They vowed to take action, successfully petitioning for a national day of commemoration – now marked on 28 October – for the victims of the New Zealand Wars and for this history to be taught in all schools. After visiting some of these sites on a 2014 school trip, the students returned to class dismayed not to have learned any of this history before. The prime minister’s announcement followed a campaign begun five years earlier by a group of students from Ōtorohanga College, a small rural secondary school in the King Country, about 20 minutes’ drive from where some of the bloodiest and most brutal battles of the 1863-64 Waikato War took place. Generations of New Zealanders had grown up without even a basic awareness of pivotal moments in the nation’s past, unable to understand how events like the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars and subsequent land confiscations resonated today in myriad ways, including in the often dire socio-economic statistics of Māori communities around the country. It felt like a momentous decision given abundant evidence that most students left school having had little or no exposure to the history of their own country. In September 2019 prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced that New Zealand history would be taught in all schools from 2022.

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