Constructing Eco-Responsible National Identities Through Collective Memory: Settler and Māori Histories of Environmental Change in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

A growing body of scholarship argues that collective memories of historical environmental change—formed and transmitted through museums, movies, novels, activist performances and other cultural texts and practices—can help nurture proenvironmentalism. Three possible mechanisms have been proposed: the shifting baseline syndrome, planetary memory and ecological grief. My paper adds a further mechanism to this list: national identity. Through a case study of public memory in Aotearoa New Zealand, the paper demonstrates that culturally mediated representations of the historical past play an important role in the construction of environmentally responsible national identities. Whereas narrating the history of Aotearoa New Zealand exclusively from the viewpoint of European colonial settlers supports a monocultural construct of national identity that sanctions the exploitation of nature for human ends, representations of the past that are inclusive of Indigenous Māori experiences generate a bicultural image of the nation that engenders greater care for the environment. The paper develops this argument by means of a mixed-method research design that combines quantitative mediation analyses of original survey data from a national probability sample (N = 1066) with qualitative interrogations of two museum exhibits (the National Museum of Sheep and Shearing and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa).