Steve Kensinger

University of Minnesota- Twin Cities

Displacement, Genocide, and Traces of History

AAA Annual Meeting 2013

The need to remember, the desire to forget:

Parihaka, race, and national melancholy in Aotearoa/New Zealand

On 5 November, 1881, Native Minister John Bryce arrested Maori leaders Te Whiti and

Tohu Kakahi and ordered the armed invasion and evacuation of the village of Parihaka, so that

the land occupied by the village could be opened up for colonization. Located on the west coast

of the North Island of New Zealand, Parihaka at the time of its invasion had become a symbol of

Maori resistance to an increasingly aggressive colonial administration determined to free up as

much land as possible for European settlement. The village of Parihaka was founded by Maori

prophet Te Whiti in the mid 1860’s as a response to the displacement of Maori from their land

caused by the enforcement of the New Zealand Settlements Act, which allowed for the

confiscation of native land from tribes considered to be in rebellion against the British Crown.

Considered to be a prophet of God by his followers and a preacher of non-violent resistance, Te

Whiti was seen as a threat to the authority of the colonial administration, and was considered to

be in rebellion by colonial officials. Furthermore, Parihaka itself was extremely prosperous as a

community, and it was often remarked by European visitors that the quality of life experienced

by village residents exceeded that of most European settlements at the time, contributing yet

another layer of threat to colonial authority. Thus the invasion of Parihaka was a show of force,

meant to illustrate the superiority of the colonial administration and the futility of any type of

Maori resistance against settler development projects.

The story of Parihaka has continued to haunt the historical imagination of Maori up to

this day. Often referred to in contemporary discourse as a shameful event in New Zealand’s

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history, Parihaka is often invoked as emblematic of the systematic destruction of Maori culture

that ensued as a result of settler expansion. In contemporary memorializations of the story of

Parihaka, claims are often made to the necessity of remembering what happened. Implicit in this

notion of remembering though is the idea that the story of Parihaka has been forgotten and

requires resuscitation. It is my contention that despite claims to having been forgotten, the fact

that the story of Parihaka continues to be told and retold attests to its status as a source of not

only racial, but national melancholia. For Maori, remembering Parihaka contributes to the

continued intrusion of New Zealand’s colonial past, a past characterized by racism and

ethnocentrism on the part of the British colonial administration, into the present. From the

perspective of the New Zealand state, the story of Parihaka acts as an instructive moment for

contemporary citizens who aspire to move beyond the racial antagonisms of the past and enact

an ideology of biculturalism, which refers to the peaceful coexistence of Maori and Pakeha as a

single political community (Hinchcliff, 2004; Hohaia, 2001; Ihimaera, 2011, Scott, 1975). The

story of Parihaka serves as a constant reminder to Maori and Pakeha alike that the racial and

ethnic divisions that characterized New Zealand’s colonial past continue to structure the present.

As this paper will demonstrate, attempts by the state to move beyond colonial racial antagonisms

through promotion of a bicultural imaginary falls short of attending to the grief expressed by

Maori in relation to their experience of living in a “bicultural” nation, leaving New Zealand

trapped in a state of melancholy.

In 2001, the City Gallery of Wellington staged an art exhibition called Parihaka: The Art

of Passive Resistance, which brought together visual artists, academics, Maori leaders, and

contemporary residents of Parihaka with the aim of asserting Parihaka’s significance for the

present, and the future. In message to the accompanying book project, one of the sponsors of the

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exhibition claimed “the message of Parihaka is very much one for the future; in looking to the

past we recognise the ideals and dreams we are still aspiring towards” (Hohaia, 2001; 17).

Yet in addition to this future-oriented optimism, a sense of grief over what occurred in

Parihaka permeated the exhibition. In many of the works on display, the events of Parihaka, and

the memories that accompany them, are evoked as shameful, partial, and in need of revision. In

one contribution to the exhibition book, Maori activist Ruakere Hond says “to a certain extent,

images of Parihaka have become sustained by what we are prepared to acknowledge within the

accepted norms of society. It is easy to turn with a nostalgic gaze upon history, filtering

appropriate from the inappropriate, with little impact upon our daily lives. Distance created by

the passing of time has left us separated from Parihaka’s ideological position” (Hond, 2001; 78).

For Hond, something is missing from the way Parihaka has been remembered that is preventing

it from fulfilling its potential as an instructive moment for the creation of a more just future for

Aotearoa. The issue with Parihaka is not so much that it has been forgotten, but rather there

exists a potential within the history of Parihaka for envisioning a future that exceeds

contemporary understandings not only of the event itself, but for why that event is important for

New Zealand in the present.

Indeed, the importance of Parihaka in structuring contemporary Maori identities can be

found in a recent novel by Witi Ihimaera called The Parihaka Woman. The novel is written from

the perspective of a Maori school teacher who is a descendent of a Parihaka resident. The

narrative itself moves between the perspective of the Maori school teacher as he translates the

journal of his ancestor, presumably the eponymous “Parihaka woman,” and the perspective of

the Parihaka woman herself. As the novel progresses, the voice of the narrator intrudes more and

more into the portions of the story meant to be taken as translations of the found journal, making

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it difficult to distinguish between the narrator himself and the voice of his ancestor, as well as

blurring the line between the past time of the journal and the present time of the narrator. The

novel’s structure highlights the ways in which the past and the present are mutually constitutive.

The narrator’s contemporary identity as a Maori is structured by the same antagonism between

Maori and Pakeha that structured the conflict at Parihaka, while at the same time, he projects

contemporary interpretations of the events onto the past that are determined by the social,

political and racial landscape of the present. While The Parihaka Woman is fictional, the

narrative device deployed by Ihimaera highlights the place of the past, specifically grief over the

past, in constructing contemporary Maori identities.

Ann Anlin Cheng has commented on the relationship between grief and identity,

particularly as it has been taken up in a judicial setting in the United States for state recognition

of the grief experienced by African Americans in response to segregation. In her discussion of

the effects of the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, Cheng asks what it means for an

individual to “go from being a subject of grief to being a subject of grievance” (2001; 3). As

Cheng sees it, the problem in translating individual grief into collective grievance is that the

practicalities of attending to collective grievance imply a logic of comparability and

compensation that presumes the effects of grief can be overcome through some form of

reparations. Cheng argues that the logic of compensation applied to the Court’s decision in

Plessy v. Ferguson proves prohibitive in addressing individual grief because it does not attend to

those aspects of racism in the United States for which reparations, either symbolic or economic,

are an inadequate response. In other words, there is something excessive about grief that

requires different modes of engagement than those developed to deal with collective grievance.

Rather than attempt to develop strategies for overcoming or moving past a history of racism,

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marginalization and exclusion, Cheng says it is more important inquire into the operation of grief

and its implications for the construction of identities.

While racial politics in New Zealand are quite different from the American context that

Cheng speaks of, a similar logic of comparability and compensation exists within the legal

apparatus of the New Zealand state, and is most clearly visible in the Waitangi Tribunal, a

government body tasked with addressing historical Maori grievances against the British Crown.

In 1996, the Tribunal investigated a claim brought by the Taranki tribes, and a statement

regarding the events at Parihaka was issued, saying

there was much pain and anger in the submissions of many who spoke of

Parihaka. They challenged the Pakeha written record as inadequate and culturally

biased, and they would offset it with family accounts passed down orally. We

have had regard to this evidence. We were constantly aware, from listening to the

people that the story of Parihaka is no past account but part of living tradition.

(Chapter 8.2)

Here the Tribunal makes explicit the connection between the events of Parihaka and their

significance for contemporary Maori identities in Taranaki, a connection that is structured by

grief. The claimants seem to invoke the same sentiments of partiality and fragmentation that we

saw earlier in the discussion above, while also alluding to the complicity of the past in

constructing a Maori present, specifically the experiences of “pain and anger” that memories of

Parihaka seem to evoke for the claimants. The compensation packages offered by the Tribunal to

Maori claimants do not address the grief that the Taranaki tribes articulate in relation to both

their past and present. Thus we can see how Cheng’s argument about the failings of

compensatory logic are applicable to the New Zealand case.

What is ultimately at issue for both Cheng and those committed to the memory of

Parihaka is the intrusion of a painful, colonial past into the present and what the effects of that

intrusion are on identity formation. Cheng calls these effects racial melancholia, and draws on

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the language of psychoanalysis, specifically Freudian conceptions of mourning and melancholia,

to develop a way of speaking about grief without making prescriptions for its erasure. Freud

argues that people form libidinal attachments to things or people, and that when those things or

people become lost, the ego enters a crisis because those identifications that had helped define

the ego are no longer present. The work of mourning is to sever those attachments, resulting in a

“free and uninhibited” ego (Freud, 1957; 244-245). Melancholia arises when the attachments of

the libido to the lost object are not displaced onto new or different objects, but are rather

“withdrawn into the ego” (Freud, 1957; 249). Melancholia in Freud’s articulation is essentially

an unresolved mourning. The grief that inheres in the ego over the lost object is not cathected

onto a new object, and therefore renders the ego to a perpetual state of mourning or grief over the

lost object of libidinal desire.

For Cheng, melancholy is the site in which the subject comes into being, for as she says,

“Freudian melancholia designates a chain of loss, denial, and incorporation through which the

ego is born” (2001; 8). The ego comes into existence only in relation to an absence. The state of

melancholia produces a subject that recognizes its loss as a constitutive element of its very being.

Judith Butler takes this logic a bit further to not only emphasize the importance of grief in the

creation of subjects, but to reject outright the idea of the autonomous subject. Butler argues that

“what grief displays is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we

cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of

ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as

autonomous and in control” (2004; 23). Butler terms this a relational notion of identity, which

she sees as the basis for a kind of community in which difference serves as the only common

bond binding people together. In other words, a relational notion of identity produces a kind of

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community that binds people together based upon difference created by a shared sense of grief.

The multiplicity of identities that might arise as a consequence of grief converge around sites or

moments of grief, creating new identities that are bound together only because of the difference

that separates them. Cheng goes so far as to suggest that both dominant and minority subjects

depend upon their identities as such in relation to the other, and also that grief, and those

moments by which grief is provoked, are crucial for the formation of both individual and

collective identities, such as race, ethnicity or nationality.

In the story of Parihaka, we see the kind of binding move between dominant and minority

subjects that Cheng sees at work in the operation of grief as a structuring principle of identity.

More specifically, in the context of the Waitangi Tribunal, Parihaka serves as a constitutive

moment in the formation of the bicultural national imaginary promoted by the state. In other

words, Parihaka and the memories of grief, anger, and frustration it engenders, work together to

form an identity that binds together Maori and Pakeha into a bicultural national community. If

we are to take seriously Cheng’s claim that the histories and consequences of racial wounding

are integral to the formation of national identities, then the story of Parihaka, and its

memorializations, are a crucial site for the formation of a ‘bicultural’ New Zealand because it is

both an instance of racially motivated prejudice and a moment of grief in which all New

Zealanders share, Maori and Pakeha alike.

A brief discussion of the terms “Maori” and “pakeha” further attests to the extent to

which these identities are bound together, and act on each other in a mutually constitutive way.

The word ‘pakeha’ is used to refer to New Zealanders of European descent, and traces its

contemporary usage from the early contact period between Maori and Europeans when it was

used to mark Europeans as different from Maori. In modern parlance, ‘pakeha’ refers to people

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and influences that derive originally from Europe but which are no longer ‘European.’ Michael

King, a prominent New Zealand historian has stated that “Pakeha is an indigenous expression to

describe New Zealand people and expressions of culture that are not Maori” (1999; 10). With

this statement King is suggesting that ‘Pakeha’ as an identity exists only in relation to and in so

far as ‘Maori’ exists as that which is excluded from the category of ‘Pakeha.’ ‘Maori’ as a racial

marker has a similar etymology tied to the history of colonial contact. Whereas prior to

European contact, Maori had no name for themselves, they began referring to themselves as

tāngata maori, which translates as “human” to distinguish themselves from Europeans. Over

time, these identifications became solidified as not only cultural, but racial identities. Maori and

Pakeha only exist in so far as the existence of either depends upon the exclusion of the other.

Maori cannot exist without Pakeha and vice versa. Thus the New Zealand state’s attempt at

creating a bicultural national imaginary merely serves as a constant reminder to Maori and

Pakeha that they have not transcended or moved beyond the racial antagonisms that structure

their very being as New Zealanders.

Parihaka is crucial for understanding the impossibility of biculturalism because it

highlights the way in which New Zealand’s colonial past haunts not only its present but also its

future. The racial identifications of Maori and Pakeha have very specific histories that are

crucial for the identity of the nation, yet prevent the nation from moving into the future because

of the current formulation of the national imaginary as ‘bicultural.’ Thus, New Zealand is

prevented from moving into the future imagined by the state, in which grief about the past binds

subjects, Maori and Pakeha, together as a community, but does not allow them to move past

those distinctions in creating a new or different future. Given the claims regarding the continued

grief experienced by Maori as a result of the events at Parihaka, the state must abandon its

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practices of compensatory logic and take seriously the grief that Maori experience as a result of

this tragedy. Otherwise, the past will continue to haunt the present, and the horizon of the future

will remain out of reach, leaving New Zealand stuck in an eternal present.

Works Cited

Augé, Marc, Oblivion, trans. Marjolijn de Jager, Forward by James Young, University of

Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004.

Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso, New York, 2004.

Cheng, Anne Anlin, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief,

Oxford University Press, New York, 2001.

Freud, Sigmund, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the

Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works, trans. James

Strachey, coll. Anna Freud, ass. Alex Strachey and Alan Tyson, The Hogarth Press,

London, 1957, pp. 243-258.

Hinchcliff, John, Parihaka: A Novel, Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2004.

Hohaia, Te Miringa, Gregory O’Brien and Lara Strongman, Parihaka: The Art of Passive

Resistance, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2001.

Hond, Ruakere, “The Concept of Wānanga at Parihaka,” Parihaka: The Art of Passive

Resistance, eds. Te Miringa Hohaia, Gregory O’Brien and Lara Strongman, Victoria

University Press, Wellington, 2001, pp. 77-104.

Ihimaera, Witi, The Parihaka Woman, Vintage, Auckland, 2011.

King, Michael, Being Pakeha Now: Reflections and Recollections of a White Native, Penguin

Books, Auckland, 1999.

Metge, Joan, Rautahi: The Maoris of New Zealand, Routledge, London, 1967.

Riseborough, Hazel, “Te Pāhuatanga o Parihaka,” Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance, eds.

Te Miringa Hohaia, Gregory O’Brien and Lara Strongman, Victoria University Press,

Wellington, 2001, pp. 19-41.

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Scott, Dick, Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka, Heinemann/Southern Cross, Auckland,

1975.

Waitangi Tribunal, The Taranaki Report – Kaupapa Tuatahi, Wellington, 1996.