“Settler storytelling and settler fantasy make it possible to overlook how colonial capitalism dominates political, economic and social space and contributes to social inequality,” writes associate professor Liana MacDonald (Photo: Robert Cross)

Liana MacDonald’s new book, Land, Race and the Settler Imagination*, explores what she calls the “settler fantasy” — storytelling that presents colonisation as finished business and keeps the ongoing subjugation of Māori out of view. In this extract, she explains how these stories are created and perpetuated through our national institutions.*

In 2020, I began lecturing in teacher education at Victoria University of Wellington. Though “anti-racism”, “white fragility” and “whiteness” had become new education buzzwords, and both tutors and students were being forced to confront and mitigate the ways colonisation had tainted mainstream schooling, I found the work draining and the experience bittersweet.

I enjoyed working with sharp and passionate trainee teachers who were devoted to the growth and development of children and adolescents, but I was also working on behalf of an education programme that advanced curricula, pedagogies and assessment approaches rooted in Eurocentrism.

My integrity was repeatedly questioned whenever I spoke out against racism and colonialism in classrooms and schools. But I held on to the hope that the whitestream education system could be transformed from the inside out.

In 2021, I started working as a history lecturer in education. AJ, Emma and Kim were young Pākehā women studying to be secondary-school history teachers as part of a one-year Master of Teaching and Learning qualification.

Together, the three trainees and I embarked on a seven-week unit focusing on how the new history curriculum, Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories (then in draft form), could support secondary students to understand how settler-colonial power relations are constructed in national institutions.

We visited two sites that play an important role in reflecting and determining how people view themselves in relation to the nation-state: New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa, and a permanent exhibition of New Zealand’s three iconic constitutional documents, He Tohu, at the National Library of New Zealand.

While there, we engaged in a process of “reading” how bodily and affective prompts emanating from the layout, objects, angles, shapes, colours, written text and sounds of the exhibitions relayed subliminal messages about how past events and histories impact us today.

Emma, Kim, AJ and I entered this process with prior knowledge of Aotearoa’s contested histories and the sanitised way they were often spoken about. We were expecting Te Papa’s permanent history exhibitions, Signs of a Nation and Passports, first opened back in 1998, to convey a relatively harmonious, optimistic and uncritical perspective of Māori and Pākehā race relations through their design. But we were surprised that He Tohu, opened almost 20 years later, gave a similar impression.

Although the exhibition engaged intellectually with New Zealand’s contested histories, we found that an easy and historically resolved view of Indigenous–settler relations was communicated to the visitor through their bodily senses as they moved through different parts of the display.

The centrepiece of He Tohu is a specially built document room shaped like a waka huia, displaying the original documents of He Whakaputanga — the Declaration of Independence, several original versions of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and the 1893 Women’s Suffrage Petition in their own cases.

Yet the student teachers and I noticed gaps and silences in the way the exhibition constructed a narrative of colonial history. We noticed the information displayed outside the document box made it difficult for visitors to discern how the three texts were connected; each document was presented as a stand-alone event, reinforced with block colours, and associated images, photographs and text.

We noted that the “in-between” chunks and context were missing, along with discussion of other significant historical events that contributed to the formation of Aotearoa New Zealand.

For example, while He Tohu forefronts He Whakaputanga, Te Tiriti and the Women’s Suffrage Petition, it pays less attention to the struggle and hardship experienced by Māori communities alongside these significant moments in national history.

Our realisation that the museum and the library were sanitising and suppressing the impact of historical colonial violence in this way, reinforcing the idea that colonial injustice towards Māori is not really that bad and that everyone operates from a level playing field, led to a range of strong emotions — wonderment, disbelief, confusion, curiosity, anger and others.

Unpacking these feelings, Kim, AJ, Emma and I came to understand that settler colonialism as a structure and ongoing process is regenerated at frequently visited places like national institutions. The embodied stories of colonial settlement told in these places support settler migrants to feel comfortable and “at home” in Aotearoa today.

Through experiencing this example of settler storytelling, a definition of the idea as the manifestation of tangible, material and felt connections between settlers and the whenua began to take shape.

The story and the fantasy

Storytelling and narrative inquiry are old practices that humankind adopted to make themselves known and understood, and to make meaning in the social world. They are used in different ways by all peoples, from all ethnic groups, and in all parts of the world.

Among these groups are the migrants and their descendants who spread across the world to already inhabited lands over the past 400 years to set up new outpost societies, and whom we now call settlers.

Settler storytelling involves the construction of social texts, reproduced through the strategic interplay of place, people and objects, to generate a sanitised narrative of colonial history and a benign and resolved view of Indigenous–settler race relations. These texts support settlers to feel at home in the post-migration homeland.

Collective remembering and forgetting are therefore closely intertwined with settler storytelling, whereby the past is interpreted and reconstructed in accordance with the values, narratives and experiences of the dominant settler group. In Aotearoa New Zealand, these are the values and experiences of Pākehā.

The outcome of settler storytelling — the resulting public memory — forms the idea of settler fantasy as discussed in this book. A settler fantasy advances an unproblematic and historically resolved story of colonial settler migration generally accompanied by the following assumptions: we are all immigrants to these shores so no one ethnic (and Indigenous) group is more deserving than another; we are all citizens of the nation- state; and power is shared equally among all ethnic groups.

Therefore, the assumptions conclude, those who work hard deserve political and economic benefits; marginal minority representation in white-dominated institutions shows meritocracy is working; and those who disagree are irrational outsiders. A particular collective and national identity is strengthened through settler storytelling and the resulting settler fantasy.

In Aotearoa, we might call this a “Kiwi” identity — an assumed national character that legitimises non-Indigenous rights to occupy stolen Native territories by advancing a sense of belonging that is equal to the people who first arrived on its shores. There is also now a more “progressive” Pākehā identity that aims to support Māori sovereignty.

Many adopt the label “tāngata Tiriti” to acknowledge the settler–Indigenous relationship that is unique to Aotearoa New Zealand and centres on the agreement set forth in Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

However, as Māori political scientist Hemopereki Simon has argued, the term and the actions of those who wield it can reproduce and perpetuate colonial structures and thinking without foregrounding Māori sovereignty and relational ways of being together.

That a sense of connectedness and belonging to the whenua can be as important to settlers as it is for Indigenous people can be seen in how tenaciously their storytelling is advanced and adhered to, and how readily it bends to accommodate “progress”.

Settler storytelling is problematic because it supports the dominant group to reimagine colonisation and settlement in ways that are disconnected from lived Indigenous realities and the ongoing structuring force of colonisation. It does so through obscuring felt knowledge about Indigenous inhabitancy prior to European “discovery” and settlement, and a sense of historical wrongdoing (otherwise known as difficult histories).

The idea is akin to what Caribbean-American philosopher Charles W Mills terms an “epistemology of ignorance”. He argues that structured and purposeful ignorance, sustained by “a certain schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities”, supports one to view institutions as objective, rather than places that have been politically, morally and epistemologically shaped by racism and race.

Such is the power of embodied and material messaging about this imaginary state of race relations that intellectual knowledge about difficult histories may not greatly threaten a settler fantasy. At the very least, evidence of colonial violence may incur changes in the settler storytelling narrative, but it does not result in transformative change.

We saw this clearly in the He Tohu exhibition, which acknowledges through its presentation of information that Māori never ceded sovereignty, but also cultivates through its environment — the shapes, curves and placement of materials, the lighting and so on — a comfortable and resolved view of the country’s difficult histories.

Moreover, settler storytelling and settler fantasy make it possible to overlook how colonial capitalism dominates political, economic and social space and contributes to social inequality. We cannot escape this material reality. Colonial capitalism works by shaping and controlling who gets to be seen as a “proper” citizen, relying on tightly policed ideas about reproduction, family and care. These expectations serve the nation-state while reinforcing white patriarchal claims of ownership over Indigenous lands, bodies and futures.

One particularly insidious strand of settler fantasy, unpicked by Te Tau Ihu o Te Waka-a-Māui historian Peter Meihana, insists that it is in fact Māori who are privileged. This idea was used first to justify “policy that separated Māori from the land”, then later to “attack any Māori initiative intended to improve the circumstances of Māori”.

Even when this privilege myth is combatted, and the structural unfairnesses and inequalities affecting Māori actually recognised, the hidden messages relayed through embodied messaging support many New Zealand citizens to invest in the idea that disparities in health, education, suicide rates, incarceration and housing between ethnic groups can be improved by attending to some sort of individual or cultural deficit, or through the inclusion of a Māori group or organisation, while keeping the foundations of our inherited colonial systems intact.

The idea of change may feel uncomfortable and unfair (perhaps even violent) to those who are used to an environment that upholds a racial hierarchy that pays the most dividends to the Pākehā collective.

The whole process is upheld through controlling the land and the Indigenous population. This is why Indigenous communities experience backlash when they threaten the validity of a settler fantasy and the perceived benefits of working within oppressive capitalist and fascist systems which claim that all are “equal under the law”.

Attacking marginalised groups is a way of forcing them back into line with settler storytelling. Moreover, the higher a person rises in this social hierarchy, the more invested they are in the rules of colonial capitalism, even when its harmful effects are known.

The ingrained nature of settler storytelling across public places and institutions means that people of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds are directed to flow with and reproduce its fantastical messaging. The unconscious (human) performance of settler storytelling is crucial to ensuring that the migrated home can duplicate Eurocentric structures, standards and a system of white supremacy.

In this regard, we can describe the settler fantasy as the product of a larger relationship between the systems of settler colonialism and white supremacy. As British Australian scholar Sara Ahmed writes: “Colonialism makes the world ‘white’, which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach. Bodies remember such histories, even when we forget them.”

Land, Race and the Settler Imagination by Liana MacDonald (BWB Texts, RRP $20, e-book $4.99) is available now.

Associate Professor Liana MacDonald is the inaugural Chair of Mā**ori, Moriori and Indigenous Peace Studies at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka University of Otago. Her research explores memory, settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty, with a focus on Indigenous Oceanic philosophies and practices of peace amid ongoing colonial conflict.

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