Table of Contents
Judy Gill
New Zealand’s education system teaches children a moral mythology presented as history with modern values repackaged, environmental destruction erased and ancestry elevated into authority – all without debate, evidence or consent.
It’s a story that rewrites history, embeds race-based authority and quietly undermines democratic equality.
Over the past 50 years, this narrative has been constructed in politics, law and academia and actively enforced through education and governance. It is not presented as interpretation or debate but as moral fact.
According to the narrative, pre-1840 Māori society lived in harmony with nature, practiced superior ethical values and functioned according to principles of guardianship, balance, and restraint. Colonisation is framed as destroying this order. This is now the centre of ‘values education’ in state schools appearing on classroom walls, in curriculum documents, in assemblies and ceremonies, in school values statements and in teacher-training language, and students are never told that it is fundamentally contradicted by the historical record.
By the time young people leave school – if they remain for the full 13 years – the narrative is no longer recognised as a claim. It is treated as fact.
At no point are students encouraged to interrogate it: they are not shown competing interpretations and they are not presented with archaeological or historical evidence that complicates the story and repetition replaces evidence.
Central to the narrative is a set of Māori-language abstractions, usually ending in -tanga: manaakitanga, whanaungatanga, kaitiakitanga, rangatiratanga and wānangatanga. The root words existed, but the moral doctrine built from them did not.
The suffix -tanga functions much like -ness or -ship in English. It converts concrete words – people, roles and actions – into abstract moral concepts.
This is simply a crude translation of Christian moral values – care for others, stewardship, responsibility, restraint – into Māori vocabulary, followed by bureaucratic standardisation and retrospective framing as tradition. Students are told these are ancient Māori values. They are not.
In English, everyone understands how ordinary words are turned into abstract moral ideas:
· kind → kindness
· leader → leadership
· steward → stewardship
· human → humanity
Nothing mystical happens. It is simply grammar.
The exact same process is used in Māori. Add -tanga and they become abstractions. These abstractions did not function as moral doctrines before 1840. They are modern constructions.
The decisive step is spiritualisation.
In Māori policy language, these abstractions are embedded in concepts such as wairua (spirit), mauri (life force) and tapu (sacred restriction). Kindness becomes sacred obligation and stewardship becomes sacred guardianship.
Students are taught – explicitly or implicitly – that Māori society practiced principled guardianship of land and water, living in balance with nature. The evidence does not support this.
Archaeological, pollen and charcoal records show widespread deliberate burning following Polynesian settlement, particularly in drier eastern regions where fire could remove forest quickly and prevent regeneration.
Peer-reviewed research shows that nearly half of South Island native forest was converted to open vegetation after Polynesian arrival, and that national vegetation cover declined from around 80 per cent to around 50 per cent by the time of European settlement. The eastern North Island also had rapid clearance in drier catchments, with fires used to suppress regeneration, and the Auckland Isthmus suffered substantial pre-European clearance for pā, cultivation and transport routes. Not that every place was bare: but vast areas were cleared and held open, permanently altering ecosystems.
Following human settlement, New Zealand experienced one of the fastest large-bird extinction events in world history.
· Before European colonisation:
· All moa species were hunted to extinction.
· New Zealand geese and Adzebills became extinct.
· Haast’s eagle disappeared after the loss of its primary prey.
These were human-driven extinctions.
Strip away the rhetoric and the ideology collapses. It is not ancient, not historically grounded and not democratic.
It is a modern invention – developed over the past 50 years and enforced over the past 20 – that takes Christian moral values, removes God, spiritualises the environment, elevates ancestry into authority and teaches children that race-based power is moral, natural and unquestionable. A system that assigns authority by descent is not cultural recognition. It is inherited rule.
References:
Human effects on the environment (pre-European burning and clearance): https://teara.govt.nz/en/human-effects-on-the-environment/page-2
Rapid landscape transformation following Polynesian settlement (PNAS, 2010): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011801107
High-resolution chronology of rapid forest transitions (PLOS ONE, 2014): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111328
Open-access version of McWethy et al (2014): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4221023/
Māori fire and reduction of woody cover prior to European settlement (Mark, 2005): https://ref.coastalrestorationtrust.org.nz/site/assets/files/7247/0028825x_2005_9512953.pdf
Canterbury pollen and charcoal evidence (Wardle, 2002): https://bts.nzpcn.org.nz/site/assets/files/22578/cant_2002_36__26-30.pdf
Native plant communities of the Canterbury Plains (Department of Conservation): https://www.doc.govt.nz/globalassets/documents/conservation/native-plants/motukarara-nursery/canterbury-plains-plant-communities-book-full.pdf
Indigenous terrestrial and wetland ecosystems of Auckland: https://knowledgeauckland.org.nz/media/1399/indigenous-terrestrial-and-wetland-ecosystems-of-auckland-web-print-mar-2017.pdf
Extinctions following human settlement: https://teara.govt.nz/en/extinctions/print
