THE PAST IS STILL PRESENT

Last week I received an email advising that the Police had been “assigned to provide an Intelligence Risk Assessment” regarding the upcoming “national commemoration of Captain Cook’s arrival in Aotearoa”, and asking if they could attend the hui-a-marama of Te Rūnanga-ā-Iwi o Ngāti Kahu… “as an observor … to identify any potential issues that might develop”.

I politely advised them that they could not attend but were welcome to make an appointment to meet with one of my staff to discuss their issue.

Ngāti Kahu had nothing to do with Cook because he never came to our rohe.  The European ‘explorer’ that did come was de Surville who responded to the manaakitanga of our tūpuna Ranginui by kidnapping him in retaliation for the taking of a small boat that had drifted ashore.  More than a century later, we learned that three months after being kidnapped, Ranginui died of scurvy on board de Surville’s ship, having never again touched land.

As for Cook, we learnt at school that he was a paragon of virtue and seamanship.  However, tangata whenua where he landed saw him quite differently.  Long after he left, the whippings, woundings, massacres and murders perpetrated by Cook and his crew on them were found to be recorded in his and others’ journals.

Cook’s journals also depict a man who struggled with his conscience, but it didn’t stop him and his crew from leaving a trail of massacres, murders, abductions, torture and theft across the Pacific before they even arrived in Aotearoa.

In a Stuff opinion piece titled ‘Was James Cook a White Supremacist?’, Dame Anne Salmond found that he was likely not.  However, Cook’s journals and his ‘secret admiralty instructions’ depict a man who, like de Surville, came from a racist culture with supremacist notions that allowed them to take the lands (and lives) of any non-white non-Christians they met in their voyages of exploitation.

So, that brings me back to this year’s commemoration.  Following unfavourable tangata whenua reaction to the original proposal, it was renamed Tuia250 Encounters. 

Supported by fifteen government agencies, co-chaired by Dame Jenny Shipley and Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr, well-resourced with a healthy budget ($20million in total) and slickly marketed, its purpose is ‘… to enable a more balanced telling of our stories about Māori and European settlement of New Zealand to guide us as we go forward together.’

But wait – is this the same government that continues to ignore the well-researched stories already told to its own Waitangi Tribunal, refuses to make New Zealand history a compulsory subject in schools, and is targeting Ngāti Kahu for police intelligence gathering leading up to this one-off event?

In her article, Dame Anne Salmond wrote of that first encounter in 1869, “Māori had never seen guns before, and Cook's men had never experienced a wero. Neither side knew the other's protocols for handling meetings with strangers.”  250 years later, it appears the past is still present.  Watch this space.