Guest Post: I was part of the Te Papa Treaty exhibit design team

A guest post by Mark Adams:

I was part of the Te Papa Treaty exhibit design team

 I’ve been waiting for the trial before assembling my reactions. Now that a court trial won’t happen here are my thoughts.

It’s disconcerting to see your work attacked with such vehemence, but admittedly Te Wehi Ratana’s stunt was carried out with some elan.

 I do feel sorry for the historians who briefed us on the design team.

All that effort bringing together the evidence, documents and records of the actual event at the time it happened. Plus the for-and-against arguments that took place at the time, the many various treaties signed elsewhere around the country, and stories and subsequent developments that grew from the signing.

They were aware of the potential for racist politics and specifically stated that the planned exhibit was not to be a “white/brown man bad, brown/white man good” display but an honest presentation of what happened at the time, and a commemoration of the pivotal event in the process of our becoming a nation.

The space we designed accommodated all this and provided for the contemplative and the dramatic, befitting its central place in the heart of Te Papa, the nation’s museum.

But our historians made a terrible mistake.

They neglected to adopt and elevate a particular opinion written nearly a century and a half after the events took place. 

Fortunately that was easily put right with spray paint and an angle grinder.

I oppose Ratana’s revisionist ethno-activism but he was effective. He knew his audience, played them perfectly and they responded just as those who think the correct thoughts should.

Te Papa’s managers witnessed living history taking place in their own museum. How exciting! Oh we’ll show it at an activist exhibition before we hide it out of sight, and now we can talk about the treaty the correct way!

The judge and the destruction of tens of thousands of tax payers’ property? Oh that. Dealing with that particular vandalism with a trial is not in the public interest. How could the public think otherwise. Charges dropped.

Why stop there. 

Obviously displaying what actually happened at the time it happened, in an exhibit about the Treaty was a mistake. So many complaints! 

Let’s pay Ratana to destroy the other text panel too – then give him the tools to properly attack the centrepiece of the whole thing – the large glass replica of the Treaty itself.