NAMING AND CLAIMING MYTHS

Central to the eurocentric Doctrine of Discovery was the practice of explorers arriving somewhere new to them, sticking a pole bearing their nation’s flag into the ground and announcing to themselves, “I claim this land in the name of ...” - without regard for the people already there.

After that came the colonisers whose task was to very deliberately displace and/or replace the original peoples using whatever means it took, from intermarriage to genocide.  Once that had been achieved, their descendants’ task was to mythologise and justify the illegality and brutality of the founding events upon which they now laid claim to sovereignty.

Nowhere have the practices of naming and claiming, displacing and replacing, and then mythologising been more clearly and eloquently recorded than in the United States of America. 

In 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall sat atop the fledgling US Supreme Court and penned a decision on a case between two white men.  At issue was a series of private European ‘purchases’ from the Illinois and Piankashaw nations in the years leading up to the American Revolution.  But what resulted was a great deal more than just the resolution of the matter at hand.  Basing his decision on the Doctrine of Discovery, Marshall used it to mythologise his forebears’ conquest of America, and to secure the rights of civilised Europeans to land then held by “fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest.”

With intonations of surprise, Marshall justified his new mythology by what he deemed the practical necessity of the matter: “To leave them in possession of their country was to leave the country a wilderness,” he wrote, and “to govern them as a distinct people was impossible, because they were as brave and high-spirited as they were fierce, and were ready to repel by arms every attempt on their independence,” – as if this were an unnatural and unreasonable reaction to invasion and dispossession.

Here in Aotearoa, the process was a lot sneakier, but just as damaging and damning. 

In 2008 I wrote, “everyone in this country has had a world view beamed into us from birth that’s predicated on key messages such as; “Native title is toast,” “the Crown holds the radical title for everything under the topsoil,” “the Government can issue fee simple title for everything above it.” 

I also noted then, and maintain now, that “the problem with those messages and world view is that they’re highly questionable, clash hugely with the dictates of good conscience and are totally at odds with the simple facts; Maori were never conquered, we never ceded sovereignty, and Native title is not extinguished.”

Those facts are the basis of tangata whenua rangatiratanga and mana whenua to this day.  And to this day, like tangata whenua, they stand in stark and stubborn denial of the Doctrine of Discovery fiction upon which New Zealand parliaments base their claim to sovereignty.