Kia ora koutou, what with statues and proposed name changes its been an interesting week. I will make it quite clear, I am in the camp with those who want names taken back to the originals. I’ve written and talked about it for years, and in The Skeleton Woman, one of my novels, set in Lower Hutt, I have my leading character talk about it in relation to that area. I won’t go on about the ugliness of the name Hutt plonked on to that beautiful area but I find it hard to believe that anyone would prefer the name Hutt to, for example, Waitohu.
I should make it clear too that I simply don’t understand why people want to hang on to names that were given to places which already had perfectly good names, this without consultation or even warning eg one day the area was Kirikiriroa, the next day, Hamilton.
I think it would be exciting and somehow right to go back to the original names, it would certainly show that we don’t want to repeat the mistakes of history, that we want to learn and reap the benefits of fixing them.
Its hard maybe to understand? If all your life you’ve lived in an area with a particular name then you’re attached to that name, it has memories, a shared history, you remember places in the area, a school perhaps, a park, a particular house. the river where you played and swam, the streets you’ve walked, all these things attached to that name. Your children and grandchildren, or your parents and grandparents lived there, you are part of that community with that particular name.
I understand your feelings because that’s exactly how Maori felt when the colonists changed the names. Its how a lot of us feel now.
Changing the place names was just one strand of the colonising process. Not allowing Te Reo Maori to be spoken at school (you got six canes or straps if you were caught speaking it), plus the practice where teachers changed kid’s names to Mary or John because, they said, they were ‘easier’. For whom?
I hear people say, ‘My family have lived here for three (four, five) generations and I think, Mate, Maori whanau, hopu, iwi, had been here for centuries when the land was taken from them by troops brandishing muskets.
Would it really hurt, for example, to change Hamilton or Hutt back to their original names? Or Cromwell or Christchurch or any of them?
What’s in a name? A whole history that was taken, obliterated, ignored, that’s what. Isn’t it time to fix this?
Renée
