,
18 tweets,
7 min read
Read on Twitter
1 An old Listener article about my book The Stolen Island was recently shared by a popular facebook page. The Stolen Island describes the role of NZers in the 19th C Pacific slave trade, & scores of facebookers commented on the pros & cons of discussing this history. (thread) 
2 Many commenters at fb pointed out that slavery has been widespread in human societies, & wondered what the point was of discussing NZ's part in the slave trade in the Pacific. Wouldn't it be better, they asked, to accept that the past was benighted, & focus on the future?
3 I certainly agree that no group of humans is prevented, by its bloodlines or language, from oppressing another. In The Stolen Island I show how the crew of the ship that raided the Tongan isle of 'Ata was comprised mainly of Maori, who had been recruited on the Chathams in 1863
4 It is very likely that the Maori who were recruited by the captain of the slave ship that raided the Tongan isles of 'Ata & Niuafo'ou were members of the Ngati Mutunga iwi. Ngati Mutunga had invaded & conquered the Chathams in 1835, & enslaved the local Moriori people.
5 Before they invaded the Chathams, Ngati Mutunga had been driven from their northern Taranaki homeland by the Musket Wars. The iwi is a fine example of the way that oppressed can turn oppressors. My own ancestors, who were chased from Skye by enclosures, offer another example.
6 After being driven from Skye by lowlands & English capitalists, my maternal ancestors colonised Outback Australia, & dispossessed the local Aboriginal peoples. In our own era, the Jews, that most oppressed of all peoples, have become the oppressors of Palestinians.
7 But I can't agree with those who have been saying on facebook that the ubiquity of slavery & colonisation, through human history means that we should avoid discussing those subjects, & instead focus on the supposedly enlightened present, & on possible futures.
8 It seems to me that the very ubiquity of conquest & oppression through human history means that we should look carefully at those societies that have avoided following such a path. What made them exceptional? What secrets can they teach us?
9 On facebook, a number of my critics have made much of the fact that some Polynesian societies practiced slavery, & were as oppressive as the empires of Europe. It is hard to deny this argument. For centuries Tonga's elite institutionalised slavery & invaded their neighbours.
10 In his great but very flawed book The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms, Patrick Kirch claimed that Polynesian societies followed a rigidly defined path. They began as small concerns, a few villages in size, & grew, through conquest, into proto-states, maritime empires
11 When Kirch discovers evidence of political decentralisation, of rulers losing control, he always invokes environmental explanations. Hence the decline of Niue from a unitary polity to a set of rival chiefdoms is attributed to the collapse of the island's ecosystems.
12 Kirch never considers the possibility that a Polynesian people might choose to turn away from the path of centralisation & domination - that they might stage protests, even revolutions, against their chiefs, kings, priests. This is a worldwide problem, amongst historians
13 The most radically egalitarian society in Polynesia was Rekohu, on the Chathams. There the Moriori people dispensed with many of the rituals surrounding chiefs, & avoided both warfare & slavery. But scholars tend to attribute Rekohu's egalitarianism to environmental factors
14 For those who believe human societies have a natural tendency towards centralisation, oppression, & slavery, & that only extreme environmental factors can arrest this tendency, Vanuatu is the great stumbling block. Vanuatu's history is simply inexplicable for most scholars
15 Vanuatu was settled only 3 and a half thousand years ago - at about the same time as Fiji & Tonga, & by the same Lapita people, who spoke a single language & had a single culture. Today Vanuatu is home to 138 languages. Tonga, by contrast, boasts 2 indigenous tongues.
16 After about 1000 AD Tonga saw the growth of a chiefdom, proto-state, & empire, which overwhelmed local cultures & languages, & imposed its own words & rituals. In Vanuatu, tho, linguistic & culture diversity exploded, & nothing like a state ever appeared.
17 Alexandre Francois, who has been documenting Vanuatu's languages, attributes their diversity to a love of difference, & a rejection of domination. Even today, a typical ni-Vanuatu will know 5 or 6 tongues, & use them regularly, in visits to his or her neighbours.
18 It seems to me that, rather than simply assuming that all traditional human societies, from Europe to China to the Pacific, were oppressive, we need to focus on places like Vanuatu, where the grim rule of human history appears to have been broken. What lessons can we learn?
