ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that examples of the strategic, selective and racialized nature of cultural forgetting in these societies are seen most clearly in their sites of national significance such as state museums and national monuments, in national days of remembrance or commemoration, and in heritage activities in the public sphere. In New Zealand, the vehicle for this kind of imagining has been biculturalism: an imagined comradeship and esprit de corps between two peoples. The author examines the way that cultural forgetfulness is structured around the tensions and unresolved injustices of the colonial past at Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum, and how its educative function is designed in ways that reflect this troubled history of forgetting. She explores the forgetting that characterizes the Treaty of Waitangi and its representation at Te Papa and linked to the way in which racialized power relations are inscribed within the pedagogies of the museum space.
