Giselle Byrnes reviews Becoming Aotearoa: A new history of New Zealand by Michael Belgrave for Australian Historical Studies:
‘All histories reflect the concerns of their age, affirming the maxim that the writing of history is as much about the present as the past. General histories make this explicit, since they paint a more expansive picture of the national story, one where the nation itself is the key protagonist. New Zealand historian Michael Belgrave’s wide-ranging new general history of Aotearoa New Zealand, Becoming Aotearoa, was written in the shadow cast by the horrific Christchurch mosque killings in March 2019. Using this event as a portal into the past, Belgrave asks: How did we get here? How can we make sense of the present through looking at our history? His response rests largely on the critical role of the state and the role it has played in New Zealanders’ lives – and especially in the relationship with Indigenous Māori. If present concerns resound in this new history, it centres on this key point: the centrality of the state in the New Zealand story.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the relationship between history and the nation-state has always been complicated. Those who call for tino rangatiratanga (Māori self-determination) might call into question the primacy of the state and the legitimacy of settler colonialism given the promises of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the 1840 Treaty that initiated British colonisation while also confirming Māori sovereignty. But nations (like states themselves) are always in a state of becoming, reflecting the dynamic nature of national identities, cultures and political trends. In this context, the term ‘becoming’ in the title of this new history, is, as I read it, deliberate; it calls attention to the contingent nature of identity and the transformational journey New Zealand has been on for the past two hundred years, accelerating in the last four decades with the economic empowerment of iwi (tribes) through Treaty settlements and increased understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Reading Belgrave’s book in the light of the New Zealand government’s current Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, an effort to erase historical difference by homogenising claims to equality, is instructive too. The tidal wave of more than 300,000 submissions from Māori and Pākehā, the majority of which denounce the bill, speak to the precious status that Te Tiriti o Waitangi now has in this country.
In thirty-five chapters spanning more than 600 pages, Belgrave takes us from the first settling of these islands by Polynesian navigators over 1000 years ago, through British colonisation, land wars and confiscation, political, constitutional and social change, world wars, feminism, Māori nationalism and New Zealand’s experiments with neo-liberal economics, embracing the broad sweep of social change through the long twentieth century to more or less the present moment. What makes New Zealand’s history different from that of other colonial settler societies? It was, Belgrave posits, the distinctive strengths of Māori, and in particular, their capacity to resist change while adapting to it. As Māori historian Aroha Harris has also argued, generations of Māori leaders creatively negotiated the challenges of colonisation and advanced their own projects, undeterred by the constraints of official policies of integration.’
Read the rest of the review here.
