[ A Maori man attacked a statue to raise awareness of his
ancestors’ pain. A newspaper covered the story, and a very important
reader took action: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.]
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HOW CHARLOTTESVILLE'S ECHOES FORCED NEW ZEALAND TO CONFRONT ITS
HISTORY   [[link removed]]

 

Jamie Tarabay
December 2, 2019
The New York Times
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_ A Maori man attacked a statue to raise awareness of his
ancestors’ pain. A newspaper covered the story, and a very important
reader took action: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. _

Taitimu Maipi, standing in front of a statue of Capt. John Hamilton,
a colonial-era British naval commander, in Hamilton, New Zealand,
which he vandalized last year., Cornell Tukiri for The New York Times

 

HAMILTON, New Zealand — An 80-year-old Maori man walked up to a
statue of a colonial-era British naval commander one winter morning in
2018, a can of paint and a claw hammer in his hands.

“The red paint was to change the way he looked, and the hammer was
to break his nose,” said the man, Taitimu Maipi.

Mr. Maipi’s small act of vandalism in the city of Hamilton, New
Zealand, was intended to be a reminder of the pain that white settlers
inflicted on the Indigenous Maori people. It ended up forcing a
national reckoning over historical memory and cultural identity that
paralleled in many ways the upheaval a year before in
Charlottesville, Va
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The attack in Hamilton drew extensive coverage in the local newspaper.
Residents responded with letters denouncing the vandalism. And the
conversation caught the eye of one longtime reader: Prime Minister
Jacinda Ardern.

In September, Ms. Ardern announced that the national school curriculum
would be changed to require lessons on the 19th-century New Zealand
Land Wars, in which British troops killed more than 2,000 Maori.

“I did not see that coming,” Mr. Maipi, a longtime activist, said
recently as he stood beside the bronze statue of Capt. John Hamilton,
which remains in the middle of Hamilton’s downtown square.

In a different time, the seemingly minor gesture of protest — after
the attack, Mr. Maipi stopped by City Hall to leave his contact
information and later got off with a police warning — might have
been quickly forgotten. But his defiant action came not long
after the deadly white supremacist violence in Charlottesville
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the planned removal of a Confederate statue.

“I think it’s all connected,” said Aaron Leaman, a reporter for
The Waikato Times, which published a series of articles as part of a
campaign to bring more of New Zealand’s history into its schools.
“I don’t think what happened here could be seen in isolation.”

After Mr. Maipi’s vandalism, some New Zealanders called for the
statue’s removal because of the role of Captain Hamilton — for
whom the city is named, though he never set foot there — in the
deaths of Maori during the Land Wars, which raged from 1845 to 1872.

Those bloody conflicts broke out after the signing of the Treaty of
Waitangi in 1840 between the colonial government and the Maori.
Disputes over land sales grew into major campaigns to confiscate
territory and reinforce British sovereignty.

Community upheaval followed these assaults against the Maori, and more
than 100 years later, they still lag on many social measures like
income and life expectancy, though the government has worked to close
the gap. New Zealand is still paying out hundreds of millions of
dollars in settlement claims related to the treaty.

“I just wanted to expose the fact that this statue shouldn’t be
here,” Mr. Maipi said. “I wanted to break something,” he added.
“I really meant what I did.”

Captain Hamilton, he said, “was a murderer.”

“There’s a lot of pain there for people who were part of those
wars,” he added.

Other citizens — many of them older, white residents who wrote
letters to the editor — complained about the damage to public
property and argued that removing the statue would be akin to erasing
history. Some used racist language.

“A lot of people were saying this is terrible, destroying public
property, and we were saying, come on people, there’s a lot of
history behind this, and there aren’t a lot of Maori statues or any
kind of acknowledgment of their role,” said Jonathan MacKenzie, the
editor in chief of The Waikato Times.

“Clearly, the people reading had little understanding of the
country’s past, and what they knew was based on the wrong
information,” Mr. MacKenzie added.

While some of the bigoted statements might have been ignored in the
past, said Mr. Leaman, the reporter, such views now command greater
attention after the massacre at two mosques in Christchurch
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“It’s easy to brush them off as fringe,” he said, “but after
Christchurch, we take hate speech more seriously.”

The newsroom decided to work to educate its readership, Mr. MacKenzie
said. “We thought, why don’t we do some stories on people who
fought on the Maori side of the war; they’d be passed down
orally,” he said.

The effort would build on a push by two nearby schools to make
teaching of the Land Wars compulsory. Currently, New Zealand history
is an elective in school, and the Land Wars aren’t part of the
curriculum at all.

“We thought we could really put some pressure on and act as a bit of
an amplifier,” Mr. MacKenzie said.

 

Jonathan MacKenzie, left, the editor in chief of The Waikato Times,
and Aaron Leaman, a reporter there. Credit: Cornell Tukiri for The New
York Times

The journalists didn’t imagine that the stories would get much
notice. But they hadn’t anticipated the attention of a prime
minister who keeps an eye on the city of her birth.

The Waikato Times’s campaign “stood out to me because I know the
region well and because it’s a view I’ve held for some time,”
Ms. Ardern said in an email to The New York Times.

She announced two months ago that changes to the national curriculum
for both primary and secondary schools would be made within the next
three years.

Ms. Ardern said the public reaction had been “incredible and
far-reaching. I think a lot of that stems from a desire from New
Zealanders to know more about their own country’s history, our land
and our people.”

Mr. Maipi said that New Zealanders had been better at commemorating
foreign wars, like World War I, than they had been at acknowledging
local history, because of the cost to the Maori.

“We need to educate the country that this happened; we need to
educate our children,” he said. He added: “The story will be told
by the children. Unless you tell the children, it will die.”

The newly elected mayor of Hamilton, Paula Southgate, is waiting on a
report that will assess the street names and statues throughout the
city that might be culturally offensive to the Maori. She expects it
to recommend moving the statue of Captain Hamilton.

“If there’s something that’s blatantly culturally insensitive,
you need to address it and be respectful about that,” she said.

_Jamie Tarabay is a correspondent for The New York Times based in
Sydney, Australia. She joined The Times in 2018 and has reported from
around the country on issues including national security, veterans,
politics and Australia’s problematic ties with China._

 

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