Heroes and Villains
Picking out bits of history to highlight past misdeeds is misguided presentism.
Heroes and Villains
“History is Written by Victors
-Unknown
Taika Waititi, talented New Zealand Māori actor and director had this to say at the 2020 Oscars:
“The academy would like to acknowledge that tonight we have gathered on the ancestral lands of the Tongva, the Tataviam, and the Chumash. We acknowledge them as the first peoples of this land on which the motion pictures community lives and works.”
A land acknowledgment for Los Angeles and the surrounding areas where American Indian tribes by the actor was of course, feted in mainstream media for “raising” awareness for past indigenous people. These types of performative virtue tributes seem to happen more and more these days, especially regarding indigenous. It is an easy and free way for celebrities and other public figures to show their level of compassion for important social issues-which their public relations team researched intensely beforehand to ensure the biggest coverage.
However, one omitted detail about Taika Waititi was the significance for a member of the Māori tribe discussing the displacement of indigenous people. While New Zealand did not have contact with Europeans until 1692 (brief, and unsuccessful), and did not attempt settlements till the beginning of the 19th century, the islands were inhabited for thousands of years prior. The dominant tribe on the main islands were composed of Māori and the sparse islands east named Chatham contained another tribe called Moriori. Well, that is to say the Moriori used to inhabit the eastern islands.
This article in Atlas Obscura explains the sad history of the Moriori:
SOMETIME BETWEEN THE YEARS 1000 and 1600, a group of people set sail, likely from the shores of the South Island of New Zealand, heading east into the great unknown.
After their arrival, this community of people, who would come to be known as the Moriori, would adapt almost every aspect of their lives to these inhospitable conditions, including their diets, their clothing, their transport, their social structures, and their military practices. For hundreds of years, they lived a pacifist, hunter-gatherer existence—until, in 1835, members of two Māori tribes from mainland New Zealand arrived on the island, killed between a sixth and a fifth of the Moriori, and enslaved the rest.
…They had lived “in peace and plenty for centuries,” he said, “enjoyed a democracy and conducted their simple affairs by a council of notable men.” In similar Polynesian societies, however, bloody tribal warfare was common—in mainland New Zealand, cannibalism remained a feature of many clashes between Māori iwi, or tribes. But the Moriori adopted pacifism, known as Nunuku’s law… in 1835, members of the Māori tribes Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Mutunga, living in what is now Wellington, New Zealand, decided to migrate to the Chatham Islands. Around 500 men, women, and children arrived on the shore, determined to take the land they found there through a practice called “walking the land,” where they moved across the island and settled wherever they liked. Moriori who disagreed or attempted to retain their districts were summarily slaughtered.
The Māori “decided” to go take the land and systematically butcher Moriori who resisted, and enslave the rest. Their enslavement only ended through European colonists’ intervention in 1863. For a population that crested in the thousands only a few decades before, the 1900 New Zealand census registered 12 Moriori on the Chatham Islands.
Regarding Taika Waititi, I suspect that his comments at the Oscars were sincere, and this bit of history is not brought up to indict or shame him for his ancestors past actions. People should not be held accountable for historical events that occurred centuries ago. What his comments highlight is the cognitive dissonance on display one must have to castigate the removal of populations in the North American continent while knowing that these actions transpired on a constant basis throughout Mankind’s existence across the globe.
Human nature does not age or mature. This is proven through the study of the oldest recorded human history. The 21st century to 3400 BCE hieroglyphs and Sumerian tablets contains vast examples of this with countless stories of greed, ambition, ignorance, and other human traits. Being emotional creatures, humans act accordingly to the external and internal forces that are encountered.
The Taika Waititi story represents the odd construct the modern age finds herself. While people should be considered on their individual traits and characteristics, this proper method has fallen to the wayside. In some environments of government, academia, and mainstream media, people are reduced to Avatars for their ethnicity groups (accused) historical transgressions. Histories such as America and other western countries are diminished and compressed into binary terms of Hero/Villain, or absolute Good/Bad morality. Gone is any semblance of complexity or nuance.
The study of history, and the interpretations taken from it to explain how we arrived here in the present cannot be simplified to these limiting parameters.
Links:
The Most Important Thing Taika Waititi Did at the Oscars Was Acknowledge That They Take Place on Native Lands
https://slate.com/culture/2020/02/taika-waititi-2020-oscars-native-land-acknowledgment.html
Taika Waititi and the academy salute L.A.'s ancestral lands at the Oscars
The Sad Story of the Moriori, Who Learned to Live at the Edge of the World
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/moriori-people-genocide-history-chatham-islands
The Dissonance of a Land Acknowledgment at the Oscars
https://newrepublic.com/article/156520/dissonance-land-acknowledgment-oscars
As in New Zealand, so in Los Angeles, the Tongva arrived and physically displaced Hokan groups that were already there. Los Angeles is "Tongva land" only in the sense that they were the last people to "colonize" it before the Europeans.