Prison labour, history-making and power: Notes on Trouillot’s 'Silencing the Past'

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History was published by Haitian writer and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot in 1995. As I’ve written elsewhere, Silencing the Past profoundly shaped the way I understand archives and the production of history. It is a go-to text for writers, educators and students across the globe and continues to offer insights into why some stories are remembered and others are not, and how historical narratives are produced and reproduced.

 

In Silencing the Past, Trouillot is less interested in what history is, but how history works. He writes, ‘This book is about history and power. It deals with the many ways in which the production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means for such production. The forces I will expose are less visible than gunfire, class property or political crusades. I want to argue that they are no less powerful.’

 

Trouillot begins chapter one with the example of the Alamo, which was won by Santa Anna in March 1836 but ‘lost’ in the longer narrative. A few weeks after the Mexican victory at the Alamo, Santa Anna was captured by the Americans at San Jacinto. The American victory was punctuated with shouts of ‘Remember the Alamo’. With their battle cry and its reference to Alamo, writes Trouillot, the men under Sam Houston doubly made history: ‘as actors, they captured Santa Anna… as narrators, they gave the Alamo story a new meaning.’ They reversed for more than a century the victory Santa Anna thought he had gained at the Alamo.

 

This is Trouillot’s way of introducing a key tenet of the book: the double meaning of the word ‘history’. The double meaning (or the double-sided historicity) he is interested in is history as what happened and history as that which is said to have happened. The first places emphasis on the sociohistorical process, while the second places emphasis on our knowledge of that process or the story about that process. As Trouillot demonstrates, neither are as straight forward as they seem.

 

From the Alamo through to the Haitian Revolution and the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Columbus, Trouillot examines the blurriness of this double meaning, tracking power and the production of history through multiple examples, especially their silences.

 

First, Trouillot offers a critique of the storage model of history, in which history is understood as the simple recall of important past experiences and events. In this model, history is to a collective what remembrance is to an individual, ‘the more or less conscious retrieval of past experiences stored in memory.’

Trouillot points out the flaws in this model, using the example of a person recalling in monologue form all their memories of a particular event, or even their life. ‘Consider a monologue describing in sequence all of an individual’s recollections. It would sound as a meaningless cacophony even to the narrator.’ And what about the events that shape us, but which we may not be able to remember or recall. The idea that the past is fixed and separate and can be accurately recalled at will is not only cognitively impossible, it does not form a history. As Trouillot notes, ‘the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present.’ In this sense, ‘the past has no content. The past – or more accurately, pastness – is a position.’

 

The problem of determining what belongs to the past is even harder when that past is said to be shared. When does the life of a collective start? How does a collective decide which events to recall, to include or exclude? ‘The storage model’ writes Trouillot, ‘assumes not only the past to be remembered but the collective subject that does the remembering.’ Who are the ‘we’ in this example?

 

Trouillot comes back to the double meaning of the word history and how the search for what history is has led people to either a) demarcate precisely and at all times the dividing line between historical process (what happened) and historical knowledge (that which is said to have happened), or b) to conflate them completely. Instead, Trioullot suggests that between the two extremes of a mechanically “realist” or positivist approach, or the naïve “constructivist” or relativist approach, there is a middle approach – one that asks how history works rather than what history is. ‘For what history is changes with time and place or, better said, history reveals itself through the production of specific narratives. What matters most are the processes and conditions of production of such narratives. Only a focus on that process can uncover the ways in which the two sides of historicity intertwine in a particular context. Only through that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.’

 

Silences

Trouillot’s treatment of silences in the production of history are especially important. Rather than mere absences or presences – which are too passive for Trouillot – silence is ‘an active and transitive process: one “silences” a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active.’ Trouillot emphasises that history is constantly produced, that what we understand as ‘history’ changes with time and place, and that what is said to have happened as the recall of facts is indeed a process filled with silences. For Trouillot, it is not just a matter of what is remembered or forgotten. Silences are produced and reproduced throughout any telling of a story.

 

In one of the most important and oft-cited passages of the book, Trouillot writes that ‘silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).’

We will come back to these soon. But for now, he writes that these moments ‘are not meant to provide a realistic description of the making of any individual narrative. Rather, they help us understand why not all silences are equal and why they cannot be addressed – or redressed – in the same manner.’ In other words, ‘any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly.’

 

Hence the mention of power in the by-line of Silencing the Past. For Trioullot, power ‘does not enter the story once and for all, but at different times and from different angles. It precedes the narrative proper, contributes to its creation and to its interpretation.’ ‘Power is constitutive of the story’ writes Trouillot. ‘Tracking power through various moments helps emphasise the fundamentally processual character of historical production, to insist that what history is matters less that how history works.’

 

Archives 101 (or the moment fact assembly, the making of archives)

This is where an understanding of context is so important, and why provenance and original order are keystones to archival practice. It is context that allows us to make sense of a source and its creation, and to place it in relation to others. And context helps us to think about the four moments that silence can enter the historical process.

 

Like the word history, the word archive has a double meaning. There are archives as evidence, and archives as an institution or repository. Both have power to marshal narratives and make meanings. And stories are key to both.

 

At their most basic, archives are stories. Whether we’re talking about archives as evidence or archival institutions, all peoples use archives as stories, whether transmitted through speech, written in text, woven within tāniko patterns or embodied in tā moko, performed as ritual or shared in everyday practices, or displayed in objects or in the land itself. For Trouillot, ‘archives are the institutions that organise facts and sources and condition the possibility of existence of historical statements.’ These ‘historical narratives are premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power’. As Rodney Carter writes,

 

‘Archival power is, in part, the power to allow voices to be heard. It consists of highlighting certain narratives and of including certain types of records created by certain groups. The power of the archive is witnessed in the act of inclusion, but this is only one of its components. The power to exclude is a fundamental aspect of the archive. Inevitably, there are distortions, omissions, erasures, and silences in the archive. Not every story is told.’

 

Yet throughout the twentieth century, public archives were seen as passive, objective and neutral. The public archivist was an impartial custodian – interpretation was the job of those using archives and not that of the archivist. ‘The good Archivist’, wrote Sir Hilary Jenkinson, the grandfather of the Western archival canon, was ‘perhaps the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces.’ Archives were the evidence from which Truth (with a capital ‘T’) could be found.

 

More recently, the post-custodial turn has challenged this view. A questioning of the profession’s objectivity has reframed or refigured archives and archival institutions. Archives are increasingly viewed as social constructs – they don’t simply ‘arrive or emerge fully formed, nor are they innocent of struggles for power in either their creation or their interpretive applications . . . all archives come into being in and as history as a result of specific political, cultural, and socioeconomic pressures.’ And for Trouillot, this is also true of the moment of fact creation – the making of sources, or archives as evidence.

 

Facts and Historical Facts (or the moment of fact creation and the moment of fact retrieval)

Following Trouillot and others, the evidential nature of archives as sources have been questioned: no longer can we think of sources as the simple bearers of fact or truth. Just as much as oral testimony, a written document reflects the biases and needs of its creator. It seems obvious, but it is important to note that sources are not neutral or natural but are created. And as Trouilott writes, ‘facts are not created equal: the production of traces is always also the creation of silences.’

 

‘Silences are inherent in history’ argues Trouillot ‘because any single event enters history with some of its constituting parts missing. Something is always left out while something else is recorded.’ The ‘facts’ people choose to record come with their own ‘inborn absences, specific to its production.’ Indeed, silences are necessary to any account, otherwise that account would be unintelligible.

 

Think back to the storage-model example. A similar process happens at the moment of fact creation, the making of sources. Trouillot uses the example of a sportscaster or commentator calling a game. If the commentator ‘told us every “thing” that happened at each and every moment, we would not understand anything.’ Things are left out. Some facts are ignored while others are highlighted. Silences are inherent (and necessary) at the moment of fact creation.

 

It's useful here to clarify that Trouillot is not arguing there are no such things as facts. Following Trouillot and others, Kevin Gannon gives the following example of how the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives) is an active process:

 

There are facts, and there are historical facts. Fact: lots of people crossed the Rubicon. Historical fact: Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE. A fact is embedded within a historical context that gives it historical significance and meaning. So when does a plain old “fact” rise to the level of “historical fact?” The short answer: when a historian decides it does. The fact and its context acquire historical meaning in retrospect, as they are recovered, interpreted, and presented by the historian.

 

In other words, ‘significance is not inherent, but bestowed’. For Gannon, ‘the myth of objectivity presupposes inherent significance’. Yet defining what fact is ‘important’ or ‘significant’ is contested, is wrapped up in cultural and political meanings, is shaped by relations of power that are themselves historical, and shifts over time. What is important to some people is not for others. ‘The assertion of “historical importance” is really a claim about things that matter, and more tellingly, things that don’t matter.’

 

It’s in this way that all writing and historical research is political. The topics we choose to study and the facts, stories and people we give significance to is not objective. The facts cannot speak for themselves, just as a historian cannot simply record the past ‘as it happened’. As I write in Blood and Dirt, all historians draw upon methods and practices within their ideological framework, including (and especially) historians who claim to be disinterested, even-handed and simply recalling the facts. The writing of history, argued Douglas Hay, ‘is deeply conditioned not only by our personal political and moral histories, but also by the times in which we live, and where we live’. Whether we acknowledge it or not, historians ‘take stands by our choice of words, handling of evidence, and analytic categories. And also by our silences.’ Or to echo Trouillot: ‘one engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active.’

 

This brings us all the way back to archives as stories, history as produced by power, and the importance of context. And back to Trouillot’s four moments of silencing.

Matthew Conroy and the four moments of silencing

Recall Trouillot’s argument that silences can enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments. There are countless examples I could use to illustrate these from a book like Blood and Dirt, which charts the hidden history of prison labour in New Zealand and its Pacific. But perhaps a good start would be the story of Matthew Conroy.

Matthew Conroy was a United Irishman, an Irish political prisoner who was transported to Australia for his part in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. When Matthew and close to 300 other male convicts arrived in New South Wales in February 1800, the Irish political prisoners were seen to pose a serious threat to the balance of power. Several plans for an armed uprising were afoot, and Matthew was firmly in the middle of them – he was said to be a ‘principal Ring leader’ and part of a secret group that met on 23 August 1800 to discuss ‘the Business’, including hiding pikes at Parramatta and recruiting convicts to the cause. A lack of evidence appears to have saved him from the 300 lashes and banishment to Norfolk Island that was handed down to the other ringleaders, and by 1814, he had joined the mission to New Zealand as a convict sawyer.

The moment of fact creation (the making of sources)

Yet in all his letters and journals, Samuel Marsden leaves Matthew Conroy off the Active’s passenger list for November 1814, despite Matthew advertising his intention to sail to the Bay of Islands in the Sydney newspapers and despite Marsden acknowledging the importance of his pair of sawyers in subsequent letters. What’s more, Samuel Marsden knew Conroy – it was Marsden who had led investigations into the plot of August 1800.

Samuel Marsden to Josiah Pratt, 28 November 1814 (Hocken)

Writing to Josiah Pratt on 28 November 1814, Marsden outlines the passengers aboard the Active and its historic mission:

 

‘When I wrote the last hasty Line I hoped to be near New Zealand before this time— we have been lying at the mouth of the Harbour detained by contrary winds ever since till, this morning— we are now leaving the Heads of Port Jackson with a fair wind— The number of Souls on Board men women and Children are 34— Europeans, Thomas Hansen Master, and his wife— Messrs Kendall Hall & King and their wives, and five Children John Hunter Carpenter— Alexr Ross mate Henry Shaffery Sailor- Richd Stockwell, Servant to Mr Kendall Thomas Namblton Cook— Wm. Campbell weaver— and Flax dresser— Walter Hall Smith.’

 

In other letters (later compiled as Marsden's account of the 1814 sailing), the passenger list is different again:

On Monday the 28th we weighed Anchor, and got out to sea, the number of persons on board (including women and children, were thirty-five— Mr Hanson, Master, his wife and son, Messrs Kendall, Hall, and King with their wives and five children;— 8 New Zealanders— two Otaheitans and four Europeans belonging to the vessel, besides Mr Nicholas, myself, two Sawyers, one Smith, and one runaway convict (as we found him to be afterwards)

Here, at least, the presence of two sawyers aboard the Active are mentioned. But why is Matthew Conroy never named in these sources? There are several possibilities. For one, Marsden hated Irish convicts. Was Conroy’s transportation as an Irish rebel and his role in the 1800 plot the reason Marsden left his name off the historic passenger list? Marsden names other convicts as passengers, including the ticket-of-leave seaman Henry Shaffery. Is this an example of the dialectics of silences Trouillot observes in the story of Sans Souci, where naming one thing actively silences the other (in other words, by naming Shaffery the convict seaman, Marsden silences Conroy the Irish rebel)? Or did he simply forget Matthew Conroy was onboard when he penned this first list?

 

The moment of fact assembly (the making of archives)

As a convict, Matthew Conroy did not leave his own account of his passage in the form of manuscripts or diaries. In the words of Trouillot, he was an actor but not a narrator. His convict status and working life contributed to the inequalities of his historical narrative at the source. The content of the traditional archive, shaped as they are by power and the preservation of certain voices over others, cemented this fact. Yet he is present in other archives such as newspapers (which recorded his presence aboard the Active on the November 1814 sailing). And reading Marsden’s own archive for silences reveals Conroy’s presence too.

 

Upon his return to Sydney, Marsden wrote that: ‘The following number of persons were left at Runghee Hoo [sic]. Mr & Mrs Kendall 1 Servant and 3 boys – Mr and Mrs Hall and 1 Boy – Mr and Mrs King & 2 Boys These belonging to the Society. One pair of Sawyers and a Black Smith bound for a time’ [my emphasis]. The pair of sawyers were William Campbell and Matthew Conroy, who were some of the first people ashore when the Active arrived. In the same letter Marsden writes: ‘I have since sent over the Wives of the Smith, and one Sawyer (the other being a single Man) and 2 Children.’ These are Eleanor Hall, wife of the blacksmith Walter Hall, and Ann Kelly, wife of Matthew Conroy. Both are listed as intending to sail on the Active in April 1815 to join their husbands, who were already in New Zealand, having sailed on the Active in November 1814. Campbell, Conroy and their families would soon move to Waitangi, where they built the first ever European structures on the site.

 

The mention of sawyers in Marsden’s later correspondence does not make it through to the various online archives that list the Active’s passengers. Entries on genealogical websites such as WikiTree and Yesteryears reproduce the lists and sources without Matthew Conroy present. In doing so, these online archives reproduce the original moment of silencing and shape the narratives that will make use of them.

Screenshot of the entry for the Active on Yesteryears (accessed 20 August 2023)

The moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives)

Nearly every account since has continued this silence which, for such a pivotal event in New Zealand’s history – a Mayflower- esque, birth- of-the- nation moment for some – is telling. It was continued at the time by a fellow passenger and friend of Marsden, John Liddiard Nicholas, in his Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand: Performed in the Years 1814 and 1815 in Company with the Rev. Samuel Marsden (Hughes and Baynes, London, 1817). And it has continued into the present, from Robert McNab and John Rawson Elder to Judith Binney and Anne Salmond.

Passenger list for the Active in Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand (ENZB)

Of course, to focus on Matthew Conroy is to silence the presence of the other convicts, Māori rangatira, missionaries, women, children and crew on board the Active. Instead, my narrative of Hohi centres Matthew and places him aboard the Active in November 1814 for several reasons. First, the lists of those said to be aboard the Active and who arrived to found New Zealand’s first mission are wrong. That which is said to have happened is incorrect. Second, the fact that Irish convicts like Conroy helped found New Zealand’s first mission is important to my argument: that convict labour was not marginal but core to the colonisation of New Zealand. Third, it connects New Zealand (through Matthew Conroy) to Irish political and social struggles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that’s just plain interesting!

 

The moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)

What others will make of my narrative about the role of prison labour in New Zealand is yet to be determined. I believe the role of convicts like Matthew Conroy is significant, for it shapes our wider understanding of the use of convict labour in the making of New Zealand from the very beginning of Pākehā settlement. From 1814 onwards, the unfree labour of workers such as Matthew Conroy have contributed to the making of modern New Zealand in important-yet-overlooked ways. The example of Matthew Conroy speaks to these moments of silences, to the various makings of sources, archives and narratives that in turn shape the making of history in the final instance. But as Trouillot would no doubt remind us, nothing is final in history.

 

These notes come from a talk I gave for the Kapiti WEA, 19 August 2023. Some of the content is republished from my Overland article on Silencing the Past, as well as my chapter for Public Knowledge. The edition of Silencing the Past I reference is the Beacon Press anniversary edition.

Archive Stories, Archive Realities

Below is my chapter for Public Knowledge, first published by Freerange Press in December 2019. You can purchase the book from the Freerange Press website. It was subsequently re-published in Archifacts. Download the PDF version from Academia.

In May 1840, a furious William Hobson learned from a passing ship’s captain that the New Zealand Company in Wellington had set up its own form of government. Stinging from the usurped authority and high treason of the colonists, Lieutenant-Governor Hobson issued two proclamations. In the name of Her Majesty, Hobson claimed sovereignty over Aotearoa New Zealand. The North Island was claimed by cession via Te Tiriti o Waitangi (despite the fact that hui with rangatira were still being held across the country, and despite having only two signed sheets in his possession). The South Island was claimed based on Captain James Cook’s ‘discovery’.

Having asserted sovereignty with the stroke of a pen and the stamp of a Paihia printing press, Hobson hastily despatched Colonial Secretary Willoughby Shortland to Wellington. With him were troops from the 80th Regiment, mounted police and orders to dismantle any New Zealand Company council, flags or insignia he found. They arrived on the evening of 2 June and sent copies of Hobson’s proclamations ashore, but Wellington weather prevented an official landing. Shortland and four members of the police force finally landed near Pipitea Pā on the afternoon of 4 June, where they were met by Colonel Wakefield and others of the New Zealand Company. Here, Shortland read Hobson’s proclamations, and the legal fiction of crown sovereignty was officially enacted.

The proclamations of sovereignty were indeed a legal fiction, for they ignored some crucial caveats: those who signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi signed a Māori-language document that never ceded sovereignty, and in tikanga Māori, or Māori law, ceding sovereignty was impossible.1

Hobson’s claim of discovery stretched legal fiction into pure fantasy. ‘There is a certain strange magic in the belief that waving a piece of coloured cloth could transfer indigenous lands to someone else,’ notes Moana Jackson, ‘but it was a theatre that had long been established in the law of all European colonisers. The fact that it would have had no legitimacy in the law of the Indigenous Peoples being “discovered” was never deemed to be relevant.’2

This magical realism – ‘legal and political gymnastics performed behind a veil of apparently reasoned justification’ – was, and is, made possible by the stories, symbols and statecraft that are public archives.3 Te Tiriti o Waitangi is an obvious example. As legal documents and ‘Talmudic symbols of imagined imperial symbiosis’, writes Adele Perry, treaties, like flags, have served colonial projects the world over.4 Others include the 1839 appointment of Hobson as Lieutenant-Governor, the letters patent that made Aotearoa New Zealand a colony of New South Wales, the pre-Tiriti proclamations of 30 January 1840 that assumed a power not yet granted and the May proclamations themselves, as bungled and back-dated as they were (the South Island proclamation had to be reissued because Hobson left off the grounds for sovereignty on the copy he sent to London, and the North Island proclamation was incorrectly back-dated to 5 February instead of 6 February).

Together these documents formed the earliest holdings of Aotearoa New Zealand’s public archive, Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand.5 They joined the larger imperial archive, ‘a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and Empire’.6 In this fantasy, world mastery was possible through documentation and the public knowledge stored within the ‘total-archive’.7

Fiction, magic and fantasy are not words most people would associate with public archives. As the official guardian of government records, Archives New Zealand is tasked with ensuring confidence in the integrity of public and local authority archives. Enabling trusted government information is its mantra. Weaving in and out of public discourse and supplementing the many sources of public knowledge, public archives often act as uncontested stand-ins for ‘the facts’ or ‘the Truth’. As written documents of evidential value, they sit at the ‘authentic’ end of the knowledge continuum, where they are contrasted with less-trustworthy sources of public knowledge such as oral testimony and fake news.

Yet at their most basic, archives are stories. All peoples use archives as stories, whether transmitted through speech, written in text, woven within tāniko patterns or embodied in tā moko, performed as ritual or shared in everyday practices, or displayed in objects or in the land itself. Using Te Tiriti o Waitangi to weave a story of sovereignty was not limited to the colony’s fledgling civil service. Many Māori descendants of those who signed, especially Ngāpuhi-nui-tonu, have pointed to the Māori-language document and the sacred covenant of its terms as a way of acknowledging both their tino rangatiratanga and their centrality to the event.

When brought together as a public archive in the form of a state institution, archives are amplified into a grandiose narrative of nationhood—a metanarrative. Indeed, some theorists go so far as to claim there is no state without archives.8 This is because archives have power. And in turn, archives are created and shaped by ever-contested power relations. Public archives are not ‘passive storehouses of old stuff, but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed.’9 Their holdings ‘wield power over the shape and direction of historical scholarship, collective memory, and national identity, over how we know ourselves as individuals, groups, and societies’.10 Archives allow people to marshal stories and to make meaning. Archives are the very possibility of politics.11

As Hobson’s actions and subsequent governments show, Aotearoa New Zealand’s public archive has always been about power. Stradling the intersection of past, present and future, it has its origin in capitalism’s vampire-like need to turn all of life into work for its own reproduction.12 Many of the seven million plus archives held in the repositories of Archives New Zealand reflect, and serve as justification for, the gendered, racialised class relations that created them. Because of this, certain voices in the archive have been privileged over others. Silences abound.

Archival power is, in part, the power to allow voices to be heard. It consists of highlighting certain narratives and of including certain types of records created by certain groups. The power of the archive is witnessed in the act of inclusion, but this is only one of its components. The power to exclude is a fundamental aspect of the archive. Inevitably, there are distortions, omissions, erasures, and silences in the archive. Not every story is told.13

Despite this, public archives are also potential sites for resistance, counter-narratives and enriching the public knowledge commons. In today’s cybernetic vortex of class power and commodification, archives and their emphasis on context are more relevant than ever.14

*** 

There is a huge body of work on the relationship between memory and stories, archives and power. It weaves through many disciplines and in and out of academia. We might think of the novels of George Orwell, such as 1984, or the importance of archives in Star Wars, from the plans of the Death Star to the location of the last Jedi. In the final season of Game of Thrones, Bran Stark reveals the archival motive of the Night King: ‘He wants to erase this world and I am its memory.’ As an archive, Bran becomes a target for erasure.

Those of the nascent labour force in Europe – whose activities were recorded and controlled by the state to become more legible to the state (hence the creation of parish registers, birth certificates and censuses) – certainly knew of their power. It is telling how many peasant rebellions began with the destruction of official archives. Writing of the introduction of the capitalist wage relation and the violent enclosure of the commons, Silvia Federici notes how people organised themselves into bands, raided manors and land registries and destroyed the archives ‘where the written marks of their servitude were kept’.15

The state knew too. Countless examples of the state destroying archives litter history—the recent Mau Mau and Windrush scandals in Britain are prime examples.16 In New Zealand, there was no public archive institution until 1956. Government agencies could pretty much do what they liked with their archives. As a result, only 3 to 4 per cent of everything ever created by government has survived. The New Zealand Police Force archives, for example, are woefully patchy for the years between 1900–1950 due to an in-house purge of records – only a sample of high-profile murder cases were kept. Police record books note detailed files on labour movement leaders and others deemed threatening to the state, but the files themselves no longer exist.17

The state also launched successive waves of attack on the archives of te ao Māori, for these represented te māramatanga o ngā tikanga, the philosophy of law deeply interwoven throughout Māori life, and were therefore incompatible with colonial authority.18 Pākehā governments supressed tā moko, punished the practice of tohunga, sanctioned the beating of Māori-language speakers in school and paved highways over wāhi tapu, violently divorcing Māori from their philosophical base. In doing so, the colonial archive not only dismissed the Māori word and replaced it with the Pākehā word, it made colonised ‘others’ available to the extractive enterprises of colonial capital.19

Despite this acknowledgement of archival power by the state, throughout the twentieth century, public archives were seen as passive, objective and neutral. The public archivist was an impartial custodian – interpretation was the job of those using archives and not that of the archivist. ‘The good Archivist’, wrote Sir Hilary Jenkinson, the grandfather of the Western archival canon, was ‘perhaps the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces.’20 Archives were the evidence from which Truth (with a capital ‘T’) could be found.

More recently, the post-custodial turn has challenged this view. A questioning of the profession’s objectivity has reframed or refigured archives and archival institutions. There has been a move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject.21 Archives are increasingly viewed as social constructs – they don’t simply ‘arrive or emerge fully formed, nor are they innocent of struggles for power in either their creation or their interpretive applications . . . all archives come into being in and as history as a result of specific political, cultural, and socioeconomic pressures.’22 Feminist and indigenous scholarship has exposed the gendered, colonial nature of archives, while ethnographic approaches denaturalise the archive to show how people encounter, interpret and make use of them as living and dynamic spaces.23 The evidential nature of their contents have also been questioned: no longer can we think of archives as the simple bearers of fact or truth. Just as much as oral testimony, a written document reflects the biases and needs of its creator.

What does this mean for public knowledge? It means that public archives should be viewed not as mere sites of knowledge retrieval, but as sites of knowledge production in both the past and the present.24 And this is a good thing. For it is as a site of knowledge production that public archives become important for counter-narratives. It allows us to read its holdings against and along the grain, to notice the gaps, to hear the silences and to tell the stories that have not been told.25 Archives read this way can challenge state power or hold that power to account. And, ideally, it can help the circulation of struggles and create possibilities that go beyond hierarchical, statist forms of power. If in one reading there is no state without archives, another reading suggests that ‘the very existence of the archive constitutes a threat to the state’.26

*** 

The value of public archives for those challenging power or creating counter-power depends on its use. Free and open access to public archives is therefore an important issue. Like Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the metanarrative of the public archive is ever vulnerable to changing governments and changing priorities. Or, in plain speak, the public archive is a political football – where it lands depends on who is kicking it.

In the archival profession access often comes second to the acquisition or preservation of records. Faced with unwieldy paper-finding aids or online search engines with outdated, incorrect or zero metadata, users not only have to deal with organising principles totally different from those of a library, such as provenance and original order, but often have no meaningful way to find and access what they need. This is even more telling in our colonial context. Māori users of the public archive must also grapple with the privileging of Pākehā terms over te reo Māori (many of which are misspelt), non-indigenous systems of knowledge, monocultural spaces and institutional anxiety, and the historical trauma of dispossession and deprivation. 27 As one Māori participant in a study of non-users noted:

there are all sorts of ways that people are disenfranchised from accessing information [at archives] – whether that’s various kinds of literacy i.e. the most basic literacy, or literacy on the level of being able to filter and understand the particular languages that are used by officialdom. And also that emotional reality of being disenfranchised – what’s your motivation to access information and know about the particulars of your disenfranchisement if you don’t have hope for things being different?28

The post-custodial turn has thankfully placed a greater importance on access within public archives. As well as culturally appropriate spatial design and the increasing use of Māori-intuitive metadata, there has been a steady investment in digitisation. Digitisation is not the cure-all solution many think it is, but it has undeniably changed the nature of archival access.29 Digital divides and digital literacies aside, the digitisation of archives has made them more accessible than ever before, allowing users to shape public discourse and dissent within the information age. Online search engines, global databases and crowdsourcing platforms have made millions of digital surrogates available to view or download from one’s personal device. Where before a researcher had no choice but to visit the archive, they can now access, use and re-use digital archives anywhere, any time – unless, of course, they are locked behind a paywall. More and more digital archives are finding their way into educational resources, policy documents, family and local histories and mainstream media, while machine-reading technology allows the automated transcription of digitised handwritten documents, making them discoverable to Google and other web crawlers.

However, we need to remind ourselves that today’s knowledge economy rests on very material relations of domination and exploitation; automation and immiseration; colonisation and incarceration. It is no coincidence that internet fibre optic cables trace the trade routes of former empires, or that the cloud – which the New Zealand government has directed its agencies to privilege over other digital storage systems – has its data warehouses in disputed post-colonial territories in order to exploit their ambiguous status, raising the issue of Māori data sovereignty.30 The extraction of raw materials needed for the information age destroys both land and labour across the globe, while the computer industry’s use of toxic substances makes places like Silicon Valley – the bastion of cybernetic capital – home to some of the highest concentrations of hazardous waste sites in the United States.31 The gap between the rich and poor there is particularly stark, as the work of elite, highly paid programmers (the cognitariat) is made possible by low-paid and gendered labour.32 For Marxist author Nick Dyer-Witheford, ‘the conjunction of automation and globalization enabled by information technology raises to a new intensity a fundamental dynamic of capitalism – its drive to simultaneously draw people into waged labour and expel them as superfluous un- or underemployed.’33 Like the service workers of Silicon Valley, these are often women, indigenous peoples or people of colour. They are the same people who fill prison cells and whose labour is then used to continue the circulation of capital. FamilySearch, one the world’s biggest genealogical sites and the host of digitised archives from Archives New Zealand, uses prison labour to digitise and index its holdings.34

Archives do not exist in a vacuum. It would be wrong to believe the power of archives is present outside of concrete relations between people, and that archives in themselves possess all the powers attributed to them. Archives, like information, must be made and used.35 It is also naïve to believe that discourse informed by public knowledge is enough to undo these relations.

Which brings us all the way back to archives as stories and public archives as sites of knowledge production. Despite what this chapter might seem to suggest, understanding archives as social constructs shaped by material social relations is a strength. If ‘the task is less to distinguish fiction from fact than to track the production and consumption of those facticities themselves’, then context is everything.36 After all, the most cherished organising principle of the archival profession is context. It is context that allows us to make sense of an archive and its content, and to place it in relation to others. It is context that can unveil the legal fictions and metanarratives both inside and outside of the public archive. It is in this sense that an understanding of context is radical, in the original meaning of the term (of relating to a root, to get to the root of something). Because if we truly want to get at the root of the social and ecological disaster that is capitalism, knowledge in itself is not enough. Knowledge must be used, and in ways that radically rupture and reorient our current modes of relationship – including our relationship to knowledge itself.


1. Moana Jackson, “The Treaty and the Word: the Colonization of Māori Philosophy” in Justice, Ethics, and New Zealand Society, eds. Graham Oddie and Roy W. Perrett (Australia and New Zealand: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1–10. This was confirmed by the Waitangi Tribunal’s 2014 finding that by signing Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Ngāpuhi – and by extension other signatories – never ceded sovereignty. Waitangi Tribunal, He Whakaputanga me te Tiriti/The Declaration and the Treaty: The Report on Stage 1 of the Te Paparahi o Te Raki Inquiry (Wai 1040, 2014).
2. Moana Jackson, “James Cook and our monuments to colonisation,” E-Tangata, accessed June 3, 2019, https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/james-cook-and-our-monuments-to-colonisation/.
3. Jackson, “The Treaty and the Word.”
4. Adele Perry, “The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession, Dispossession, and History in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 325.
5. Incidentally, the largest repository of Archives New Zealand sits on the former lands of Pipitea Pā in Wellington.
6. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 6.
7. Tony Ballantyne, “Archive, Discipline, State: Power and Knowledge in South Asian Historiography,” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 3, no. 1 (2001): 90.
8. Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (Cape Town: New Africa Books, 2002), 23.
9. Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” in Archival Science, no. 2 (2002): 1–2.
10. Schwartz and Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power,” 2.
11. Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Chicago: The Society of American Archivists, 2007), 345. See also Randall Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009).
12. For an indigenous understanding of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation and capitalist modes of production as ‘modes’ or ‘forms of life’ see Glenn Coulthard, “The Colonialism of the Present,” Jacobin, accessed May 30, 2019, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/indigenous-left-glen-coulthard-interview/ and Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
13. Rodney Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” in Archivaria, no. 61 (2016): 216.
14. For more on the cybernetic vortex, see Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (London: Pluto Press, 2015) and his earlier work, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-technology Capitalism (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1999), which draw upon autonomist Marxist traditions. For Dyer-Witheford, ‘contemporary capital increasingly subordinates the reproduction of variable capital (humans) to that of the fixed capital (machines) of which the capitalist class is the personified representative. This is an accelerating movement that proceeds by intermediate cyborg or symbiant stages towards even higher levels of automation. In this process, the creation of surplus populations, appearing in various forms of precarity, informal work, unemployment and destitution in differentiated global zones becomes the characteristic form of proletarianization,’ Cyber-Proletariat, 196.
15. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 45.
16. In 2012 it was discovered that thousands of documents detailing crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed or secretly withheld from the public. The discovery came after a group of Kenyans detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion won the right to sue the British government, and access previously hidden files. More recently, in 2018, it was discovered that the British Home Office had destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording Windrush immigrants’ arrival dates in the United Kingdom, an important source of residency status for older Caribbean-born residents. For a useful introduction to state destruction of archives, see Eric Ketelaar, “Recordkeeping and Societal Power,” in Archives: Recordkeeping in Society, eds. Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed and Frank Upward (Wagga-Wagga: Charles Sturt University, 2005), 277–298.
17. For more on this topic, see Jared Davidson, Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2019).
18. Jackson, “The Treaty and the Word.”
19. Tony Ballantyne, “Littoral Literacy: Sealers, Whalers, and the Entanglements of Empire,” in Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below, eds. Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid (New York: Routledge, 2014), 160. See also Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012).
20. Hilary Jenkinson, “British Archives and The War,” in The American Archivist 7, no. 1 (1944): 1–17.
21. Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form’ in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (Cape Town: New Africa Books, 2002), 86.
22. Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 6.

23. Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley, “Introduction,” in Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive, eds. Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley (New York: Routledge, 2017), 5. See also Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 

24. Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 85.
25. For more on reading archives along the archival grain, see Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). For a summary of ‘history from below’ see Jared Davidson, “History from Below: A Reading List with Marcus Rediker,” History Workshop Journal, accessed June 10, 2019, http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/history-from-below-a-reading-list-with-marcus-rediker/.
26. Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 23.
27. See Jared Davidson, “Colonial Continuum: Archives, Access and Power,” in Archifacts (April 2015): 17–24.
28. Jared Davidson, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Non-user Understandings of Archives in Aotearoa New Zealand” (Master’s Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2014), 23.
29. Issues of labour time and the cost of both digitisation equipment and ongoing digital storage costs often gets lost in the demand to ‘digitise everything and put it online’, as do questions of data sovereignty and cultural and intellectual property rights.
30. See James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2018).
31. Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx, 235.
32. On the cognitariat and the role of knowledge and knowledge commons in cognitive capitalism, see Carlo Vercellone, “From the Mass-Worker to Cognitive Labour: Historical and Theoretical Considerations” in Beyond Marx: Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century, eds. Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2014), 440.
33. Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat, 15. On the phenomenon of capital’s creation of surplus populations and resistance to it, see Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (London: Verso, 2016).
34. Shane Bauer, “Your Family’s Genealogical Records May Have Been Digitized by a Prisoner,” Mother Jones, accessed June 4, 2019, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/mormon-church-prison-geneology-family-search/. See also Archives and the Old Mole, “Ancestry, Ancestry, White Power, and Corpsefucking,” accessed June 4, 2019, https://archivesoldmole.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/ancestry-ancestry-white-power-and-corpsefucking/.
35. To paraphrase Richards, The Imperial Archive, 73.
36. Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 85.

History from below: a reading list with Marcus Rediker

First published in Overland Literary Journal, February 2019.

The writing of history, argued Douglas Hay, ‘is deeply conditioned not only by our personal political and moral histories, but also by the times in which we live, and where we live.’ Whether we acknowledge it or not, all historians and writers ‘take stands by our choice of words, handling of evidence, and analytic categories. And also by our silences.’

It is these silences – of the historical record and the conscious/subconscious approaches of many historians – that history from below seeks to recover. But what exactly is history from below? Who is below? And now that modern historians of any worth must consider the aims and methods of social history, as well as class, gender and race, is there still value in the label history from below?

Sometimes known as ‘people’s history’ or ‘radical history’, according to the Institute of Historical Research, history from below is history that:

seeks to take as its subjects ordinary people, and concentrates on their experiences and perspectives, contrasting itself with the stereotype of traditional political history and its focus on the actions of ‘great men’. It also differs from traditional labour history in that its exponents are more interested in popular protest and culture than in the organisations of the working class.

For David Hitchcock, history from below is history which preserves, and which foregrounds, the marginalised stories and experiences of people who, all else being equal, did not get the chance to author their own story. The recovery of voices missing from the historical narrative is a central purpose of history from below.

An active and world-renowned practitioner of history from below is Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and author of many prize-winning books (my favourite, by a pinch, is The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic with Peter Linebaugh). For Rediker, history from below is a variety of social history that emerged in the New Left to explore the experiences and history-making power of working people who had long been left out of elite, ‘top-down’ historical narratives. It is an approach to the past ‘that concentrates not on the traditional subjects of history, not the kings and the presidents and the philosophers, but on ordinary working people, not simply for what they experienced in the past but for their ability to shape the way history happens.’ Finding and exalting the collective self-activity or agency of working people is paramount. As Rediker notes, ‘the phrase ‘history from below’ is a rhetorical assertion of political sympathy but also of how history happens.’

It would be wrong, however, to think that history from below ignores power relations or the powerful. As Geoff Eley argues, setting history from below against histories of ‘the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy’ is to invoke a false antinomy. ‘Historians from below’, notes Rediker, ‘study power.’

In doing so, history from below (especially feminist work and studies of slavery and unfree labour) has expanded our understanding of the working class and working-class struggle beyond waged labour. Rediker’s own work on slavery and the revolutionary Atlantic is a case in point, for it includes the waged and the unwaged, men and women, and people of many different ethnicities and cultures. Previously overlooked forms of resistance to capitalism have joined the ranks of more traditional labour actions.

Those who have worked to this end includes the American historian Jesse Lemisch, who passed away in late 2018. In his preface to Lemisch’s Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution, Rediker writes that Lemisch helped to internationalise American history and to make its study more sophisticated ‘by adapting and popularizing the work of the British Marxist historians – Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and especially E.P. Thompson, all of whom eschewed dogmatism, reductionism, determinism, and excessive abstraction in favour of a flexible, concrete humanism in the writing of politically-engaged history.’

Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class showed historian Ruth Mather ‘a new way of doing history, one which didn’t patronise working people, or subsume them in a narrative of progress, but instead constructed a story about thinking, feeling people with their own ideas about their lives and their own strategies for living them.’ Rediker argues that Lemisch went beyond these distinguished scholars in several respects:

If the British Marxist historians, along with the French historians Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, had pioneered ‘history from below,’ which made historical actors of religious radicals, rioters, peasants, and artisans, Lemisch pushed the phrase and the history further and harder with ‘history from the bottom up,’ a more inclusive and comprehensive formulation that brought all subjects, especially slaves and women, more fully into the historian’s field of vision… by insisting that sailors and other workers had ideas of their own, he [also] made a point that many historians have yet to grasp – the history of the working class must be an intellectual as well as a social history.

However there is more to it than simply the people we choose to write about (although they are crucial). In researching and telling history from below, the ‘how’ is just as important. This includes the methodologies we use, the sources we scour, and the narratives we employ to tell the story. Eley notes how history from below posits ‘a set of conceptual rules and protocols, methodologies and theoretical approaches, topics and fields, cautions and incitements, that allow the largest of analytical questions to be brought down to the ground.’ Viewpoint is critical. Rediker, echoing George Rawick, notes that ‘if you write something in which an ordinary working person couldn’t see him or herself in that story, somehow you’ve failed. That’s a question of audience, of sympathy, of the subjects you choose to treat, and how you treat them.’

In this vein, Rediker believes all good storytellers (and good historians) tell a big story within a little story. In his own work ‘the big story has always been the violent, terror-filled rise of capitalism and the many-sided resistance to it from below, whether from the point-of-view of an enslaved African woman trapped in the bowels of a fetid slave ship; a common sailor who mutinied and raised the black flag of piracy aboard a brig on the wide Atlantic; or a runaway former slave who escaped the plantation for a Maroon community in a swamp.’

By emphasising resistance and the agency of everyday people, history from below has always challenged dominant historical narratives and the power relations they help to maintain. Which is why history from below remains as pertinent as ever. As Hitchcock notes, ‘history must be uncomfortable. If history allows you to be complacent, it is not doing its job.’

For Rediker, part of that work is teaching. He is currently the visiting professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where he is running the graduate course, ‘How to Write History from Below.’ The course explores the key theories, methods, and issues in history from below, from its origin in the 1930s, through the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, to the present.

As Marcus prepared for his stint in Hawai’i, he shared online the books that he thought were essential for anyone interested in learning how to write history from below. Thinking they would make a great reading list, I wrote to Marcus and, with his permission, they are reproduced here. They also made me wonder: what books could be considered exemplars of Australian or New Zealand histories from below?

Happy reading!

C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Vintage, 1938.

‘This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba.’

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Vintage, 1963.

‘A seminal text on the history of the working class by one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century … The work has become one of the most influential social commentaries every written.’

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution, Penguin, 1972.

‘Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers, and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them … It is a portrait not of the bourgeois revolution that actually took place but of the impulse towards a far more fundamental overturning of society.’

Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, Harvard University Press, 1983.
‘Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and sensibilities of nonliterate sixteenth-century villagers.’

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
‘An incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death … Ginzburg’s influential book has been widely regarded as an early example of the analytic, case-oriented approach known as microhistory.’

Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, Columbia University Press, 1988.
‘This landmark work from a renowned feminist historian is a trenchant critique of women’s history and gender inequality. Exploring topics ranging from language and gender to the politics of work and family, Gender and the Politics of History is a crucial interrogation of the uses of gender as a tool for cultural and historical analysis.’

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia, 2004.
‘In the neoliberal era of postmodernism, the proletariat is whited-out from the pages of history… Federici shows that the birth of the proletariat required a war against women, inaugurating a new sexual pact and a new patriarchal era: the patriarchy of the wage.’

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2015.
‘Acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.’

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Beacon Press, 2004.
‘Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motley crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history … Marshalling an impressive range of original research from archives in the Americas and Europe, the authors show how ordinary working people led dozens of rebellions on both sides of the North Atlantic.’

Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, Penguin, 2012.
‘In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the Amistad rebellion for its true proponents: the enslaved Africans who risked death to stake a claim for freedom.’

Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, Verso, 2018.
‘A gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World… by tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved.’’

Unschooling Camp, Foxton Beach 2016

 
Our whānau has just returned from a four-day camp for those who unschool or practice natural/child-led learning. Held at Foxton Beach Boys Brigade, it was a great space and an amazingly inspiring time. Best of all, it confirmed for me that exploring the possibility of unschooling could be the right choice for our children (or should I say, they have made the right choice themselves!)

We've been investigating/doing unschooling with our six year-old for a year now, but really the last year has been a continuation of our parenting style/philosophy and the holistic approach that we learned through Playcentre. In a wiki nutshell unschooling is:

an educational method and philosophy that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. Unschooling students learn through their natural life experiences including play, household responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, believing that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood and therefore useful it is to the child

Like the idea of anarchism, this does not mean no rules, structure or organisation—far from it! We've actively developed an educational practice to suit our eldest child that we constantly document and review. But it does mean not going to school, which for many is a radical concept. (I'm also aware that for many people, having one adult not engaged in waged labour is either impossible or too much of a struggle. We as a family may have little money on a single income, but we are privileged enough to be able to make it happen).

But as the camp demonstrated to me, the kids and adults were loving the unschooling approach. 'Free' is the word that springs to mind—not in the hippy-happy-joy-joy sense, but in terms of autonomy, independence, self-determined.

Around 200 people from across Te Ika-a-Māui/the North Island came and went over the course of the camp, which included co-operative dinners, the odd activity, and lots of play—in the bush, in the sand, at night, in the hall, at the chess table, in the tents, cabins and grass. Lots of noise and lots of fun! And it meant some well-needed downtime for parents.

A market and child-led concert showed that unschooled kids are social, confident and talented (this is obviously something I needed assurance on, as the question I inevitably get asked is how social unschooled children are). Poetry, performance, guitar, dance, jokes — it really was inspiring to see children free to be themselves; to create, to sing and to collaborate.

I was amazed at the huge amount of respect the children had for each other, and the respect adults had for children as people. From teens to toddlers, their interactions were based in a way of being grounded in reciprocity and respect.

Linked to this was the fact that the camp was a co-creation space, which meant that it was organised and run collectively (while allowing space for those who couldn't or didn't want to participate). As the website notes, 'this encourages trust, openness, flexibility, ease and self-responsibility.' Which is apt, considering what I'm reading at the moment:

Commoning is primary to human life. Scholars used to write of “primitive communism.” “The primary commons” renders the experience more clearly. Scarcely a society has existed on the face of the earth which has not had at its heart the commons; the commodity with its individualism and privatization was strictly confined to the margins of the community where severe regulations punished violators...

Capital derides commoning by ideological uses of philosophy, logic, and economics which say the commons is impossible or tragic. The figures of speech in these arguments depend on fantasies of destruction—the desert, the life-boat, the prison. They always assume as axiomatic that concept expressive of capital’s bid for eternity, the ahistorical “Human Nature.”

Of course it's far-fetched to claim that this camp was perfectly pre-figuring some kind of post-capitalist society. It was not without its faults and complexities (I would have liked a little more acknowledgment of the tangata whenua of that place, and/or pōwhiri). But as a first-time attendee with much to learn, I've come away feeling inspired, and with a connection to others who have similar values and approaches to education. Bring on the autumn camp!

Many thanks to the behind-the-scenes organisers, the parents who made us feel welcome, and of course, the kids.

People's History talk: "Tatau tatau" vs "half-caste Maori" scabs

• Date: 15 October, 2013
• Time: 5.30pm – 7.00pm
• Location: Tiakiwai Conference Centre, Lower ground floor, National Library building (use Aitken Street entrance).

Māori workers are largely absent from early twentieth-century New Zealand labour history. Commonly thought of as rural people, Māori are not mentioned in histories of organized urban craft workers and industrial unskilled workers who joined the socialist and syndicalist influenced New Zealand Federation of Labour in 1910.

Perusing the pages of the Maoriland Worker (the Federation of Labour newspaper) between 1910 and 1914, it appears Māori were subjects of political columns, union updates, and Red Fed organizing. Most striking is the figure of the half-caste Māori scab, who is demonized for endangering union organizing by their willingness to cross the picket line and join employer initiated arbitration unions.

Most regular in the pages of the Maoriland Worker is the Māori shearer, who unobtrusively is a member of the Shearers’ Union, has a Māori organizer, and is expected to become “one” with his or her Pakeha brothers and sisters in the “best interests” of the union. This talk analyses why there were such powerful differences between these two conceptions of Māori and focuses on shearing and mining work between 1910 and 1914.

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Cybèle Locke is a history graduate of Otago and Auckland universities, who has published widely on labour history. Currently a lecturer in the History Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, she was a participant in the activist movements of the late twentieth century.

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Part of a series of talks for the centenery of the 1913 Great Strike. Presented by the Museum of Wellington City & Sea, the Labour History Project and the Alexander Turnbull Library. Supported by the Maritime Union of New Zealand and the Rail & Maritime Transport Union.

More talks

October 1: Songs of work and workers and Sites of struggle
October 8: A century of remarkable women in the PSA
October 22: Reds & Wobblies
October 29: Dreadnoughts, Picture Palaces and Revolutionists
November 12: Savage, Fraser, Freyberg, Cullen
November 19: 1913: still relevant after all these years?

Radical and union posters now digitised!

From VIC: Victoria University of Wellington Library (New Zealand) is pleased to announce that the Dan Long Union Library Poster Collection and the Therese O’Connell Poster Collection are now online, complete with digital images of almost all the posters. To browse the collections, please follow the hyperlinks given above and then the various links on the webpages. To search for particular items, click the “Find” button near the top of the screen and select the appropriate fields (to search for names, select “Scope and Contents” and “Index terms”). The large digital images can be viewed by going to the individual poster records and then clicking on the thumbnails.

We hope you have a chance to peruse these collections and enjoy the fabulous posters!
http://library.victoria.ac.nz/library/collections/jcbr/findingaids/image.html?p=dlpc&r=ref155

Red Square Revolt: Student strikes in Quebec

100 years ago today: start of the Waihi Strike

On 14 May 1912 one of New Zealand's most bitter industrial disputes began in Waihi. By November, the New Zealand Police had flooded the town, a miner was batoned to death and families driven out of town by mobs of 'free' (scab) labour.


Background...
The New Zealand labour movement at that time was undergoing a deep radicalisation. Like their fellow-workers worldwide, New Zealand workers were discovering syndicalism, direct action and fostering a radical working class-counter culture of penny pamphlets, socialist 'Sunday schools' and streetside soapboxing. As a result, workers across New Zealand were increasingly questioning what was perceived to be a bankrupt system—arbitration.

In 1894, legislation was introduced that outlawed strike action and forced unions and employers into negotiated industrial awards governed by the Arbitration Court (known as the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, or ICA). Although the ICA had encouraged the growth of trade unions in New Zealand, “a complex interplay of changing work patterns, a rapidly expanding workforce and the bankruptcy of traditional union strategies” led to widespread dissatisfaction from around 1906 onwards.

The first to challenge arbitration was an illegal strike by 66 Auckland tramway workers in 1906 who, against the judgement of their union official, walked out in protest after a number of motor men had been dismissed. After ceasing work for half a day and smashing the company’s plate glass windows, management caved. This was followed in 1907 by a strike of slaughtermen—200 of who were fined for their illegal action but who simply refused to pay. These successes turned heads, but the “rebellion burst into the open” with a strike won by the Blackball Miners’ Union in 1908, whose defiance against fines and the authority of the presiding Judge openly flouted the Arbitration Court and the ICA itself.

The strike also resulted in a Miners Federation, which soon grew into the ‘Red’ Federation of Labour, whose preamble stated ‘the working class and the employing class having nothing in common’. The Red Feds encouraged class struggle free of ‘labour’s leg iron’: the ICA Act. Affiliated unions, including the miners of the Waihi Trade Union of Workers, began to de-register from the ICA.

So in May 1912 when 30 engine drivers in Waihi re-registered under the ICA (reportedly encouraged by the bosses), the union struck in protest. According to Stanley Roche, on Tuesday 14 May, Waihi came to a standstill.

From NZHitsory.net:

The local police inspector initially adopted a low-key response to the dispute, but he was overruled by the tough Police Commissioner John Cullen, who ordered extra forces to be sent to the town. In July William Massey's conservative Reform Party came to power. Enthusiastically backed by Cullen, Massey was determined to crush the 'enemies of order'.

Eventually about 80 police - 10% of the New Zealand Police Force - were deployed in the town. Leading strikers, including Evans, were arrested, and more than 60 were gaoled... The Red Fed leaders began to lose control of the strike as workers influenced by the radical American-based Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or 'Wobblies') demanded more militant action.

In October the company reopened the mines with non-union labour.

Things in Waihi became more hostile with the arrival of these Police. While the scabs grew more confident they were equally met by the women of Waihi, who were extremely active on the pickets—'following-up' scab labour and hurling insults, rocks and humour.

However the strike failed. Intense police repression and violence saw the balance of power shift to the bosses. During what became known as the ‘Black Week’ in November, the Miners’ Hall was stormed, striker Fred Evans was killed by a police baton to the head (becoming the first worker do die in an industrial dispute in New Zealand), and unionists and their families were driven out of town as police stood by.

100 years on...
This year marks the Centennial of the Waihi Strike and to draw attention to our working past, the Labour History Project (and others) have organised a weekend-long event in Waihi:

THE DRAFT PROGRAMME:
Friday 9 November, from 4.30 pm
Registration at Friendship Hall, School Rd, Waihi
Light refreshments, tea and coffee. Dinner and drinks available RSA Seddon St

Saturday 10 November 8.30am to 12.30 pm
Seminar papers at Waihi Memorial Hall, jointly with the
Australasian Mining History Association
Lunch, plus refreshments at Friendship Hall

Saturday 1.30 pm to 5pm
Seminar papers, plus issues and interests presentations at
Friendship Hall
Alternatively - field trips, workshops and exploring,

Saturday 5.30pm
Exhibition opening of paintings by Bob Kerr

Saturday 7.30pm
Dinner at RSA, followed by social, including the Waihi Oratorio written and directed by Paul Maunder.

Sunday 11 November 9am
Commemoration of death of Fred Evans
Roll call of Waihi miners, with their descendants.

This looks set to be an important and historic event. More information will be available as it comes to light.


Sources...
There are a number of books and online articles dealing with the Waihi Strike (listed below). I would recommend Chapter 19 from Richard Hill's, The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove, which is a nice summary of events. Download it here (collated to print PDF zine).


Other sources include:

• Campbell, R.J. 'The role of the police in the Waihi strike:some new evidence'. Political Science 26, No2 (Dec. 1974): 34-40
• Papers Past (online papers from the period, including the Maoriland Worker)
• Holland, H. E. et al. The tragic story of the Waihi strike.
  Wellington, 1913 (very light on the IWW)
• Olssen, E. The Red Feds. Auckland, 1988
• Rainer, P. 'Company town: an industrial history of the Waihi Gold Mining Company Limited, 1887-1912'. MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1976
• Roche, S. Y. The red and the gold. Auckland, 1982 (highly readable, but does not mention the IWW at all).
• Moriarty-Patten, S. ‘A World to Win, a Hell to Lose: The Industrial Workers of the World in Early Twentieth Century New Zealand’, Thesis, Massey University, 2012 (excellent—and only—study focusing on the NZ IWW)
• Video: Black Tuesday and the 1912 Waihi Strike. Watch it here.