And so it’s Waitangi Day again, which can seem like a test for us all, a litmus test, a history test, an exam we’ll only just scrape through.
I do think that our best politicians, like our best commentators and journalists, love the challenge of Waitangi Day, our complicated national day.
Or, put it another way, the best of them find some poetry and some truth in it. They come away from it convinced they have seen something nearly spiritual at the heart of Waitangi.
Waitangi seems the one day a year when we engage in symbolism and ritual to confront our developing, imperfect national story. Sometimes the symbolism is hard to miss. Mud gets flung at Don Brash. John Key turns up with a little girl from “the nation’s street of hopelessness.”
Most of the time, the dialogue is harder to translate into headlines. The reality of politicians of all stripes gathering together with elders and other leaders at the dawn service to offer prayers, thanks, hopes or whatever for the future of Aotearoa as the first light seeps into the sky above the bay can’t be a bad thing.
Whatever their motivations for turning up, it would be hard not to take away something decent from an experience like that. A bit of humility about our place in history, and willingness to learn, has got to be a good thing.
In 1999 I tagged along behind the Prime Minister, Jenny Shipley, as her chief press secretary when she went to Waitangi. It is the dawn service I remember most. And there were some inklings of what nationhood was supposed to mean at this place, and could mean in the future. You’d call it a sense of history, I suppose.
Along with the fireworks of their celebrations, Americans constantly talk about their nation’s faltering attempts to create a more perfect union. The best of their leaders tap into the quest to make their country a little more perfect. The arc of history bends towards justice.
We don’t generally allow such visionary talk from our leaders. Waitangi is one time when we let the rhetoric take a few faltering nods in that direction.
But you wouldn’t often pick up anything very inspiring from most of the media coverage of Waitangi.
Most of the pictures and headlines just about generate themselves, year after year. There are the struggles to understand the rules of engagement. Scuffles and complaints but not much oratory because that takes a while. There are happy contrasting scenes from other parts of the country where the day is celebrated in simpler, less political ways, like picnics or concerts, as if that’s a better way to go.
(The other handicap the day has is timing. The annual trek of politicians up north is a national marker of the end of the summer holiday. Time to put away the jandals, tune into Morning Report and get back into serious news instead of unruly tourists, Wellington sinkholes or whatever else the summer has thrown up.)
This year, through accident or design, as we’re marking Waitangi Day we seem to be having a debate about teaching New Zealand history in schools. It’s 2021 and we’re wondering if our own history should be part of the curriculum? There must be a lot I’m missing here.
I heard some proponent of the proposed curriculum say the other day that it would be all about the forces that formed New Zealand, not just lists of dates and events. I don’t know where he’s been – he was a he – but history has always been someone’s version of the story. I don’t think any teacher for about 100 years has thought history is mainly about rattling off dates. But it is good to be explicit about whose version of history we’re promoting.
I remember learning about years of (European) political reform in secondary school – and yes, much of the history we are proposing to study hadn’t even happened then. I was impressed that the thread of history was about decreasing the power of monarchs and enfranchising more and more people, extending their rights. That was someone’s view of history, and it seemed pretty good at the time. It left you with the idea that a lot of people have always lobbied for change, and that progress is possible.
We’re also about to have another national day, Matariki. I suppose it will have the virtue of being free of baggage as a national commemoration.
So anyway, have a good weekend while we think about our story. It is important. As Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live …” It’s good that we’re still working on ours.