Uncanny pedagogies: teaching difficult histories at sites of colonial violence

ABSTRACT

In 2022, New Zealand history will shift from an optional to a compulsory subject across all levels of schooling. Teaching about New Zealand’s difficult histories has the potential to reconstitute settler-Indigenous relations to show how historical colonial injustice impacts people today, but it raises questions about whose history will be validated and taught and how settler discomfort about breaking the silences surrounding colonial violence might be addressed pedagogically. Building on scholarship in haunting, we introduce the notion of a settler colonial crypt to show how settler memory and forgetting of colonial violence can be challenged and transformed by Māori tribal memories. The introduction of difficult histories at sites of colonial violence is accompanied by the uncanny; intellectual, emotional and embodied experiences that are uncomfortable and frightening, yet stimulating and inspiring, to generate new ways of considering settler-Indigenous relations. Data from a large-scale ethnographic study exploring how different groups in New Zealand remember or forget the New Zealand Wars reveal how secondary school students were directed towards the uncanny during a field trip. The excursion demonstrates the potential for transforming understandings about how invasion and violence accompanied settlement, providing the impetus for something-to-be-done and setting the groundwork for genuine attempts at reconciliation.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler colonial
• New Zealand wars
• difficult histories
• haunting
• crypt
• uncanny

Acknowledgments

This work was carried out as part of a Marsden grant awarded by the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Notes

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7QfRbq6hiI

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liana MacDonald

Liana MacDonald (Ngāti Kuia, Rangitāne o Wairau, Ngāti Koata) is a Lecturer in the School of Education at Victoria University of Wellington. She recently completed postdoctoral research in a national study about the New Zealand Wars, which followed a doctorate about racism and silencing New Zealand secondary schools. She is interested in the cultural politics of education and ways in which state schooling reproduces the norms and values of settler societies. Liana taught secondary school English and social sciences for 11 years.

Joanna Kidman

Joanna Kidman (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) is Professor of Māori education at Victoria University of Wellington. Her work spans indigenous sociology, Māori youth, higher education, decolonization studies and comparative education. She is especially interested in the interplay of power relations between different groups of people and has worked extensively in Māori communities across Aotearoa New Zealand and with indigenous Seediq communities in mountain village schools in Taiwan where ancestral knowledge and languages have been incorporated into curricula. Currently, she is co-leading a three-year nation-wide study into how the nineteenth century New Zealand Wars have shaped tribal and national memory, identity and history.