Colonisation

My Grandmother, Maude Emma Stubbersfield, was the granddaughter of Patrick Norton, an Irishman who was a harpoonist working from a whaling station in the Marlborough Sounds. In 1845, Patrick married Tangitu, a much younger Māori woman. Tangitu was a daughter of Turakautahi, the Ngāi Tahu chief of the Pā at Kaiapoi, and in 1831, she survived the slaughter of her family by a war party from the North Island. My grandmother had an illustrious Māori heritage.

My grandmother was 24 when she married a 47-year-old English widower, Albert Stubbersfield. As an elderly English colonist, it is unlikely Albert held any sympathy for the primitive ideas his young bride may have had. Also, their children were born between 1899 and 1915, a time when Māori were considered a dying race, and speaking Māori in school would get you punished. So my mother and her siblings grew up with a vague knowledge of their heritage, but totally ignorant of the Māori language, customs, or lifestyle. That was a decision my grandmother made out of love and concern for her family, and probably the best thing for her children.

The photo above shows the full effect of colonisation: a Māori family where every element of Māoritanga has been extinguished, and the colonial identity is supreme.

Colonisation  

Every society, every culture, and every trade or profession has its own pool of traditional knowledge, and in New Zealand, we have two major strands. First, there is mātauranga Māori, the accumulated wisdom of the Māori people, and secondly, the knowledge, skills and traditions of the European colonists.

Between 1820 and 1930, more than 50 million Europeans emigrated from their homelands^[1]. Fleeing from overcrowding, poverty and repressive governments, they sought new lands where they could recreate their previous lifestyles, but with more wealth and freedom. They chose temperate climates, especially in the Southern Hemisphere and where indigenes were few and ill-equipped to resist Western arms. Inadvertently, but greatly to their advantage, they also brought Western illnesses that decimated, or even eliminated, the indigenous populations. European colonists also replaced indigenous plants and animals with their traditional horticulture and animal husbandry to maintain their homeland lifestyles and to give them the ability to trade with their home countries.

It is important to recognise the difference between commerce and colonisation. Commerce is the mutual exchange of goods for the benefit of both parties. The European ships arriving in NZ at the end of the 18^th century came to trade and engage in commerce. They wanted wood, water and women. In return, Māori could obtain wool (blankets and cloth), weapons and wine (or beer and spirits).

It was mutually beneficial until the Europeans became so numerous that they could begin to ignore the normal courtesies of trade and simply impose their terms on the locals. As early as 1849, Ngāi Tahu was complaining to Queen Victoria about land purchases in Canterbury, where colonists failed to fulfil their agreements. Māori appealed to the Queen to control her subjects, but the colonists, including their leaders, assumed that the land was not owned or occupied according to European standards and was therefore available to be taken. There was no law or government by European standards, so they enacted their own law and then applied it to the added disadvantage of Māori. Colonisation has never benefited the colonised, as by definition, the indigenes are deprived of choice.

William Bernstein^[2] suggests the opposite. He claims that New Zealand, together with Australia and the Americas, amongst the poorest nations in the year 1500, are now amongst the richest due to colonisation.  He admits the large influx of colonists into relatively small indigenous populations produced a “clear field for European culture by…allowing the settlers to systematically annihilate a colony’s original inhabitants” so that, as a consequence, “prosperity followed”.  Apart from such callous disregard for basic decency, accepting even genocide, his economic facts are wrong.

Ngāi Tahu Kaiwhakahaere Justin Tipa, in his Waitangi Day address^[3], pointed out that “following first contact with Europeans and by the 1830s, our Ngāi Tahu tīpuna had established thriving trade relationships with Pākehā across Te Waipounamu, Te Ika a Māui, and Australia….Ngāi Tahu, as a tribe, willingly participated in the new economies available to us”. Then the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, and by the late 19th century, Ngāi Tahu had become essentially landless, severely impoverished, and all but forgotten. English law was applied to systematically destroy Māori traditional land use. English law was based on the idea of land being owned by an individual; they conveniently adapted that to allow a registered company to legally be a “person” but could not concede that an iwi be treated in the same way.

So, look at New Zealand today. In 2023, the Māori economy was valued at $118 billion. Māori constitute 18% of the population, but contribute 28% to the New Zealand economy.^[4] How much better, for all, would the last hundred years have been if Māori had been treated as partners in business, instead of as a pest to be eliminated.

Colonists rapidly outnumbered the original Māori population. To add to our problems, measles, influenza, tuberculosis and other Western diseases were so deadly that James Busby, the British Resident, in 1873 considered the country would be left “destitute of a single aboriginal inhabitant”^[1]. Unsurprisingly, mātauranga Māori was considered irrelevant.

Debate

Well, Māori didn’t go extinct. We have survived, and in recent decades, there has been a wide and powerful resurgence of pride in being Māori and a renewal of Māori culture and language. In 2021, this resulted in the Government proposing changes to the school curriculum “to ensure parity for mātauranga Māori in NCEA, and it has equal value with other bodies of knowledge” – those other bodies remaining unspecified, but the comment was made with reference to the Science curriculum.

This is a significant perspective for a government to take, because the 20^th Century has been dominated intellectually by a global coming to terms with science ^[5].  Science has changed how we think; it has revolutionised the rules by which the intellect operates and has challenged the legitimacy of all traditional knowledge, including, in New Zealand, the thinking of those of European descent, and also of Māori.

Consequently, in 2021, seven Auckland University Professors (‘The Listener 7’) published a strong criticism of the proposed curriculum in a Letter to the Editor of the New Zealand Listener ^[6].  The letter generated acrimonious debate, the resignation of the Acting Dean of Science who had signed the letter, and public advertisements accusing the University of failing in its most basic role as a defender of free speech and a venue for open examination of all opinions.

Three of those who wrote the letter to The Listener were members of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Two members of the Royal Society resigned their memberships, disgusted that the Society had failed to support the letter writers, and 70 other members of the Royal Society submitted a written protest at the lack of support for the ‘Listener 7’.

On the other side of the debate, two Auckland academics, Siouxsie Wiles and Shaun Hendy, attacked the ‘Listener 7’, and launched an appeal for support for that attack, to which almost 300 academics responded, agreeing that they were “appalled by the letter.”  In my view, this is a very strange response from academics. To disagree with the ‘Listener 7’ is acceptable, but to respond with moral outrage?

During the COVID pandemic, Wiles and Hendy were leaders in giving clear, evidence-based advice to the NZ government. Wiles is a very experienced virologist, and Hendy is an expert on how information and infection travel through complex networks. I admire them for the way they did their job despite the abuse they received from those who blamed them for the inconvenience of our lockdowns. But expertise with viral infections or the mathematics of networks does not provide expertise in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of mātauranga Māori.

The ‘Listener 7’ looked at what they knew of mātauranga Māori and considered that it did not relate to what they had been doing during their lifetime of work in science. Their stance is open to debate, their understanding of Māori open to correction, but if this is a scientific debate, then the very essence of science is that ideas are promulgated to be challenged and debated; there is no place for censorship.  Moreover, the phrase “appalled by the letter” indicates that this is not a response related to science, but moral outrage. As an analogy, would the University’s Philosophy Department really want to ban reasoned discussion about right and wrong, and just go along with the loudest voices shouting in the streets?  Matt Heath, Radio Hauraki host and Herald columnist, commented, “Claiming ‘hurt’ as a rebuttal to another academic’s argument is surely at odds with what academics do” and suggested that “being offended is cowardly”.^[7]

And there is more involved here. The reaction from Wiles and Hendry is but the tip of an iceberg, indicative of a subtle, pervasive and dangerous shift in how we experience the world. Jonathan Haidt^[8] looks at this change in life experience from a time when young people (children and teenagers) used to experience the real world through play, to a time when they grew up experiencing a virtual world through their phones. The smartphone was introduced in 2007. By about 2012 most homes had smartphones. In June 2010 the iPhone4 was introduced with its forward-facing camera, and teens now could post their own enhanced images, obsessed with whether total strangers would like them and opening themselves up to large-scale public shaming. Haidt’s statistics show that from 2010 to 2015 there was a rapidly increasing world-wide decline in the mental health of young people, and the only common element was the availability of smartphones.

Haidt’s explanation is that the older mobile phones were useful mainly for communicating one-on-one with family and friends. Smartphones are different. They connect you to the internet, to thousands of strangers, through more than a million apps, to uninterrupted, unfiltered and unregulated comments of every kind. Play-based childhood connects with the real world. You can’t escape it. You will have disagreements, but you must work them out.  Phone-based childhood connects with a virtual world, where you don’t have to deal with opinions you don’t like, or with people who don’t like you. Just press a button and go to a different virtual world, and the algorithms will make sure that you are fed endlessly with what you most want to see. The result is that, instead of discussion and debate, you censor the options that you dislike. When you post, Instagram enlists a binary response: like or dismiss and move on. It is not an invitation to detailed discussion. It is moral outrage; 300 likes and we have proved ourselves right.

A university has become redundant should it allow phone-based opinion, generated in a virtual world where we choose what we want to hear, to silence people in a real-world, meeting opinions that extend their knowledge, challenging each other and possibly changing those opinions and their behaviour. All opinions should be respected, open to discussion and critique, and without censorship by popular vote.

Overlooked

The ‘Listener 7’ did err, partly in their understanding of science, but primarily in failing to recognise the depth of hurt and betrayal felt by Māori from more than one hundred years of being ignored, derided, and sidelined. It is hard to read Harry Evison (The Long Dispute. A history of Ngāi Tahu in the South Island) ^[9]  or Alfred Crosby (Ecological Imperialism. A worldwide view of colonial impact on the indigenous people)^[1] without heartbreak and tears. In this context, the comment penned by the ‘Listener 7’ seems superficial, a callous and unfeeling awareness of the alienation that is still felt today by Māori; nor was there any positive suggestion of how matāuranga Māori could contribute positively to modern society. Even so, the ‘Listener 7’ did not deserve to be publicly humiliated, but rather to be involved in a reasoned discussion.

There is a more serious error with the ‘Listener 7’. They trace the origins of science to “ancient Greece and India”, implying a constant, uniform process where the only change is the amount of knowledge accumulated. I will consider the evolution of science later, but here consider two fundamentals of modern science where most scientists get it wrong: objectivity and evidence-based verification.

First, science has been considered objective, with the removal of mankind from being the centre of the universe to an improbable accident living “on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people” (Carl Sagan).

In recent decades this view has been increasingly challenged. Michael Polanyi^[10] thinks it absurd to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world. He asks why Copernicus exchanged our actual station on Earth for an imaginary position on the Sun? The only justification is that it gave a greater intellectual satisfaction. Copernicus rejected the evidence of our senses in favour of an abstract theory. Both Ptolemy and Copernicus have mankind in the centre of the universe, but wish to satisfy differing human affections. Galileo, Newton and the James Webb telescope all add to our understanding of stars, but they don’t diminish the significance of the Earth for us, nor the fact that it is only with mankind that the universe becomes conscious of itself; possibly the most significant event in the history of the universe.^[11]

Secondly, the way science is taught in schools and universities is generally wrong. We are taught that science is evidence-based, that the facts generate the theory, and if the theory does not agree with observation, then the theory is discarded.

This is not true. Polanyi^[10] emphasises the personal, emotional involvement a scientist has with his theory, and Thomas Kuhn^[12], in 1962, drew attention to the fact that scientists had such a deep, personal commitment to their theories that major changes in thinking required a generation of scientists to die off before new ideas could take hold.

The relationship between Science and mātauranga Māori is complex. Both have their foundation in anthropocentric models that are more similar than is generally understood; both are evidence-based, both depend heavily on myth, and in both, the human mind discovers a rationality which governs nature before deciding which facts it considers relevant. And yet the two are different and require different ways of thinking. This relationship will be examined more closely in a later post.

Moving Forward

In subsequent posts I shall give more considered discussion to:

• Different ways of looking at the world.
• The nature of Western thought and why it succeeded.
• What is missing in science, capitalism and democracy.
• Possible answers: modern secular, traditional tribal, spiritual, and religious.
• The distinctive contribution that matāuranga Māori can make to life in NZ.

 For the moment, if eminent academics are lined up and hurling abuse at each other, surely there is something they are all overlooking? And to begin, there are two strong Māori kaumatua who think, as I do, that these two systems are both necessary, yet are both very different.

One of these things is not like the other

In 2018, Te Ao Mārama, the University of Auckland’s Centre for Fundamental Inquiry, hosted an international Astrobiology conference. The keynote speaker on the second morning was Kaumatua Rangi Matamua from the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Waikato, who gave the conference an introduction to mātauranga Māori. He gently mocked the scientists: “You scientists don’t know what you believe; you are always changing your minds. Mātauranga Māori does not change.”

That statement, that mātauranga Māori does not change, has been challenged by some. Yes, I agree there is a dynamic element to mātauranga Māori, but it is as a response to the contact with European traders from the late 19^th Century and the increasingly enforced change with colonisation that attempted (and continues to attempt, in some circles) to eradicate this mātauranga and replace it with Western values. The dynamic element of mātauranga Māori was enforced at the time by the conflict with Western dynamism, but even though matāuranga can be added to, the core remains constant.^[13]  For two millennia before contact with the West, mātauranga Māori, in common with all primal communities, remained unchanged in its core.

Additionally, recognition of the difference also comes from Haare Williams, kaumatua, poet and writer. He penned a lovely poem entitled ‘Mātauranga’.^[14] One verse reads

Remember Moko

Mātauranga Pakeha isn’t better

Mātauranga Māori isn’t inferior

It’s different

Value difference.

And if they are different, then the NCEA syllabus needs to acknowledge the difference.

 

Soon to be posted: §3. Value the Difference

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1. Crosby, A.W., Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cannto Classics ed: 2015 ed. 1986, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2. Bernstein, W.J., The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created. 2004, New York: McGraw Hill. 420.
3. Tipa, J., Waitangi Day Speech. 2025.
4. Wilson, S., in NZ Herald.
5. Watson, P., A Terrible Beauty; A History of the People and Ideas that shaped the Modern World. 2000, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
6. Clements, K., et al., In Defense of Science, in New Zealand Listener. 2021.
7. Heath, M., Why being wrong is good- and being offended is cowardly. 2021.
8. Haidt, J., The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. 2025, Penguin Random House.
9. Evison, H.C., The Long Dispute: Maori Land Rights and European Colonisation in Southern New Zealand. 1997, Christchurch: Canterbury University Press.
10. Polanyi, M., Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. 1958, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
11. Conway Morris, S., The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe became self-aware. 2015, West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press. 493.
12. Kuhn, T.S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, ed. O. Neurath. Vol. 2. 1962, Chicago: Chicago University Press. 210.
13. Kaa, H., Te Hahi Mihinari: The Māori Anglican Church. 2020, Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget William Books.
14. Ihimaera, W., ed. Haare Williams: Words of a Kaumātua. 2019, Auckland University Press: Auckland. 260.