The Waimate Conspiracy

The opening film of the Dreamspeakers Film Festival, Stephen Lewis's The Waimate Conspiracy, is a fascinating, fictional film about a group of Maori whose oral histories fail to stand-up in a land claims case in court. When the people are baffled as to what to do next, they fake an historical account of the take-over of the land by a white family. Carefully creating a book, binding, aging, handprinting and all, they make a document that white people tend to believe. What I love about the film is how it brings into question the very notion of textual authenticity and white culture's refusal to believe oral history and it's need for textual proof, despite its equal inaccuracy. White society's faith in text as real is challenged by the film. As current debates about the veracity of Internet encyclopedias verses print, peer reviewed journals boils, we are reminded about how white cultural elites have maintained control over the creation of history by controlling the "legitimacy" of documents.