Minister rejects claims Māori history is being sidelined in rewrite which includes cutting some references to the Treaty of Waitangi
As cows grazed sleepily in a nearby paddock, then-14-year-old Leah Bell watched as a local Māori elder cried.
She was standing at the site of the massacre at Rangiaowhia, where Māori were deliberately burnt to death by the British crown in 1864. The site was just down the road from her Waikato high school. But she had never heard about it; in history, they’d been learning about the American civil war.
That “shameful” realisation led Bell and her classmates to organise a 13,000 strong petition to parliament in 2015, as part of a groundswell of young people pushed for the teaching of accurate New Zealand history, including the wars over land, in schools. This was made compulsory in 2023.
Now, the government wants to rewrite the history curriculum, removing and revising Māori history content and cutting some Māori words and references to the country’s foundational document, the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) from the overall syllabus.
