Aotearoa New Zealand’s New National History Curriculum and Histories of Mourning

Abstract

From 2022, New Zealand schools are teaching a new compulsory history curriculum that aims to teach diverse New Zealand histories, while foregrounding the centrality of Māori histories and the impacts of colonisation. The new curriculum will upend a long history of ‘forgetting’ the nation’s contentious and conflictual past, and in particular the nineteenth century ‘wars for New Zealand’ (O’Malley, 2016) that secured settler hegemony over the nation-state. In this paper, we focus on the roles of remembering and forgetting in the narration of national histories to explore what might be a productive orientation to take to this contentious and unsettling past. We argue that the new history curriculum inaugurates a new phase of narrating the nation, replacing earlier phases of monocultural and bicultural nationhood that depended on this past being ‘forgotten’. And we argue for the productive value of a histories of critical mourning approach to remembering this founding violence.