Te Tiriti o Waitangi/The Treaty of Waitangi

Educating for Personal Responsibility and

Reconciliation WENDY FOWLER

2013

‘The Education Review Office national curriculum review published in early 2010 evaluated 67 primary schools and 42 secondary schools on how they were using the eight principles…The Treaty of Waitangi was identified as one of the… least enacted principles.’ Consedine p149

• Consedine (Consedine, 2001), in their survey of a group of teacher education students, provide a staggering reality check. It is reported that 88% had never heard of the New Zealand Declaration of Independence (1835), 61% were aware of the differences between the Maori and English versions of the text of the Treaty of Waitangi, and 80% were not familiar with New Zealand’s Native Land Legislation.

• Propaganda thrives in a vacuum• Sensationalism thrives in a vacuum• Without context(history) we create false

memory, we romanticise the past, we adopt false contexts/replacement contexts

Saul Ralston. On Eqilibrium

• Our history is a taonga/ an incredible gift• Our history is unique

• Having lived in the country for just over several weeks I find it astonishing, and several college classmates of mine have told me, that they have never been taught in the classroom, about the location of their own cities, rivers and mountain ranges. I find this fact very startling, as these students are in their final year of university, and will be teaching their countries’ youth after graduation. As educators how can we expect to teach our youth to the best of our ability, if we do not even know and understand the world around us? (2012)

To misquote FDR somewhat:

With great knowledge (power) comes great responsibility.

• We can know a great deal about the history of indigenous-settler relations. But knowing brings burdens that can be shirked by those living in ignorance. With knowledge the question is no longer what we know but what we are now to do, and that is a much harder matter to deal with.

Henry ReynoldsWhy Weren’t we Told?

MIROSLAV VOLF• adequately naming what transpires between people (being truthful in love) ; • perpetrators confess, forgive themselves, receive forgiveness and healing;•followed by practical action that promotes and enables healing, forgiveness, restoration, reconciliation, hope and a future ;• victims and perpetrators who ‘remember rightly ‘ .

COMMUNAL FORGIVENESS• When a whole group of

offended people engages in the forgiveness process in relation to another group that is perceived to have caused a social offense. -Everett Worthington

• Let us give them Knowledge and a vision • Ki te kahore he whakakitenga ka ngaro te iwi

Being a peacemaker is neither a comfortable journey nor a short one but it is essential if we are to find the human face of the ‘other’.-Rice

Peace, like war must be wagedVannevar

Bush/George Clooney