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11 tweets,
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1 A number of commentators have said they hope the decision to expand the teaching of NZ history in our schools will help destroy old & racist myths, by providing students with facts. But myths are quite capable of adapting to facts, as recent NZ history shows. (thread) 
2 The history of Moriori studies shows how facts can be made compatible with a racist myth. By the '80s the early 20th C theory that Moriori were a pre-Maori Melanesian people had been discredited amongst scholars for decades. Michael King began to popularise the real story.
3 At the request of Moriori King wrote an accessible & riveting book that explained how the indigenous people of the Chathams/Rekohu were Polynesians, & not Melanesians chased from mainland NZ by latecomer Maori, as colonial mythographers had claimed.
4 The idea that Maori had colonised & dispossessed Moriori had long been used as an excuse for the Pakeha colonisation of Aotearoa. The work of King & the Moriori Renaissance of the '80s & '90s made such excuses untenable for more sophisticated Pakeha. But the myth could adapt.
5 In the late '80s & early '90s, conservative Pakeha intellectuals like CK Stead adapted the Moriori myth. They focused on the invasion of Rekohu/Chathams by 2 small Taranaki iwi in 1835, & the killings & slavery that followed.
6 Stead & co changed the premises of the old argument about Moriori, but not its conclusions. They said Maori couldn't complain too much about colonisation, after the events of 1835. Their argument made no logical sense, & ignored vital facts about 1835 & the preceding decades.
7 But even as the old notion of Moriori as a pre-Maori people slowly declines, & becomes confined to the dankest corners of the internet, the idea that the invasion of 1835 exemplified Maori civilisation, & showed that Maori deserved colonisation, flourishes amongst conservatives
8 The Moriori myth, then, remains intact, even as its promulgators discard claims that have become embarrassing & incorporate a few carefully selected facts about history. The myth has actually strengthened, by the mythmakers' increased grasp of facts.
9 Those who hope that supplying NZ students with facts, even fascinating facts that were long suppressed by racist schools, forget that facts are less important, in history, than stories & arguments. & any story, any argument, any myth, can find facts to support it.
10 To say all this is not to claim that every story & argument about the past has the same value. Some stories, some arguments are vastly superior to others. Michael King's story about the 19th century is much richer & has more explanatory power than CK Stead's.
11 We can't overturn the old myths with facts alone. Students need to know the different stories, arguments, & theories about history that NZers have produced. They need to navigate, to float down these rivers, & discover which flow deeper & clearer, which turn dark & torpid.
