Remembering & Forgetting Colonial Violence in Aotearoa/New Zealand -Joanna Kidman & Vincent O'Malley

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research shares this online lecture entitled "Contested Pasts: Remembering and Forgetting Colonial Violence in Aotearoa / New Zealand" by Professor Joanna Kidman (Victoria University of Wellington, Indigenous Sociology) and Dr. Vincent O’Malley (Founding Partner, HistoryWorks). This lecture was presented on Zoom on October 9, 2023 (Indigenous Peoples' Day).
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The nineteenth century New Zealand Wars were a series of violent collisions between the British and colonial military and Indigenous Māori communities that forever changed the course of the nation’s history. Thousands were killed or maimed in these conflicts, over two-thirds of them Māori, at rates that in some areas eclipsed, in relative terms, the huge losses suffered by New Zealand troops during World War One. Māori who survived the British and colonial military onslaught found their lands stripped from them in punishment for acts of so-called ‘rebellion’ and future generations were condemned to lives of poverty, their once flourishing economies destroyed. Newly emboldened settler governments meanwhile no longer felt obliged even to pay lip-service to its promises made to Māori in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. A much harsher approach towards colonisation was adopted as a direct result.
The legacy of these wars profoundly affects Indigenous lives today, as evidenced by the dire socio-economic statistics for Māori communities and the imperiled state of te reo Māori (the Māori language). Yet, colonial violence and its encroachment in Māori lifeworlds over time is remembered unevenly by different groups. New Zealand’s difficult colonial history and the complicated, entangled relations between Māori, Pākehā settlers and the state are characterised as much by collective amnesia and hotly contested versions of historic events as by public commemoration.
Drawing on historical and sociological perspectives, Professor Kidman and Dr. O'Malley explore how Māori communities invaded by British and colonial forces remember this tragic history and how their stories are transmitted across generations; and they consider how shifting Māori tribal memories and settler amnesia or denial about this difficult past permeates people’s everyday lives in the present. They argue that it is only through an open and honest reckoning with this brutal history that healing can begin.