ETHICAL REMEMBERING - UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE

TUIA250 is the government-funded programme marking 250 years since Captain James Cook of the British navy first visited Aotearoa.

The word ‘tuia’ is a Māori verb.  Its English translations include ‘to lash’, ‘to bind’, ‘to lace together.’  But in the case of the Cook commemoration, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage paired it with the English noun – ‘encounters’.  Whether they intended to infer that ‘encounters’ and ‘tuia’ mean the same thing, that is what they are promoting, and it is neither correct nor ethical.

In her article, Cook and Ethical Remembering, Tina Ngata of Ngāti Porou distils several years of discussions with rangatahi on the subject into ten guidelines for teaching what happened 250 years ago.  Guideline one is to ‘know the story’ and I covered that last week.  This week I cover three further guidelines starting with guideline two which is to ‘ANALYSE AND UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE’.

As Ms Ngata notes, it is really important “to analyse and understand the language long used by the colonising culture as a tool to mask and minimise colonial crime while demonising Indigenous resistance … [because] words like ‘encounters’ and ‘arrival’ function to neutralise the fact that an armed military vessel arriving without invitation to claim lands, killing people while doing so, is actually an invasion.”

Guideline three is to ‘FOCUS ON IMPERIALISM, RATHER THAN INDIGENOUS CULTURE’.  Imperialism is a wide reaching machine that continues to deliver harm across the globe.  So, it’s vital that our future generations be equipped to identify it and take on the challenge of addressing it. 

Many people still struggle to recognise Cook or his superiors as invading white supremacists.  But any project that is based upon a sense of entitlement to the lands and lives of non-white people is clearly white supremacist and imperialist.

As Ms Ngata says, “Ignoring the impacts of imperialism will not make it go away.  Instead it will merely leave a vacuum for imperial apologists to fill.”

Guideline four is to ‘CONTEXTUALISE OUR STORY IN THE GREATER STORY OF IMPERIALISM’. 

Ms Ngata notes that, “Cook’s invasion has a level of relevance at a national level for us.  But, at an international level, ours was just one of many nations between the 15th and 18th centuries that were severely impacted by Imperial expansion.”

Understanding how the Doctrine of Discovery initiated the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, as well as the expansion of Empires across the African continent, North and South America is essential for any student of colonial and imperial history. But Ms Ngata sounds a note of caution here to “be mindful that this is harrowing history.  So, we need to undertake this discussion in an age-appropriate way with careful observation of how the information is ‘landing’.”

In coming weeks, I will cover the six remaining guidelines distilled by Ms Ngata.  To conclude this week’s kōrero, while we cannot change the past, we can and must analyse and understand it before we commemorate it.