Writing for The Conversation, University of Waikato historian Garritt C. Van Dyk recounts visiting the Kōpinga Marae on Rēkohu (the Chatham Islands), where a framed document signed by Andrew Little, the former minister for Treaty of Waitangi negotiations, is on display. Dated February 14, 2020, the apology acknowledges how historical Crown actions and omissions caused prejudice to the Moriori and breached the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.
The apology specifically addresses the Crown's failure to protect the Moriori from violence and enslavement, the dispossession of their land, and the removal of and trade in kōimi t'chakat Moriori (human remains) by the Colonial Museum. It also apologises for the propagation of the false history that the Moriori were extinct and racially inferior.
Van Dyk describes how this false narrative was disseminated through the New Zealand School Journal, established in 1907. In July 1916, an article titled "The Passing of the Mouriuri" claimed the Moriori were a primitive Melanesian people who had been driven from Aotearoa New Zealand by racially superior Māori and subsequently exterminated in an 1835 invasion. According to Moriori tradition, the first Moriori arrived directly from Eastern Polynesia, with later arrivals from Aotearoa New Zealand around the 1400s.
The false history taught to children for much of the 20th century has had lasting consequences. The Crown apology recognises that ta rē Moriori (the Moriori language) was lost as a living language by the early twentieth century and apologises sincerely for the failure to protect it. A corrected account of Moriori history was published in a revised set of school journals in 2010.