The order of things

I must have driven through Pākaraka, near Whanganui, although I don’t remember. Whenever it was, the little town would have borne a different name.

Objectors say you can’t change the name of a place: that’s wiping out history. And they insist, you can’t just wipe out history. It’s an affront to their sense of order.

You can, though.

The children were playing in a woolshed when Maxwell, Bryce and their militiamen approached. How the story is told depends on the teller: that’s how history goes. People who deny the past is ambiguous are generally trying to hide from it.

Some accounts of that day in 1868 emphasise the age of the children. The youngest may have been only six, but none were older than twelve. Some accounts dwell on the weapons used against the children’s small bodies: sabres, swords, revolvers. Others centre on the short life of ten-year-old Kingi Takatua, who died alongside his friend, Akuhata Herewini, when his head was cut in half. Yet others talk about the survivors, who must have run screaming from the woolshed, their little fingers severed by the blades.

As best I can tell, no one disagrees on this much. The children were playing. They were playing. The town, Maxwell, was named for the man who mutilated and killed them.

When the new signs went up just yesterday - for Pākaraka, no longer Maxwell - they didn’t last long. Before a full day had passed, someone tore them from the ground. The news showed a photo of them laying there, in the grass. People laughed at it on social media. One guy said, ‘Maybe the silent majority are showing how they feel about name changing happening all over NZ’.

Because sometimes when a person acts out, it’s regrettable, but just a little understandable. I’m not talking about kids breaking into a shop or stealing a car. Little shits: they offend our sense of order. Whatever their motives, we find them despicable. Lock them up in bootcamps until they learn some personal responsibility.

But the ones who drive their utes into signs? Spew hate speech on social media? Send death threats to iwi or rape threats to the ex-Prime Minister? Sure, no one’s saying it’s great, but let’s not be too quick to judge. Maybe we should try to understand their motives, the things that provoked them. The familiar was taken from them: their sense of order was offended. Maybe we’re all a little bit responsible - or maybe no one is at all.

Our political discourse is changing. I don’t know enough about co-governance to say what it would mean - but I see plainly what the retreat from it represents, just as I understand what’s signalled by this new era of all-male decisiveness. It’s time to regain our sense of order.

I read the comments, even though I know I shouldn’t. I feel a sense of unsafety. There is nothing remarkable about this feeling - people of colour have always felt it, rainbow people, women in positions of leadership - except that it is now felt by someone like myself. It has reached me, and I am almost untouchably amongst the safest.

They say, you can’t just wipe out history. Kingi Takatua, Akuhata Herewini, even as their families wept for them, had a past, a whakapapa. I don’t know their histories: nor do you. They had a future, too, or they should have. I know more about Maxwell, after whom the town was named, and for whom these skulking angry white commenters pine.

That is the order of things.

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