Explores the role of the courts and of various types of commissions in mediating and reinventing historical narratives of colonisation. By using the New Zealand experience as a case study and setting it within the international context, the author shows how the colonial courts became from 1840 places where different narratives of discovery and conquest, of loss and displacement and of claims to resources and to mana were debated. These legal debates were not only between the indigenous Maori and Europeans (Pakeha); Maori also used the courts to maintain or reclaim traditional rights as between Maori and Maori.