‘A Scheming Unprincipled Native and Notorious Mischief Maker’: The 1882 Ngāpuhi Petition to Queen Victoria and Settler Disinformation in the Late Nineteenth-century British Empire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In light of the inability of most late-nineteenth-century Indigenous petitions to the British Crown to achieve their stated objectives, many historians conclude that the rise of settler self-government precluded imperial intervention in settler affairs. Consequently, Indigenous petitions to the British government in the late nineteenth century are often portrayed as futile anachronisms from an earlier phase of imperial administration. However, using Māori and settler correspondence relating to the Ngāpuhi petition and delegation to London in 1882, this article demonstrates that neither Māori petitioners, the New Zealand government, nor the British government were overly concerned with the rights of responsible government when contemplating responses to the petition. Instead, this article contends that the primary consideration for all three parties was whether the grievances proclaimed within the petition were accurate, and that the failure of the petition had more to do with the petitioners’ credibility than Britain's right to interfere in New Zealand. It is argued that Indigenous petitioners moved between government, newspapers, and imperial humanitarian networks in pursuance of the credibility that could prove the legitimacy of their grievances in the face of disinformation campaigns launched against them by settler governments. I suggest that the importance of credibility over the rights of responsible government illuminates the liminality of the late nineteenth century, when the division of sovereignty between the empire and its settler colonies was unstable and Indigenous issues were more likely to be decided by the power of persuasion and the manipulation of facts than by formal and stable jurisdictional boundaries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".