Uncovering our past

For veteran broadcaster Cameron Bennett, navigating the origins and consequences of the New Zealand Wars has been both confronting and exhilarating.

There's a Māori whakatauki (proverb) that says, "Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua. / I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past." The loop of past, present and future speaks to New Zealand Wars: Stories of Tauranga Moana, the latest in Aotearoa Media Collective's documentary series on the land wars that shaped us as a nation.

It's a loop that traverses the bloody 184372 struggle for control and sovereignty of Aotearoa to the consequences of that struggle: mass confiscation of Māori lands, collapse of the Māori economy, institutional racism, inter-generational trauma. All of it evidenced by the litany of negative statistics that still afflict Māori, and, by extension, the rest of us, too.

But many of us have little or no idea of just how much that past informs the present: what happened and why? Who was involved? At what cost? New Zealand history is only now being mandated in schools. That wasn't my experience. I learnt about the unification of Germany and Garibaldi instead, and what I did know of the 19th-century wars was via the dominant Pākehā version of events.