By Dan Taipua

Copyright thespinoff

A Swedish strategy game has rebranded the Tūhoe sovereignty flag as a communist emblem – a misstep that erases history, but also opens the door to telling it properly.

Stereotypes are bad, but one that generally holds true for New Zealanders is that our ears prick up when we hear the name of our country mentioned in popular media – whether it’s in an episode of the 90s American sitcom Full House, or when kaiju attack Auckland in Godzilla Singular Point. For the Māori among us though, that response can sometimes be a wince, conditioned by the 50/50 chance that someone is about to add to an historical list of cringe-crimes. Video games are especially dicey in this regard, and the latest example is that of the Mana Motuhake o Tūhoe flag being repurposed into a fictional Communist flag of New Zealand. It’s a puzzling depiction riddled with historical flaws, but we can use this moment to redraw a better picture of our own local history.

Shown above are two flags, one the very real flag of Tūhoe sovereignty adopted by that iwi, and the other a fake flag for the real Communist Party of New Zealand. The invented colours recall the flag of North Korea, and appear in the video game Hearts of Iron IV (HOI4).

Hearts of Iron IV is a grand strategy video game set around the start of the second world war, and its closest analogues are video games like Total War, Crusader Kings, or the popular boardgame Risk. You don’t control a hero character shooting his way across a field, but instead move tokens around a map like a disembodied general or emperor. Games like HOI4 rely heavily on symbols and to stand in for groups of people, or economic units, or even time itself – making them oddly ahistorical. We might compare this type of detached strategising to chess, where the bishop is a just set of rules about moving around a board and any other characteristics don’t really matter. We could paint chess pieces in any number of colours, or give each piece the name of a historical figure, but that doesn’t affect the game itself. Similar to the way science fiction barely relies on science, historical strategy games barely rely on history.

In the “what if?” scheme of HOI4, the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) of the second world war era is rendered as a viable strategic power within New Zealand’s political landscape, and the leader of the party is identified as Elsie Locke. Neither of these depictions are correct; and their grandiose scaling betrays a much richer and more local history. Elsie Locke is an important figure in our political and cultural heritage, but she was not party leader during the second world war – her legacy instead lies in the formation of the Family Planning Association, peace activism, and a career as an author and historian. The Communist Party of New Zealand had later members whose influence was equally profound but far-removed from plots of global domination, notably the poet Hone Tuwhare, and the world-famous ophthalmologist and philanthropist Fred Hollows.

While HOI4 has a detached view of history (“it’s just a game” after all), it repeats the paranoid trope of overestimating communism’s influence within New Zealand. At the height of its popularity, the CPNZ had 2,000 members from a national population of 1.6 million. Far from being a powerful governmental faction, the party was instead subject to intense government surveillance and suppression – a small community subjected to disproportionate scrutiny. The CPNZ did have its own insignia, but it featured the very predictable motif of the hammer and sickle, and there is no record of the party co-opting flags of indigenous sovereignty.

Why would a game like HOI4, developed in Sweden, decide to steal a symbol of sovereignty from the people of Tūhoe? There’s likely no grand scheme behind it, and the developers just needed symbols for their game of tokens and signs. What they failed to recognise is that Tūhoe has a real-life history of being subjected to paranoid political surveillance rendered across small-but-influential communities, and that some of those communities adopted the symbology of Western gaming history into their political identity.

The bold and frankly beautiful flag of Te Mana Motuhake o Tūhoe is a product of the latter 20th century, and is part of a tradition of sovereign insignia crafted by Māori since the arrival of the Crown. Historical antecedents include flags from the Kingitanga movement, the related Pai Marire, the Ringatū faith and more, but a particularly salient case is the insignia of Hiruharama under the leadership of Rua Kenana.

Rua’s small but influential community in Maungapōhatu stood as a model of self-sovereignty, providing for their own needs within Te Urewera’s ranges, and notably refusing to engage in the affairs of the first world war as much as possible. The most famous flag of Maungapōhatu is ‘Kotahi Te Ture’ (repatriated to Tūhoe only in 2014), but the community adopted other symbols too – taken from the suits of Western playing cards. The symbol of Clubs served as a profound religious symbol of the Holy Trinity, and appears on flags, buildings, and throughout the grounds of Maungapōhatu.

For Kenana’s community, the symbols and signs from games were used to establish a sense of identity and declaration of self-dependence – the total inverse of a video game adopting a flag of sovereignty as a token or placeholder. The flag ‘Kotahi te Kure’ had to be repatriated to Tūhoe, and that’s because it was seized by the New Zealand Police during a raid motivated by inaccurate information and ahistorical fantasies. It’s often the case that those who live their lives with a serious sense of purpose are assaulted by those who see history as a game.

The flag of Te Mana Motuhake o Tūhoe is indisputably the property of Tūhoe, by moral right and the bare fact of material history. Whether a deformation of that flag into a game token is an outright offence is a decision for those who stand under its true version. It’s probable that a game studio in Sweden, working on a franchise property for a perfectly innocent international playerbase, has no gauge on any of these matters and is trucking along with a game that includes all the known factions of the second world war: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Chiang’s Republic etc.

In any case, the relationship of game-logic applied to real-life has clear historical consequences, and the stories and lessons we can take away from our smaller, non-global, non-dominatory experiences paint a richer image than the movement of tokens around a board.