Is a New Zealand Tribunal Giving the Public a Fictional History?
Diana McCurdy, in the New Zealand Herald (July 10, 2004): Every week, 19 researchers and historians at the Waitangi Tribunal painstakingly unearth new information about New Zealand’s disappearing past. As they investigate Maori claims against the Crown, the researchers document aspects of history never before recorded on paper. In an improbable twist, the tribunal – one of New Zealand’s more controversial institutions – has become a nursery for the rewriting of New Zealand’s history. It seems a laudable enterprise. But questions are emerging about the academic validity of the history the tribunal is producing. In a new book, The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History, Victoria University historian Dr Giselle Byrnes lays damning charges against the tribunal, describing its attempts to write history as a “noble, but ultimately flawed experiment”. The tribunal, she says, is not writing “objective history”. Rather, the reports it produces are deeply political and overwhelmingly focused
