarities that the other languages in the subfamily do not have. This suggests a shared history. Tools made from obsidian and argillite, materials which were available in the North and South Islands but not in other parts of Polynesian, have been found at Moriori archaeological sites on the Chathams.

Nevertheless, a very powerful myth has developed which says that Moriori were Melanesian pre-Maori settlers of New Zealand, who were conquered and then driven to the remote Chathams by the more 'advanced' and 'aggressive' Polynesians. Even though it has no credibility amongst scholars, the myth of Moriori as a pre-Maori people has persisted in the minds of many Pakeha, and a surprising number of Maori.

Gavin Menzies has plugged in to some of the myths of pre-Maori habitation of these islands in a doomed attempt to make his argument for the Chinese circumnavigation of the world seem more convincing. In 1421 he suggests that many Maori are actually the descendants of members of the Chinese fleet that set out in the fifteenth century and thus, presumably, not really the indigenous people of these islands. That was bad enough, but last year Menzies visited New Zealand to inform us all that 'Maori do not exist'. According to Menzies, Maori are the descendants of Chinese prostitutes and Melanesian slaves. Here's an excerpt from a report on the talk Menzies gave:

Chinese miners were in New Zealand from about 286 BC, he said. They brought concubines from China and on the way to New Zealand picked up Melanesian slaves who revolted, killed the Chinese men and took the women for themselves. This, he said, was the origin of the Maori people.

Menzies said his book had been well-received around the world but had drawn hostile criticism in New Zealand...

Funny that. One person who has responded warmly to Menzies' bizarre reformulations of the Moriori myth is Muriel Newman, former Act party MP and scourge of solo mothers, 'bludging Maoris' and the 'Treaty industry'. In her weekly newsletter Newman regurgitated the musings of Menzies and other pseuds:

Gavin Menzies and his 1421 Team presented new evidence of early Chinese exploration by Zheng He, strengthening their belief that Chinese colonies existed in New Zealand for hundreds of years before the arrival of Maori...

Claims have been made that New Zealand was discovered from as early as 600BC by Phoenician, Indian, Greek and Arab explorers. In fact, claims of these visits help to explain the existence in the South Island of the fossilised remains of rats that have been carbon dated at 160 BC - more than 1,000 years before Maori!

Well, only if you can explain what the Polynesian rat was doing in Greece or Phoenicia, Muriel. The real reason for the enthusiasm Newman and other right-wingers show for the pseudo-histories of Menzies and others is easy to understand. Many Pakeha want to believe that Maori took New Zealand from the Moriori, or from some other people, or that Maori are some kind of historical freak, because that would, according to the Darwinian logic of the right, somehow make the subsequent Pakeha colonisation of Maori more justifiable. 'We only did to you what you did to the poor old Morioris, mate'... What mystifies me is why the Women's Bookshop, which has always been associated, in my deluded mind at least, with the warm fuzzy liberal left, would want to go out on a limb and promote a load of racist baloney like Menzies' book. I can understand the free speech, 'fair's fair, let him have his say argument' for stocking 1421 , but to call it 'a classic' that 'rewrites history' goes above and beyond the call of liberal pluralism, surely?

Pseudo-historians like Menzies like to apologise for their stupidity by claiming that they represent some heroic intellectual 'alternative' which a hegemonic scholarly 'establishment' wants to gag. The truth is that history, like most fields of scholarship, is a nest of infighting between rival schools and theories. Every year in this country, dozens of interesting, innovative and carefully researched histories are published; it's a pity that so few of them attract the hype or readership of 1421. If anyone has been dissuaded from reading 1421 by this post, but still wants to connect this part of the world with China, then they ought to check out Jade Taniwha, Jenny Bol Lee's just-released study of the 'Maori Chinese' culture that has developed in New Zealand over the last eighty years or so. Real history is always better than the counterfeit stuff.

Justin Taua: Maori must confront racist pseudo-history

Over the past year this blog has repeatedly discussed the claims by pseudo-scholars like Martin Doutre, Kerry Bolton and Noel Hilliam that an advanced European civilisation once existed in New Zealand, before it was wiped out by Maori invaders who appropriated parts of its culture.

Pseudo-historians like Doutre and Bolton hold openly racist views - Bolton is New Zealand's most famous neo-Nazi, and in an infamous debate at the Scoop Review of Books last year Doutre admitted to being a Holocaust denier and an admirer of the British neo-Nazi David Irving - and yet they also claim that their bizarre views about New Zealand prehistory are supported by many Maori.

As Matthew Dentith has noted, the pseudo-historians and their publishers have failed ever to produce a single Maori scholar who shares their ideas. This is hardly surprising, given that the myth of an ancient white race of New Zealanders is intended to deprive Maori of their status as tangata whenua and to denigrate their cultural achievements by claiming that taonga like waka and carved meeting houses were actually created by whites.

The recent controversy over Noel Hilliam's activities in the northern Kaipara region has shown what Maori really think of the pseudo-historians. Hilliam's looting of prehistoric grave sites in the Kaipara region and his misrepresenation of an ancient Maori carving in Dargaville museum have been condemned by Te Uri o Hau, the tangata whenua of the northern Kaipara, as attacks on their history and culture. After complaints from Te Uri o Hau and also from outsiders like myself, Dargaville museum has distanced itself from Hilliam, and the New Zealand Historic Places Trust has opened an investigation into his visits to prehistoric grave sites.

Now the veteran trade unionist and Maori rights activist Justin Taua has aimed his fire at the pseudo-historians. Justin comes from Tuakau, a small town just south of Pukekohe in the central Franklin District, where he is well-known for the roles he has played in the National Distribution Union and, more recently, in the Maori Party. Justin is known outside Franklin for his involvement over the years in causes like the anti-war movement, the foreshore and seabed hikoi, and the campaign for an inquiry into the death of Stephen Wallace. Justin has spoken at political meetings and demonstrations in many parts of New Zealand, and in 2006 he was invited to South America to meet trade unionists and indigenous rights activists there.

Justin is well aware of the long history of racism that Maori and other minorities have suffered in central Franklin. In the 1850s and early 1860s, the area sat on the boundary between the independent Waikato Kingdom and the settler state based in Auckland; in the aftermath of the invasion and conquest of the Waikato, many of Justin's ancestors had their land confiscated by the victorious settler state.

Some Maori land escaped confiscation, and in the early twentieth century the lower Waikato and central and western Franklin became a base for the attempts of Waikato leaders like Princess Te Puea to revive the fortunes of their people. Some of the first collective farms Te Puea established were in Franklin, and in the interwar years a string of marae were opened in the area, often in the face of Pakeha opposition. Justin's Nga Tau E Rua marae in Tuakau was opened by Te Puea herself, and was a symbol of the determination of Maori to retain their cultural identity.

Many of the Maori who had their land confiscated after the 1863-64 war became casual labourers in the market gardens which flourished on the volcanic soil around Pukekohe. The first postwar market gardens were run by Pakeha, but in the early decades of the twentieth century many Indian and Chinese immigrants began to plant crops like potatoes and onions on small plots of rented land around Pukekohe. Many of them employed Maori, and intermarriage between the two groups became relatively common.

The legacy of the Waikato war and the arrival of relatively large numbers of non-European immigrants both helped to make Pukekohe a stronghold of organised racism. In a fascinating but depressing essay published in the New Zealand Journal of History in 1985, Jacqueline Leckie described how the White New Zealand League was founded in Pukekohe in the 1920s to campaign for the deportation of 'aliens' and the 'purity' of the white race. The League attracted hundeds of members, and even won the support of some trade unions. In a recent comment at this blog, Leckie's fellow historian Mark Derby noted that even as late as the 1950s Pukekohe's movie theatre had segregated seating, and that barbers in the town centre were for a long time known to refuse to cut the hair of Maori and Indians.

Given this history, it is perhaps not surprising that the Franklin E Local, a publication based in Pukekohe, has emerged in the last year as the champion of the racist theories of the likes of Martin Doutre and Noel Hilliam.

In an article which has appeared in the Maori Party publication Nga Motu News and which is being circulated at party meetings, Justin Taua urges Maori to confront the Franklin E Local and other sources of racist pseudo-history in twenty-first century New Zealand. He invites readers of his text, which Ive reproduced below, to pass it on to friends and contacts.

Franklin E Local Sham

Since September 2008, ‘Franklin E Local’ which is a free monthly giveaway distributed in the Franklin District of Counties Manukau, has been waging a racist campaign designed to undermine Maori history and political determination in Aotearoa.

‘E Local’ issues from Sept 08, Oct 08, Nov 08, Jan 09 and Feb 09, all contain ‘pre-Maori New Zealand’ articles. The October 09 issue features a promo promising a continuation of the ‘hit’ series ‘pre-Maori New Zealand’ in the next E Local issue for Nov 09. In the September 08 issue, a feature article entitled ‘Who walked New Zealand pre-Maori’ contained fanciful accounts of a Celtic occupation of Aotearoa pre-Maori. It is presumed that the feature article was written by none other than ‘Franklin E Local’ editor Mykeljon Winckel. Ironically an item on Miss Teen NZ 2008 Kahurangi Taylor who features on the front cover of the same issue, serves to cover as an antidote the shambolic rantings of the E Local editor. Similarly an article in the May 09 issue on Ngati Tahinga Kaumatua Mina Whare, served the same purpose.

The bash the hell out of Maori and then sooth their feelings approach is a tactic all too common by racists who like to dish up the old ‘some of my best friends are Maori’ bullshit. E Local as part of its community good-cop PR last year, launched a book called 'Franklin and its people 2008' to cynically enhance and give legitimacy to the extreme right-wing views of its editor.

Conspiracist magazines such as ‘Nexus’ follow a similar Pattern to ‘E Local’ by inserting legitimate articles next to crap about UFOs with the idea of transferring the legitimacy to the UFOs.

The lack of response from Maori and their organisations from within the rohe (area) where E Local is distributed is of major concern. For more than a year, E Local editor Mykeljon Winckel has been promoting the fantasist writings and theories of Martin Doutre author of ‘Ancient Celtic New Zealand'. At present, publications by Doutre (a self-confessed Holocaust denier and white supremacist) are available in public libraries including those in Franklin District. And they are not in the ‘Fiction’ section either.

Supporting Doutre in his endeavour to rewrite Maori and New Zealand history are the former curator of the Dargaville Maritime Museum Noel Hilliam and New Age archaeologist Barry Brailsford who invented the ‘Kaimanawa stone wall’ made by ancient Celts. Add to the mix disgruntled Kaipara farmer Allan Titford (who got screwed by the Crown not Te Roroa) and the proto-Fascist ‘One New Zealand Foundation’, and you have all the ingredients to fuel the lies promoted with relish by Mykeljon Winckel.

Doutre and his gutless mates contemptuously brush off all challenges put to them by university specialists in New Zealand history and archaeology. The consensus among the academics is that Doutre and his revisionists are a political phenomenon rooted in an international white backlash and Aryan Neo-Nazi racism.

Doutre maintains that there is a conspiracy led by Maori-friendly academics to silence the real history of New Zealand. Judging by the attendances at local community halls up and down the country where he and his followers speak, there seems to be a receptive audience among New Zealanders needing to re-enforce their own prejudices.

But more importantly, where are the voices from Maori, from Tangata Whenua in challenging these criminals? Are we so disconnected from what is happening around us? The fact that Franklin E Local is being peddled within the rohe bounded by Te Puaha O Waikato in the south and Te Maanuka in the north should be a wakeup call for all people not just the haukainga.

Maori academia and Iwi media in all spheres including the internet are deafening by their silence. Maori Television which produces by far the best current affairs and political content in NZ has been left wanting. Standard diet politics seems to be the order of the day. Destructive nutcases like Doutre don’t even warrant enquiry or get a roasting.

In May TVNZ's ‘Close-up’ did an extremely light-hearted story on Martin Doutre and some odd looking boulders on the North Shore. In the end, it left the viewer no more enlightened than before. It’s too early to make a direct association with the rantings of Doutre and the role of the embedded mainstream media, but on May 6, in a New Zealand Herald piece written by Wayne Thompson, Doutre and his assistant Russell Ireland were able to promote the issue of the North Shore boulders. At the very end of the article, a legitimate account of how the boulders came into being was given by a Geological Society spokesman, but not before Doutre was able to plant the perception in the mind of the reader of a pre-Maori people's connection to the boulders. His mission was accomplished.

As mainstream corporate media tightens its noose, dumbing down content and becoming ever more conservative, the rightward shift begins to incrementally accommodate the views of the more extreme right-wing. So called community publications such as Franklin E Local with Mykeljon Winckel at the helm, serve to accommodate that process dressed up in a different disguise.

Open your eyes and look at those back issues of Franklin E Local that you have tucked away somewhere and decide for yourselves what the next move is going to be as individuals, communities and work sites. That challenge goes out to all Marae, Iwi organisations, trade unions and political groupings worth their salt.

Important reference material can be found at Blog site http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2009/01/pseudo-history-countering-cranks.html This contains many up to date features on topics that are enlightening in their form and content. Scroll down and you’ll find material directly related to the topic at hand and many others of interest.

Karuwhero Kahui no Paakau Marae, Te Puaha O Waikato
Ngati Tiipa me Ngati Tahinga me Ngati Reko

The myth that won't go away

Rekohu, which translates as 'misty sky', was the name given to the Chatham Islands by their original inhabitants, the Moriori people. Rekohu is also the name of a weblog which provides an irregularly updated but fiercely pro-Moriori account of events on the Chathams.

The author of Rekohu has responded with a mixture of amusement and exasperation to the attemots of John Wanoa to reinvent the old myth of the Moriori as pre-Maori inhabitants of mainland New Zealand. As I noted a couple of months back, Wanoa has been presenting himself as a descendant of a fictional North Island Moriori people, and claiming that he is owed vast sums of money by the New Zealand government and the Queen of England. Rekohu can laugh at Wanoa's absurd claims, but he is annoyed that the basic facts of Moriori history have still not been assimilated by so many New Zealanders:

I concur with the assessment of the gentleman in question. I think he is a nutter! One comment that I feel obliged to reiterate though, because some of the esteemed scholars seem to forget it, presumably because they see it as being so bloody obvious is thus: the whole myth thing, whether perpetrated by the pakeha or by the Maori is actually irrelevant. Get over it for God’s sake! Moriori were. Moriori are! And Moriori will be. That is the important thing and the more that people continue to focus on the periphery of that, the greater creedence is given to bloody nutters such as that other bloke and the less mana, and significance is given to the actual story and reality of Te Imi Moriori.

It is easy to understand Rekohu's frustration. Since the 1920s, when HD Skinner produced his classic study The Morioris of the Chatham Islands, the Victorian notion that the Moriori were a group of Melanesians driven from mainland New Zealand by aggressive, latecomer Maori has been discredited amongst scholars. Major archaeological digs on the Chathams in the '70s filled in many gaps in Moriori prehistory, and Michael King's 1989 book Moriori: A People Rediscovered synthesised a huge amount of research and the oral traditions of the Moriori themselves to create a compelling and accessible account of the history of the tchakat henu of Rekohu.

King showed that the Moriori were the descendants of a group of early Maori who had arrived on the Chathams and had been unable or unwilling to leave. The cool climate, constant winds, and relatively small size of the islands led to important cultural changes, like the erosion of social destinctions, the adoption of a strict pacifism, and the abandonment of agriculture. In recent years scholars at the University of Auckland have put the icing on the cake, by using tests on rat bones to determine that the first settlers of Rekohu arrived from the northern part of the South Island around the beginning of the fifteenth century.

The problem with Rekohu's argument that the old myth of the Moriori as pre-Maori New Zealanders is 'irrelevant', and should not be subjected to criticism, is that the myth has refused to die amongst the Kiwi public. Again and again, it is invoked during discussions of issues related to race and history.

The current controversy over whether the city of W(h)anganui should have an 'h' added to its name has seen the Moriori myth bubble once again to the surface. Maori activists in W(h)anganui have long argued that, under the Treaty of Waitangi, their history deserves respect, and that this respect should extend to the proper spelling of traditional names. In a debate on the website of the New Zealand Herald prompted by the Geographic Board's decision that the name should change, a number of Pakeha opponents of 'Maori radicalism' used the Moriori myth to bolster their arguments.

A commenter with the unfortunate name 'Hopefully Fair' contributed this nugget of wisdom:

Boat people are boat people whether they came here 200yrs ago or 1000yrs ago. What happened to the original people before the Maori arrived, or does that upset the stomach...

'Richard from Timaru' also raised the spectre of pre-Maori settlement, and threw a little Martin Doutresque paranoia into the mix:

People want it changed to it's original name, that's fine, and I support that, but Maori are just one in a long line of people that have occupied this country. So the original names of these places wouldn't even be Maori. Sadly though, much of NZ's real history is sealed for decades by previous governments. History that shows NZ populated long before the maori.

Historic finds are dealed off from public access, and worse, some maori tribes have bulldozed it over to keep the myth going that they are native to this country.

Given the continuing currency of arguments like these, I think that the Moriori myth still needs to be countered publically, even if it is as dead as a dodo within the walls of academe. Rekohu himself seems to accept that the Moriori myth needs to be addressed, when he argues that Moriori history should be taught in New Zealand schools.

It seems to me, though, that there is a complementary argument which can be made against those who invoke the Moriori myth. Invariably, those who invoke the myth, or the related and even more absurd myth of ancient Celtic New Zealanders, identify the indigenity of Maori, and the validity of agreements like the Treaty of Waitangi, with the fact that Maori occupied New Zealand before other peoples.

All the evidence points to Maori being the first inhabitants of New Zealand, but even if they Maori were not the first New Zealanders that fact would not, in their eyes and in the eyes of the Treaty, stop them from being indigenous. That’s because Maori understand indigenity as something which derives not from first occupation but from a series of activities - taking possession of the land, naming it, burying the dead there, burying placenta there, and so on (it’s no coincidence that the Maori word for land is also the Maori word for placenta).

If the near-impossible happened, and the remains of a pre-Maori civilisation were discovered, then the Treaty would not have to be torn up and Maori would not have to abandon their claims to be the tangata whenua of New Zealand. Indeed, there have already been Treaty settlements where groups of Maori have been recognised as indigenous, and offered certain resources, despite the acknowledged fact that they were not the first occupants of their rohe.

A good example is the case of Kai Tahu, the iwi which was recognised as the tangata whenua of most of the South Island and given a range of resources in one of the first major Treaty settlements in the early ’90s. No Kai Tahu leader has ever denied that their iwi was not the first to take possession of the southern part of the South Island. The Waitaha and Ngati Mamoe peoples lived in the area before Kai Tahu arrived sometime in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. These prior peoples were either conquered or assimilated, or both, and Kai Tahu became the tangata whenua of most of Te Wai Pounamu. It was Kai Tahu, not Ngati Mamoe or Waitaha, who signed the Treaty, and the arguments about the Treaty concern whether or not the Crown honoured its obligations to Kai Tahu.

If Ngati Mamoe and Waitaha had survived as distinct groups inside the territory Kai Tahu controlled, then the situation would be more complex. In the Chathams, Moriori were conquered by two Taranaki iwi in 1835, but the Waitangi Tribunal found that this conquest did not erase Moriori mana whenua on the islands, because Moriori had retained their culture and traditions. Moriori and the descendants of their conquerors both have rights under the Treaty of Waitangi.

Those who claim that Moriori once populated the North and South Islands, or that Northland was once crawling with Celts, or that the Chinese built forts up and down the South Islands, cannot point to any person, John Wanoa aside, who claims descent from such phantom civilisations. They cannot show that the Maori groups which signed the Treaty of Waitangi were falsely claiming to control Celtic or Chinese land. They cannot demonstrate that Celtic or Chinese or mainland Moriori populations existed as subjugated peoples within the rohe of iwi which signed the Treaty. How, then, can the pseudo-historians use these phantom peoples as evidence of the illegitimacy of the Treaty of Waitangi?

(Re)defining 'tangata whenua'

Over at indymedia Justin Taua has posted his statement against Franklin E Local's wacky claims about an ancient white civilisation in New Zealand, and received the following comment from 'bluntmanz':

"Tangata Whenua" means "The People of this Land". Maori are the Tangata Whenua of Aotearoa, they were here first. There was no pre-Maori colonisation, by 'Ancient Celts' or anyone else. Ko Ngati Pakeha Ahau.

It should come as no surprise that I agree with bluntmanz that Maori are tangata whenua of Aoteaora, and that I think that arguments that a lost tribe of Celts set up shop here thousands of years ago are no more credible than Thierry Henry's claim that his handball against Ireland was accidential. [For those who have come to this page for looking for them, some of my criticisms of the pseudo-historians' arguments about an ancient white civilisation can be found by clicking here.]

I'm not sure if I completely agree, though, with bluntmanz's suggestion that Maori are tangata whenua simply because they were the first people to settle in Aotearoa. The belief that tangata whenua status derives automatically from first arrival is certainly popular across much of the political spectrum, from the liberal left to the raving racist fringes of the right.

Both the old myth of the Moriori as the pre-Maori inhabitants of Aotearoa and the newer myth of a prehistoric white civilisation have appealed to many of their proponents because, by 'proving' that Maori were not the first inhabitants of this country, they seem to deprive Maori of their tangata whenua status and scupper the work of the Waitangi Tribunal and other institutions based on the assumption of this status.

Pseudo-historians like Martin Doutre and Kerry Bolton gleefully append their strange writings about 'ancient Celtic' rock formations and canals with boasts about the momentous political implications of their work. The total failure of the pseudo-historians to convince trained scholars of their 'findings' is explained as the result of a conspiracy intended to prevent the political earthquake that acknowledgement of an ancient white civilisation would cause.

But if they are labouring to drag New Zealand to the right by sinking the Treaty of Waitangi, then the pseudo-historians are labouring in vain. All the evidence we have suggests that the ancestors of the Maori were indeed the first settlers of Aotearoa, but even if lost Celtic cities were at last discovered in the forests of Northland, then this fact wouldn't stop Maori from being considered tangata whenua.

In a very fine essay published in the February 2008 issue of the Aussie academic journal Thesis Eleven, Kai Tahu scholar Te Maire Tau showed that traditionally Maori have understood indigenity as something which derives not from first occupation of a piece of land, but rather from a series of activities, like giving names to places and phenomena, burying the dead, and burying placenta (it's no coincidence that whenua means 'afterbirth' as well as 'land' in Maori). Tau's description of the process of indigenising territory is both precise and poetic:

The act of consecrating the land was carried out by renaming the land, winds, mountains, streams and stars with the spirit (mauri) of their gods and ancestors...the early Waitaha transformed the South Island into an ancestral church that subsequent tribes were absorbed into in a dual osmosis: the conquering tribes married into the Waitaha and were themselves absorbed into the genealogy of the Waitaha.

Tau's point about indigenity might surprise some leftists, as well as the pseudo-historians of the far right, but the fact is that there have already been many Treaty settlements where a group of Maori have been recognised as tangata whenua, and offered certain resources, despite the acknowledged fact that they were not the first occupants of their rohe.

Kai Tahu, for instance, was recognised as the tangata whenua of most of the South Island and given a range of resources in one of the first major Treaty settlements in the early ’90s, yet no Kai Tahu leader has ever claimed that the iwi was the first to take possession of the southern part of the South Island. As Tau's essay points out, the Waitaha and Ngati Mamoe peoples lived in the area before Kai Tahu arrived sometime in the seventeenth century. These prior peoples were either conquered or assimilated, or both, and Kai Tahu became the tangata whenua of Murihiku.

The pseudo-historians might, of course, consider it a deplorable state of affairs that Maori and the Waitangi Tribunal define indigenity by criteria other than initial occupation, but the fact that they do shows that the discovery of the remains of a pre-Maori civilisation would not derail the Treaty process and stop Maori claiming indigenity. There would be no need for an elaborately sinister conspiracy to disguise signs of a pre-Maori people.

It is relatively easy for scholars to show that Kai Tahu are the tangata whenua of most of the South Island, because the tribe absorbed Waitaha and Kati Mamoe centuries ago. Matters are more complicated, though, when more than one group claims to be tangata whenua of a particular piece of soil.

When they studied the history of the Chatham Islands, the scholars of the Waitangi Tribunal had to contend with the claims of both the Ngati Mutunga iwi and the Moriori people to tangata whenua (or, in the Moriori language, tchakat henu) status. Ngati Mutunga acknowledged that Moriori had been the first occupants of the Chathams, but insisted that they had become the new tangata whenua when they had conquered the islands in 1835. For their part, Moriori argued that mere conquest was not enough to confer indigenity. Moriori mana and culture had not been extinguished by their subjugation at the hands of the 1835 invaders, and deserved to be recognised.

In the typically thorough report it issued in 2001, the Waitangi Tribunal decided that the Moriori should be considered the 'first indigenous people' of the islands, while Ngati Mutunga should be considered the 'second indigenous people'. The Tribunal's decision resonated beyond the small world of the Chathams: historian and commentator Michael King seized upon the concept of a 'second indigenous people', and argued, in a series of widely-circulated statements, that it could be extended to cover all Pakeha Kiwis. King was worried about race relations in New Zealand, and he believed that Pakeha needed to be granted some form of indigenity if they were to be reassured of their place in our society, and reconciled to the 'Maori renaissance' which began in the '70s.

Despite or because of his untimely and spectacular death in 2004, King's notion of a 'second indigenous people' remains influential today. It can be argued, though, that King distorted the concept when he borrowed it from the Waitangi Tribunal's report on the Chathams. The Tribunal developed the concept in the knowledge that Moriori had been scattered and partially abosorbed into Ngati Mutunga society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

After decades of enslavement, a drastic drop in population, and the failure to win back their land after emancipation, Moriori found it impossible to hold on to important elements of their culture, like their language, their religion, and some of their oral traditions. Some Moriori left their homeland; many of those who remained intermarried with Ngati Mutunga, spoke Maori as their first language and attended Maori marae. Moriori only began to reassert themselves as a separate people in the '80s.

The fact that most Moriori no longer live in the Chathams and the fact of the partial absorption of those who remained in their homeland into Ngati Mutunga culture surely influenced the Waitangi Tribunal's decision to describe Ngati Mutunga as the 'second indigenous people' of the Chathams.

Is there a real analogy between the conditions on the Chathams and those in 'mainland' New Zealand? Most Maori have neither emigrated from New Zealand nor been absorbed into Pakeha culture: King's use of a concept developed for the special conditions of the Chathams therefore seems cavalier. Even if his conlusione were flawed, though, the late historian's willingness to think creatively about the notion of indigenity, rather than mehanically associate it with first occupation of a piece of territory, should be an example to us today.

Footnote: I apologise in advance to anyone who is offended by my use of the 'Chathams', rather than the Moriori name 'Rekohu' or the Maori 'Wharekauri'. I have used 'Rekohu' on occasions in the past, but I've found that it causes confusion, because very few people know what it means.

Sentimental histories

Even by the most conservative estimate, people lived on these islands for more than five centuries before the arrival of European settlers. Another half century or so elapsed before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed and large-scale European colonisation began. Despite its vast length, though, the early history of Aotearoa/New Zealand gets short shrift in our media, our popular culture, and our political discourse.

In an opinion piece published in the New Zealand Herald this week, Hone Harawira spends some time discussing pre-contact and early nineteenth century Maori society. Harawira's article is a reply to the anti-Maori rant Paul Holmes wrote for the Herald in the aftermath of Waitangi Day, and it offers an explanation for the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and an interpretation of the document's meaning.

Hone's article is a lot easier and more interesting to read than Holmes' obnoxious and semi-literate tirade, but I found myself disagreeing with many of the arguments it makes about history.

According to Hone, chiefs representing a Maori nation decided, after a fair amount of internal debate, to sign the Treaty in the hope that the document would allow them to create a partnership with the British Crown, and to maintain control over their rohe. As Hone goes on to observe, though, the Treaty did not prevent the Crown from waging war on Maori for decades, and alienating tens of millions of acres of Maori land. It is hard to read Hone's article without concluding that the Maori who signed the Treaty were at beast naive, and at worst downright foolish.

The reality, though, is that neither a Maori nation nor British power existed in these islands in 1840. As Matthew Wright shows in his excellent new book Guns and Utu, iwi were not only often at war with each but internally fragmented in the 1830s, and British authority did not exist even in the Bay of Islands, where the religious and political representatives of the world's largest empire relied on the goodwill of Nga Puhi chiefs for their safety and keep.

By 1840, iwi had interacted with small numbers of Pakeha for generations, and no idea that hordes of Britons might soon descend on their rohe, and by buying up swathes of land prompt the emergence of a sense of Maori nationhood, and nationalist organisations like the Kingitanga. The chiefs who signed the Treaty were not looking into the far-off future and making constitutional arrangements – they were pursuing short-term political and economic ends as they struggled with other Maori. Nga Puhi leaders, for instance, wanted the Treaty to cement their status as the most powerful iwi, by making sure that the Bay of Islands remained the locus for trade with Europeans. They were struggling to hold on to the advantages that Hongi Hika had gained with his new-fangled muskets in the 1820s, and trying to prevent the emergence of other areas of New Zealand as ‘hot spots’ for trade with Europeans. On the other hand, some Ngati Kahungungu leaders insisted on signing the Treaty because they thought it would shift the balance of power away from the north. But Maori were not only divided into iwi: within tribes like Nga Puhi and Ngati Kahungungu there were dissident groups. Hongi Hika had been killed in 1828 not by one of the members of the many southern iwi he attacked, but by a dissident hapu of Nga Puhi who lived on Whangaroa Harbour, and who had refused to let him dictate their terms of trade with visiting European ships. With its constant struggles between and within iwi, Aotearoa was no more unified than Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Hone's article for the Herald castigates Europeans not only for betraying the Treaty, but for forcing bibles, booze, and guns on Maori. These impositions, Hone suggests, helped destroy the harmony of pre-contact Maori society. Reading Hone's article, we would never guess that in the decades before 1840 iwi rapidly and eagerly transformed their economies, levelling forests and growing kumara and flax to exchange for muskets, cannons, and ammunition. Nor would we guess at the way Maori took up the Christian faith and reshaped it in the nineteenth century, as prophets like Papahurihia, Aperahama Taonui, and Te Kooti reinterpreted the bible in the light of their own experiences in Aotearoa. Hone Harawira has spent his life seeking greater autonomy for Maori. Again and again he has argued that iwi and hapu should be able to shape their own destinies, rather than remain submerged in Pakeha institutions. But Hone's vision of pre-contact and early nineteenth century Maori society denies that the indigenous people of these islands played any role in shaping their early history. Hone presents Maori society as undifferentiated and hostile to modernity, when it was divided and dynamic, and he sees Maori as the passive victims of innovations like the bible and guns, when in fact they seized upon and exploited these new features of their world in the nineteenth century.

There's a curious similarity between Hone's take on the past of these islands and a polemical booklet by an obscure New Zealand communist named Ray Nunes. I've been discussing The Maori in Prehistory and Today, which Nunes wrote in the 1980s, with some members of the Workers Party of New Zealand, which has published the text on its website.

As a socialist, Nunes was greatly attracted to what he saw as the classlessness of pre-contact Maori society. He was upset at the destruction of the 'primitive communism' of Maori society by nineteenth century colonisers. Nunes gave his booklet the subtitle The Great Unknown Past of the Maori People because he thought that contemporary anthropologists with a pro-capitalist agenda were deliberating obscuring this communist history.

Nunes’ own understanding of anthropology was limited by his admiration for the Stalin-era Soviet Union. Under Stalin, Soviet anthropologists and ethnologists were forced to work within the confines of the categories that Engels used to describe prehistory in his 1884 book The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State.

Engels believed that the American scholar Lewis Morgan had discovered, during his researches into the Iroquois people of North America, a series of stages through which prehistoric human societies typically passed. Morgan associated these stages, to which he gave the names Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilisation, with various forms of social organisation and with various technologies. Savage societies were devoid, for instance, of class distinctions, as well as pottery, while written language was a sign of civilisation.

After he took control of the Soviet Union Stalin integrated the Morgan-Engels notion of a series of stages of prehistory into his mechanical vision of historical societies, which had feudalism being replaced inevitably by capitalism, which was in its turn replaced inevitably by socialism. History became a series of hoops that every society had to jump through.

Stalin liked the stagist model of history because it seemed to make his rule unquestionable and his policies irreversible. When he forcibly collectivised Soviet agriculture, destroying Russia's peasantry, or made a shock alliance with Hitler on the eve of World War Two, Stalin was acting as the instrument of destiny. To oppose him was to stand on the wrong side of history.

Outside the Soviet Union, though, the stagist model of the past had come under pressure early in the twentieth century, as scholars used new techniques like scientific archaeology and in-depth ethnographic research to gather evidence which showed that human societies were much more diverse than Morgan and Engels had imagined, and couldn’t be consigned to a series of tidy categories. It was clear that class distinctions did exist in many early societies, and that there were even hierarchies in some hunter gatherer societies. It was also clear that societies evolved in many different ways, and that different modes of production could co-exist in the same prehistoric society.

Stalin prevented Soviet scholars from innovating in response to this new knowledge, but in several Western countries, most notably France, Marxist anthropologists reacted to it by abandoning the categories that Engels had laid out and instead adapting the complex method Marx had used in Capital to the study of pre-capitalist societies. This new materialist approach to prehistory began to influence scholars in New Zealand in the 1970s, but because he was trapped, even in the 1990s, in a Stalinist view of the world, Nunes knew nothing about the post-Stalin rebirth of materialist anthropology.

In one part of his booklet, Nunes tries to define Maori and wider Polynesian society:

If you take the trouble to read Engels’ summary of Morgan’s three stages of savagery and barbarism in Origin of the Family, you will not have much difficulty in seeing that pre-European Maori society was much too undeveloped to reach the highest stage of barbarism, and at best lies at the border between the middle and upper stages of savagery.

The early Maori society was in many ways more highly developed than in most Pacific Islands still, it lacked certain essentials required to reach the middle or upper stage of barbarism, though their primitive agriculture along with advanced (for primitive society) methods of fishing, gives them some features of the lower stages of barbarism. What held the Maori back from further development towards slave society and civilisation was the difference between the natural endowments of New Zealand and the old world.

Nunes is arguing that the physical environment of these islands meant that Maori existed at a certain level of development, and were doomed to remain there, as long as they remained isolated.

Nunes’ claim that pre-contact Maori had a 'primitive' system of agriculture incapable of generating much of a surplus seems odd, in view of what we know about their horticultural achievements. Nunes lived for at least the last decades of his life in Auckland, a place that was, for at least a couple of hundred years, covered in a network of huge gardens.

These gardens made use of all sorts of horticultural innovations, like artificial plaggen soils, specially designed wall systems which created microclimates, and networks of canals. Although Maori, like other Polynesians and like the indigenous peoples of North and central America, lacked metal tools and domesticated animals to help them work their lands, they made up for this lack by innovative use of wooden tools like the ko, and by the intensive deployment of human labour - including, in many cases, the labour of slaves.

A fragment of Auckland's ancient gardens still exists, in the Otuataua stonefields reserve near the city's airport. Wandering around Otuataua's hundred or so hectares, one can easily see the extent to which Maori could use technology to modify the landscape and boost production.

If Ray Nunes had visited the Otuataua stonefields, he would also have been able to see evidence for the existence of private property in pre-contact Maori society. At Otuataua and at other large garden sites around New Zealand, archaeologists have noted how walls and ditches were used not only for horticultural purposes, but also to demarcate the land which could be cultivated by individual whanau. Contrary to what Nunes claims, iwi tended to have concepts of private as well as collective ownership of land.

The rich gardens of Auckland were one of the reasons the isthmus was so coveted by different iwi. There were so many battles over the place that it was given the name Tamaki a Makarau, or isthmus of one thousand lovers. Chiefs who took control of the gardens could produce and expropriate a surplus which could be ploughed into trade, war, and self-aggrandisement.

Ray Nunes claims to have read Cook's accounts of Maori society, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed Cook’s many remarks about the sophistication of Maori agriculture, and the size of the surpluses this agriculture could produce. When he cruised along the western Bay of Plenty during his first visit to these islands, Cook called the Maori settlements he saw ‘towns’, and Joseph Banks thought that they might be the outposts of some great southern continent’s civilisation.

Ray Nunes was forced to deny the sort of evidence I have been discussing because it conflicted with the stagist model of the past he had taken from Engels. Because Maori society lacked features like pottery and a written language Nunes felt that it must occupy the stage in human prehistory Morgan and Engels called 'Savagery'. By slotting Maori society into this pigeonhole, though, Nunes had to deny some very obvious features of that society, like sophisticated agriculture, the production of a surplus, and the existence of social stratification.

At about the time Ray Nunes was working on his dogmatic booklet, the Hawaiian scholar Patrick Vinton Kirch was publishing The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms, a book which attempted to do justice to the diversity and fluidity of pre-contact Polynesian societies. Proceeding in the synoptic, materialist manner of the Annales school of historians and of French anthropologists like Godelier, Kirch's book compares the histories of all of the major Polynesian societies, including Aotearoa, and shows that Tonga, Hawa’ii and Tahiti had developed into highly stratified, economically advanced places by the seventeenth century, in contrast to islands like the Chathams and Pukapuka, where low-tech, egalitarian societies existed. Kirch advances a series of materialist explanations, including ecology, population pressure, and social conflict, to explain the development of stratification.

Kirch argues that Aotearoa was less stratified than Tonga, Hawaii or Tahiti, but claims that significant divisions still existed between chiefs and commoners. Kirch's data suggests that two modes of production operated alongside each other in most of Aotearoa: a domestic subsistence mode, which was centred on the hapu, and a chiefly tributary mode, which relied on the communal labour of many hapu – on communally planted gardens, for example – and on tribute from hapu. The fluidity of pre-contact Maori society, where iwi would go in and out of existence, and both iwi and hapu would clash militarily, has been noted by many scholars, and this fluidity, which contrasts greatly with the stability of Tongan or Hawaiian society, probably has a lot to do with the fact that two partly contradictory modes of production existed side by side.

Kirch's book is not without its critics, but it has become, for many anthropologists and archaeologists, a sort of framework within which detailed work on individual Pacific societies can be done. Kirch ought to be essential reading for anybody interested in a serious alternative to Ray Nunes' quixotic attempt at a materialist account of pre-contact Polynesian society.

Ray Nunes might seem like a marginal, eccentric figure in New Zealand political and intellectual history, but I'd argue that his little book expresses, in admittedly old-fashioned, Eurocentric language, a vision of Maori history which is very common in the contemporary tino rangatiratanga movement and on the activist left in general. Like Hone Harawira's opinion piece for the Herald, Nunes' booklet presents traditional Maori society as undifferentiated, static, and incompatible with modernity: easy prey, in other words, for the colonisers of the nineteenth century.

Because they see traditional Maori society as unstratified and essentially unchanging, rather than divided and highly dynamic, Hone and Nunes can't appreciate the speed with which Maori embraced aspects of the modern world in the early nineteenth century, the way iwi and factions within iwi used alliances with Europeans to further their own ends, and the canny, practical calculations behind the decisions of chiefs to sign the Treaty.

Hone's article for the Herald and Nunes' booklet attempt to make us sympathise with early nineteenth century Maori by presenting them as a noble, simple people who were duped by Europeans and corrupted by modernity. This vision of history is not only patronising and disempowering - it is quite false. To do justice to the complexity of our past we need the scholarship of the likes of Patrick Vinton Kirch, not sentimental dogma.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

The virus mutates

Sir Peter Buck holds the stocky, dark-skinned man firmly and eyes him suspiciously. 'It is as though Buck believes that the man is a rare piece of wildlife, who might take flight at any moment', wrote Michael King, in a comment on the famous Ngati Mutunga anthropologist's demeanour in the this strange photograph, which was taken in Dargaville in the early 1920s, and published shortly afterwards in HD Skinner's groundbreaking The Morioris of the Chatham Islands.

Buck probably deserves the faint look of triumph that can be detected in his face: by the time he located the man we now know as Matene Totara Te Retimana in the upper Kaipara, he had spent years investigating rumours that a full-blooded Moriori had settled in Northland after being taken to the region as a slave in the nineteenth century.

Buck was a scholar of great probity, who undertook his research in a humble rather than inquisitorial manner. In his poem about the man, Kendrick Smithyman reflects on this humility:

Buck had questions. Wherever he went
he mightn’t ask outright - he knew how to behave -
of this one and that one, or of this one and that knew
alright to say directly "Tell me . . . Show me".
Said "Show me how they tie a knot and I’ll tell you
something worth knowing about these people."

There is nevertheless something disturbing about this photograph. For all his gentle professionalism, Buck was a member of one of the two Taranaki iwi which shattered the Moriori world by invading the Chatham Islands in 1835. His ancestors had eaten many Moriori, and enslaved others. Buck was barely removed from the era of Ngati Mutunga hegemony on the Chathams: he was born in a small and improvised settlement near Urenui, in the north Taranaki heartland of his people, set up by hapu which had hurriedly abandoned the islands because they were worried that their own traditional lands might be threatened by a new invader - the Pakeha.

Buck grew up with stories of the ruthless prowess of Ngati Mutunga taua, and even some of his most distinguished contemporaries imbibed their parents' contempt for the indigenous people of the Chathams. Maui Pomare, who was the first Maori to gain a medical degree and eventually became Minister of Health, harboured a lifelong disdain for Moriori, whom he considered 'slaves' and 'the offspring of slaves'.

By the time Michael King discovered the photo of Buck's Moriori, the man had once again become a mystery. In the notes to his magisterial 1989 book Moriori: A People Rediscovered, King laments that extensive research in the Dargaville area had failed to turn up any information about him, or any descendants he might have had. It was matter of conjecture, King concluded, whether the man in the photo was even named Te Retimana.

In desperation, perhaps, the historian fell back upon a anecdote from his friend Kendrick Smithyman. King's book quoted 'The Last Moriori', a poem Smithyman had written in the late 1970s, more than fifty years after his father had pointed out Retimana as the unfortunate man wandered down a Dargaville street:

Reputedly last of his kind,
quite surely one of the last
not crossbred but (as They said) pure
as pure goes, a Chatham Island Moriori
taken for a slave when a boy, taken
again in some other raiding, passed
from band to band, from place to place
until he washed up on the River.
This was the story, anyway, which is
as may be. He was

very old, he did not belong,
some chunk of totara which lay too long
in acid swamp.
He was kumara left on the pit’s floor,
sweetness dried, its hull drawn small.
He was what you found in caves but did not
mention, travesty gone
beyond human. A tatty topcoat, bowler hat,
blanket which seemed to look your way
without seeing you from the stoop of a hut
at the Pa. A few weak hungers,
he survived. He endured,

already myth, beyond legends of his kind,
a poor fact.

As I noted last year, in my review of Rhys Richards' fine book about Moriori dendroglyphs, Smithyman's poem deserves to be placed alongside TS Eliot's 'Gerontion' as an eloquent expression of ethnic prejudice. Smithyman's view of Te Retimana almost certainly owes more to Pakeha and Maori stereotypes about an inferior, immoral, doomed people than to any insight into the man himself. In 2005 the first modern Moriori marae opened on Chatham Island. Named Kopinga, the building stands near a cliff in the north of the island, and is shaped like an enormous albatross; its centrepiece is a huge carved pole on which the names of all the Moriori who were alive at the time of the 1835 invasion are inscribed. The name Te Retimana appears several times in the list, so when in 2007 Matene Totara's grandson Steve Te Retimana contacted Moriori historian Maui Solomon about his family history he was assured of a warm response. Together, the two men were able to establish that Matene Totara Te Retimana was taken from the Chathams as a boy by the islands' Taranaki conquerors, before coming north and assimilating into Nga Puhi society.

Late last year a three-day hui was held in Ruawai, a small town south of Dargaville, where descendants of Te Retimana were joined by Solomon and other Moriori. The event at Ruawai was ignored by the national media, but reported in the Dargaville News, in the Northern Advocate, and on some Maori news sites. This scant coverage was enough to bring another man who claims to be Moriori out of the woodwork and on to the internet.

Unlike Steve Te Retimana, John Wanoa has no connections to the indigenous people of the Chatham Islands. His surname does not figure on the carved pole at Kopinga marae, and he has made no effort to contact Moriori historians. Despite his lack of credentials, Wanoa has spent much of the last few months spamming a bewildering range of websites, forums, and e mail lists with the claim that he is not only Moriori, but a spokesman for a 'nation of Moriori'. Wanoa hails from the northern Kaipara, and he is indignant that the hui at Ruawai did not include him.

Wanoa's wild claims derive not from any knowledge of Moriori history, but from a reading of the voluminous pseudo-histories of this country written by Pakeha cranks like Noel Hilliam, Barry Brailsford, Kerry Bolton, and Martin Doutre. Wanoa is Maori, but the fact that many of the creators of these pseudo-histories are motivated by an anti-Maori political agenda does not appear to faze him. In foam-flecked statements like this one, which was posted on several websites and at least one email list, Wanoa recycles some of the most outlandish claims of the pseudo-historians:

My Company is SUING the NZ Governments CORPORATE FRAUD COMPANY called "HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN IN RIGHT OF NEW ZEALAND" for all the STOLEN LANDS and the DESECRATIN of Urupa Ancestral Grave SITES especially ONE TREE HILL where BLOODY PAKEHA DUG UP THE MORIORI PUPONGA MANUKAU BONES of ERU MANUKAU Ancestors then CRIMMINALLY BLATANTLY INUMANELY CRUSHED THEM ALL IN ROBERT ROBERTSONS PAKEHA FLOUR MILL IN MT EDEN along with the rest of ERU MANUKAU'S MORIORI TUPUNA BONES...

TAKE NOTICE THAT YOU ARE ACUSED THE NAMED PERSONS SEVERALLY MUST REBUTT ALL OUR MORIORI PUPONGA MANUKAU CLAIMS HISTORIC LAND CLAIMS before 4pm on the 30th September 2008 or earlier as our MARAE COUNCIL so determines TAKE NOTICE THAT the 20 SOVEREIGN STATE GOVERNMENTS who signed AGREEMENTS with each other including ERU MANUKAU Minister of Security Intelligence MAORI CROWN SOVEREIGN GOVERNMENT Representative under the PARAMOUNT by right of Inheritance MOHI WIREMU TE MAATI MANUKAU the 4th Members of the Order of the ST JOHNS and Her Majesty the Queen most Honorable Member...

Wanoa claims to be a descendant of a group of pre-Maori Moriori who lived at Puponga, which is the peninsula on the Manukau Harbour often nowadays known as Cornwallis. He claims to speak for these people, and for Moriori who lived on the Auckland isthmus, on the Kaipara, and in the Waikato. Wanoa claims that the Moriori of the North Island were conquered by Maori and then Pakeha, and that traces of their existence have been systematically hidden by a conspiracy embracing both groups. Now, though, under the leadership of a shadowy exile from New Zealand named Eru Manukau, the 'Moriori' are about to make a comeback, and execute a series of complicated legal manoeuvres which will somehow lead to their taking control of these islands.

It is easy to dismiss Wanoa as a crank. But his views are perhaps significant, because they represent the assimilation and adaption by a Maori of the anti-Maori propaganda which the likes of Kerry Bolton and Martin Doutre pump out. The virus has mutated. Wanoa is ashamed to be a Maori, and has identified himself with a fictional pre-Maori people. Wanoa gives this people the name Moriori, perhaps in deference to the long-standing myth that the Moriori were pre-Maori inhabitants of the North and South Islands, but he allows them many of the qualities of the ancient Celts which Bolton and Doutre believe resided here. Wanoa's mainland Moriori were a technically advanced people, not hunter gatherers, and they maintained extensive contacts with other parts of the world, including the mythical ancient civilisations in South America that so fascinate Pakeha pseudo-historians. Wanoa's claims about a conspiracy of silence and his reference to a mill grinding up the bones of his ancestors are clearly sourced from the Celtic New Zealand circle.

The only authentic part of Moriori culture which Wanoa invokes in his statements is the pacifism which made the Chathams so easy for Maori to conquer in 1835. Wanoa's mainland Moriori were peace-loving folk, who apparently refused to use their advanced technology to defend themselves against savage Maori invaders.

How can we understand Wanoa's conversion to and indefatigable advocacy of a profoundly racist mythology? I find it hard to believe that Wanoa has been moved only by the eloquence of Martin Doutre's prose, or the logic of Kerry Bolton's arguments. I think that his decision to repudiate his Maoriness is also related to a far more subtle and widespread tendency in contemporary discourses about New Zealand history.

The old myth of the Moriori as an autocthonous people driven from the North and South Islands by savage Maori invaders has been in decline for two decades, as the 'Moriori renaissance' symbolised by the opening of Kopinga marae helps to clarify the origins and the history of the indigenous people of the Chathams. But the longevity of the myth is nonetheless remarkable, given the lack of the scholarly suport it has commanded, and this longevity has to be related to the political usefulness of the idea that Maori were, like Pakeha, a people who had displaced another to take control of the North and South Islands. 'We only did to them what they did to the Morioris' is the sort of statement that can still be encountered occasionally on talkback radio shows and in the letters columns of newspapers.

Although the myth of the Moriori as a pre-Maori people has become harder and harder to advance, many Pakeha still feel a need to legitimise the conquest of Maori in the nineteenth century by finding a moral equivalent for this conquest in Maori history. For many of the more intelligent apologists for colonialism, the Maori invasion of the Chathams in 1835 has become a sort of justification for the Pakeha treatment of Maori later in the century. In her fine study of the history of the Moriori myth, Canterbury University's Jacinta Blank identified the danger of making a simplistic interpretation of the events of 1835 into a new version of that myth.

Blank's research helps us to see how the undeniable brutality of the 1835 invasion and the contrast between 'warlike' Maori society and peaceful Moriori society are now sometimes held up as reasons why Pakeha were justified in imposing their laws and government on Maori at the point of a gun in the New Zealand Wars. The actions of two small Taranaki iwi in a very specific historical situation - a situation largely created by the coming of the Pakeha, with his guns and his insatiable need for food and building materials - are used to condemn all of Maori. The diversity of Maori societies is ignored, and Moriori pacifism and egalitarianism are idealised, rather than treated as the pragmatic choices of a people forced to inhabit two small, isolated islands with limited resources. Moriori, who were once condemned as a degenerate race, are now patronised as utopian innocents, and Maori are cast in their familiar role as savage opportunists.

Perhaps the self-deluded, self-hating John Wanoa is the victim of a new chapter in the history of the Moriori myth, as well as the fantasies of the Celtic New Zealand circle.

Gavin Menzies at Old Government House: should Auckland Uni be hosting an exhibition inspired by a racist crank?

The University of Auckland's Old Government House has for many decades been an important centre of intellectual and cultural exchange. As well as providing a common room for university staff, Old Government House has regularly hosted academic seminars, debates, and conferences. Work by important New Zealand artists like Toss Woollaston hangs permanently on the building's walls, and many fine artists have exhibited there.

Unfortunately, a new exhibition at Old Government House makes a mockery of the building's history as a venue for serious scholarship and quality art. Entitled A Stirring Myth of Conspiracy, the exhibition consists of a series of paintings and sculptures inspired by the theories of Gavin Menzies, a retired British naval captain who has in recent years won notoreity for claiming that fifteenth century Chinese sailors visited New Zealand and many of the other islands of the Pacific, as well as places as far afield as Iceland, the Azores, and Antarctica.

In their contributions to the catalogue for A Stirring Myth of Conspiracy, painter Pauline Brill and sculptor John Young repeatedly praise Gavin Menzies. Young claims that Menzies' ideas have 'power and strength', and Brill predicts that artefacts from Chinese voyages to New Zealand and other lands will 'emerge in due course'. Young has sculpted impressions of objects associated with Menzies' theories, like the 'Tamil bell' found in the interior of New Zealand in the nineteenth century. Brill has painted a Chinese junk sailing in New Zealand waters. Neither Brill nor Young has studied history or any comparable discipline at postgraduate level.

Not everyone shares Brill and Young's admiration for Gavin Menzies. In his books and in his public appearances, Menzies has made a string of claims about Pacific history which have offended many Polynesians. In 2006, for instance, Menzies visited New Zealand and gave a public lecture in which he claimed that 'Maori people don't exist'. According to Menzies, Maori are not a Polynesian people who reached New Zealand in waka, but rather the offspring of a group of Melanesian slaves who took over the Chinese junk that had been transporting them and raped a group of Chinese concubines who had also been travelling on the junk. When Maori members of his audience challenged his claims, Menzies told them that Maori oral history was 'just fantasy' and that New Zealand historians like Michael King 'don't understand history'. Menzies has also caused offence in Niue by claiming that the people of that nation are the descendants of Chinese, and that the Niuean and Chinese languages are 'practically one and the same'.

Menzies is deeply unpopular amongst academics who study the history of China and the cultures of the Pacific. Though Menzies' books have sold well, he has not received a single positive review in a refereed academic journal. Many reviewers have complained that Menzies deliberately distorts the historical record and the work of serious scholars in order to make his claims appear more credible than they are. The historian George Wade is taking legal action to try to get Menzies' volumes moved from the 'Non-fiction' to the 'Fiction' sections of British bookstores. A large number of scholars have banded together to set up the 1421exposed.com website, which is dedicated to countering Menzies' falsehoods.

It is easy to understand the anger that Menzies has caused amongst many people. The man has no training in history or any other academic discipline, and he does not understand a word of the Chinese language, yet he claims to know better than all the world's historians and Sinologists combined. Menzies' first book has the portentous title 1421: the Year China Discovered the World, yet it was written as a novel, and only recategorised as 'history' on the advice of its publishers. Menzies' work is characterised by amateurish blunders and clumsy attempts to distort the work of genuine scholars of Chinese and Pacific history. In 1421, for instance, Menzies reproduces a map which he claims was produced by Chinese sailors in the fifteenth century, and which includes locations like New Zealand and Antarctica. But the modern Chinese script used in the map was not created until after Mao's Communists came to power, in the middle of the twentieth century. Menzies' distortion of the work of serious researchers is exemplified by his references to the DNA tests undertaken in recent decades to help determine the origins of the Polynesian peoples. Tests by dozens of academics have confirmed the long-held view that the ancestors of the Polynesians entered the Pacific from the coast of southeast Asia four or five thousand years ago. In both his books and his speeches, Menzies tries to argue that DNA tests have proven his theory correct, because they show a distant connection between Polynesians and certain Asian peoples. But Menzies claims that the Polynesians are descended from fifteenth century Chinese, not peoples who lived on the coastal fringe of southeast Asia many thousands of years ago. Menzies is guilty of grossly distorting the findings of real scholars in an effort to give his ideas some sort of credibility.

In his desperation to prop up his strange interpretation of history, Menzies has turned to some very unpleasant ideas. One of the worst aspects of 1421 is Menzies' attempt to argue that the Maori legends of a patu paiarahere, or fairy folk, are actually based on memories of a light-skinned pre-Maori people. This claim was first made in the 1970s by Kerry Bolton, one of New Zealand's best-known neo-Nazis and the originator of the idea that a pale-skinned people occupied New Zealand before being dispossessed by Maori. Bolton has propagated the idea of a 'white tangata whenua' in a stream of books and articles, and it has been picked up by a new generation of far right activists, the best-known of whom is Martin Doutre, the author of Ancient Celtic New Zealand and a leader of the anti-Maori One New Zealand Foundation. For racists like Bolton and Doutre, the existence of a pale skinned pre-Maori people means that whites are the rightful owners of this country, and that documents like the Treaty of Waitangi are null and void.

Gavin Menzies takes the idea that the patu paiarehe were a light-skinned pre-Maori people and adapts it by claiming that the 'fairy folk' were in fact Chinese. In a passage which Pauline Brill and John Young quote in the catalogue for their exhibition, Menzies claims that:

They [the patupaiarehe] wore white garments and also differed from Maoris in having no tattoos and by carrying children in their arms. Some married Maori women. I believe this local legend to be true and the first non-Maori settlers in New Zealand were not European but Chinese. The word Patu paiarehe has another meaning, namely fairies.

In reality, the stories of patu paiarehe have always been regarded by Maori as legends, like stories of taniwha, and not as accounts of a distinct group of real people. In a criticism of the misuse of the patu paiarehe myth written last year, the distinguished Kai Tahu writer Keri Hulme pointed out that fair-skinned individuals were sometimes born into pre-colonisation Maori groups, but that they 'were part of us, Maori, normal people...[though] rare'. Hulme condemned the appropriation of Maori oral tradition by misinformed racists as 'abhorrent'.

The past is an almost infinitely complex phenomenon, and the ways that we understand it are continually changing. Disciplines like history and archaeology are exceptionally disputatious, as scholars test different interpretations against the evidence. Universities should be places where scholars come together to argue with and learn from one another. Certainly, no university should ever enforce a particular 'line' on the interpretation of history. Equally, though, universities should be bastions of rational thought and scholarly standards. Gavin Menzies' complete lack of understanding of scholarly method, his contempt for historical fact, and his destructive and libellous use of the work of serious scholars has earned him the contempt of historians and Sinologists around the world. It is wrong for the University of Auckland to host an exhibition and publish an exhibition catalogue which celebrate Menzies' racist pseudo-scholarship.

It might be argued that bad ideas can inspire good art, and that A Stirring Myth of Conspiracy might still have aesthetic value even if the theories of Gavin Menzies are worthless. But the exhibition fails on an artistic as well as intellectual level. Pauline Brill's paintings are very clumsy attempts at traditional portraits of sailing ships that show no awareness of any art movement of the last hundred years. Young's sculptures resemble the sloppily joined trinkets that are offered to tourists at second-rate market stalls. Neither Brill nor Young has any profile in the Auckland arts community. The fact that they are exhibiting at Old Government House seems to have more to do with the fact that they sit on the House's Gallery Committee than anything else. Even if the ideas that inspired it were wholly inoffensive, A Stirring Myth of Conspiracy would still be an embarrassment to the University of Auckland.