Decolonizing the Archives: The Work of New Zealand's Waitangi Tribunal Journals Public History Review HOME ABOUT LOGIN REGISTER SEARCH CURRENT ARCHIVES Decolonizing the Archives: The Work of New Zealand's Waitangi Tribunal Rachel Buchanan ABSTRACT If history is to be decolonized, then the archives it is made from must be too. This article uses the work of the Waitangi Tribunal in Aotearoa New Zealand to explore how this might be possible. The tribunal is a permanent commission of inquiry that investigates contemporary and historical breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Tribunal hearings are rich sites of public history-making. A hearing involves the research and production of ‘traditional’ and ‘historical’ tribal narratives as well as the performance of dozens of individual testimonies from Maori. By collecting and archiving the family and tribal histories that Maori claimants have chosen to speak, write or sing before it, the tribunal has made the private public. In the process, the colonial archive has been expanded, democratised and decolonised. This article argues that while the work of the tribunal is necessarily constrained by its brief to investigate post-contact grievances, the voluminous and precious archive generated by inquiries and by the settlement process that sometimes follows, provide the seeds for other more satisfying and challenging stories about New Zealand’s past and present. It reads the archives generated by the Taranaki inquiry to demonstrate how a significant feature of claimant testimony is the challenge it poses to conceptions of time that are central to academic history-making. The subaltern histories shared at tribunal hearings collapse the distinctions between past and present, placing ‘historical actors’ and ‘historical events’ on the same stage as present ones. Tribunal archives, then, are a new and overlooked collection of documentary evidence that refuses to locate colonisation in the past. The tribunal archives challenge historians to rethink ‘history’ and ‘the colonial archive’. If colonisation is something that is not over yet then the colonial archive is still being created (by bodies like the tribunal). It is a collection of documents that can be viewed as both historical and contemporary. FULL TEXT: PDF DOI: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v14i0.399 Share this article: ISSN: 1833-4989 Privacy Policy This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Browse BY ISSUE BY AUTHOR Information FOR READERS FOR AUTHORS FOR LIBRARIANS Notifications SUBSCRIBE User Username Password Remember me Login Make a Submission UTS: Library Contact Byrnes considers the work of the Tribunal not only in terms of how Maori and Pakeha perceive its procedure and efficacy, but also in the conte xt of New Zealand history in general. Read more.. Error in review? Submit review. Find and Download Book — The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History. Click one of share button to proceed download: Choose server for download: USA Server 1 USA Server 2 EU Server 1 EU Server 2 CH Server 1. The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History. 6 mb. 3 min. Waitangi Day is celebrated in New Zealand on February 6. Widely regarded as the country’s national day, the event has historically been shrouded with controversy. You only need to look at the history behind Waitangi celebrations to understand why. Meet up. Go out. The Treaty of Waitangi (known as ‘Te Tiriti o Waitangi’ in Te Reo Māori ) is New Zealand’s founding document. Signed on February 6, 1860, the Treaty was an agreement between the British Crown and the indigenous Māori people. Its name stems from the place where it was signed – Waitangi is located in the Bay of Islands , along the northernmost parts of the North Island..