Questioning the canon: Colonial history, counter-memory and youth activism

Abstract

Social memory is inscribed by power relations that both produce and contain canonical state narratives. In settler nations, where indigenous and state relationships remain unresolved, tribal memories of violent colonial histories that are passed on to successive generations expose ‘official’ silences in foundational stories about a nation’s origins. In this article, we examine a public debate that occurred when a group of secondary school students took a petition to the New Zealand Parliament calling for formal recognition of the difficult history of the New Zealand Wars – a series of nineteenth-century clashes between British imperial troops and their colonial allies against indigenous Māori. Drawing on Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, we show how the young activists’ public acknowledgement of difficult histories exposed simmering tensions between competing historical narratives throwing light on how political struggles over representations of the colonial past are shaped in many settler nations.