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WARNING: This article discusses violence against Indigenous peoples.
A voyage of “discovery”
On October 8th of 1769, the British ship captain James Cook and his crew first set foot on Aotearoa — the “land of the long white cloud.”1,2 The last time Europeans had encountered this place was when the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman “discovered” it in 1642; a Dutch mapmaker later named the land “Nieuw Zeeland.”3 Cook and his crew encountered and promptly murdered the Indigenous leaders Te Maro and Te Rakau along with seven other Indigenous people because of some kind of “misunderstanding;” Cook wanted to speak with them (“I just wanna talk, bro!”), but they approached with spears in what may have been a “ceremonial challenge” rather than an attack.4,5
We know the Indigenous people of Aotearoa as Māori today. According to Te Ara - The Encyclopedia of New Zealand by the New Zealand Government, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa named themselves Māori (“ordinary”) only after the Europeans had arrived, as a marker of collective identity.6
In 1770, Cook and his crew traveled to the land he called “New Holland” — later named “Australia” after the mythical “Terra Australis Incognita” that some Europeans had insisted must exist below the Equator to “balance” the mass of the Northern Hemisphere.7,8 Cook wrote the following about the Indigenous peoples he met there9:
From what I have said of the Natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary conveniencies so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition . . .
O! They’re so innocent, so childlike. So precious!
They probably won’t even notice if we steal from them. Or if we just ask nicely for them to give us whatever we want, whenever we want, surely they won’t mind? Or if they do mind, we’ll just kill ‘em.