genealogy Article A Tale of Two Stories: Unsettling a Settler Family’s History in Aotearoa New Zealand Richard Shaw Politics Programme, Massey University, PB 11 222 Palmerston North, New Zealand;
[email protected]; Tel.: +64-27609-8603 Abstract: On the morning of the 5 November 1881, my great-grandfather stood alongside 1588 other military men, waiting to commence the invasion of Parihaka pa,¯ home to the great pacifist leaders Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi¯ and their people. Having contributed to the military campaign against the pa,¯ he returned some years later as part of the agricultural campaign to complete the alienation of Taranaki iwi from their land in Aotearoa New Zealand. None of this detail appears in any of the stories I was raised with. I grew up Pakeh¯ a¯ (i.e., a descendant of people who came to Aotearoa from Europe as part of the process of colonisation) and so my stories tend to conform to orthodox settler narratives of ‘success, inevitability, and rights of belonging’. This article is an attempt to right that wrong. In it, I draw on insights from the critical family history literature to explain the nature, purposes and effects of the (non)narration of my great-grandfather’s participation in the military invasion of Parihaka in late 1881. On the basis of a more historically comprehensive and contextualised account of the acquisition of three family farms, I also explore how the control of land taken from others underpinned the creation of new settler subjectivities and created various forms of privilege that have flowed down through the generations.