We seem to be beset by narratives about ‘colonisation’ and its purported ongoing evils in this day and age. On close inspection, the confected outrage regarding colonisation in our contemporary world should not stand up to scrutiny.
Most of the attacks on ‘colonisation’ in present day New Zealand are really attacks on the inescapable reality of modernity, the modernised world all peoples are navigating.
A Maori person who was born in the same year as I was has the same experience of the modern globalised world as I do. We both have had to navigate the progress and innovation that has occurred through the decades, the change and progress that accelerated through the course of the 20th century. He wasn’t teleported here from 1840 and I wasn’t given a manual on what are purportedly ‘Pakeha institutions’ prior to my birth. Neither of us have any special instinctual knowledge that would advantage one over the other. We both have been learning to navigate a modern globalised world since we were birthed.
Moreover, there is no such thing as ‘Pakeha medicine’ that modern day Maori are often caricatured as approaching with some mixture of awe and fear: the medicines and healthcare structures we have today are the product of the collective input of countries right around the world and have taken many decades to develop. All humanity has witnessed this, no matter where you are located around the globe: a medical researcher in Japan is no doubt contributing as much as one from anywhere else around the planet, and we all benefit from the global drive to improve our collective lot.
The health system that we have arrived at is not some alien ‘Pakeha colonist system’: you will find it has wide-ranging commonalities with any such system anywhere in the world. Healthcare is one example of this global commonality, but of course there are many other examples as modern societies order themselves in very similar ways as regards the provision of schooling, policing, and the other fundamental institutions and services countries provide for their populations.
We are currently having a bizarrely irrational and inherently negative view of our modern nation imposed on us by homegrown academics, and we need to push back against that by deploying logic and reason and our knowledge of the wider world of which New Zealand is a part.
Aaron Spencer is a writer and truth seeker from the Bay of Plenty.