If you look back at photographs of the 1969 bicentennial Cook commemorations in Gisborne, the appearance is one of a festive affair. A parade through town, led by a huge float of Captain Cook’s head made its way through local throngs, followed by a model of the Endeavour ship. Naval vessels from Australia, USA, Canada and the USA took part, the pageantry is both very British, and very provincial New Zealand.

Today, just 50 years later, the response to this anniversary is very different.

The Cook commemorations are now nationwide, with tens of millions of dollars being spent on multiple events that range from a controversial reenactment of the Endeavour voyage to permanent art installations dedicated to those who were killed by Cook within minutes of landing.

A sombre British High Commissioner ffered “expressions of regret” to local descendants of those killed, in the hopes of a “shared future”.

One might be forgiven for concluding that New Zealand is living up to its public profile as a progressive champion of social justice. A closer look tells another story.

To fully appreciate what Cook’s arrival has meant for Māoridom, one must consider their status before the arrival of Cook. Māori were an independent, self-governing people. Their territories were abundant with life and as Endeavour crew member Sydney Parkinson observed, the land was “ agreeable beyond description ... hills are covered with beautiful flowering shrubs, intermingled with a great number of tall and stately palms, which fill the air with a most grateful fragrant perfume.”

Today, 250 years later, Māori are no longer self-governing, their waterways are severely degraded, and for an unacceptably high number of Māori, the risk of dying an early death, or becoming homeless, or being incarcerated, is an all too likely reality.

And yet Māori have never been and are not passive victims of circumstance. These commemorations are happening against a backdrop of heightened expectations for Britain to take responsibility for successive injustices starting with Cook’s multiple killings, the spreading of disease, the illegitimate proclamations of discovery and claiming of lands.

Colonisation is anything but a historical event. It is an enduring experience of centuries of colonial claims upon their lands, their waters and their bodies. Even today, as many indigenous scholars note, global threats such as the climate crisis and ocean pollution are merely extensions of the experience of colonisation that they have been fighting for centuries, and they do so extremely effectively.

What could be a vital opportunity for the New Zealand government to demonstrate leadership in facing up to its own history of colonial racism risks being lost in a parade of “two sides to the story”. This, of course, negates the fact that if one side of the story includes genocide and land theft, that is probably more important to address than the “other” side of the story which includes drawing maps and observing planets.

What would have been a very timely and important apology from the Crown has been replaced with a very particularly worded “expression of regret” along with emphasis that it does not in fact come from the British Crown, and at one point descended into “It’s impossible to know exactly what led to those deaths”. The simple answer to that statement is: Britain’s imperial expansion led to those deaths.

What we also know is that there were witnesses to these killings, multiple crew members wrote about what happened, and while many of those accounts have slight variations, they are all in agreement that only Cook and his crew had firearms, which they discharged often, at times to people who are completely unarmed, and in retreat.

It’s interesting also that the British high commissioner focused on the remorse expressed by Cook and his botanist Joseph Banks. If you were to read Cook’s journal he is quite clear that he felt the need to fire into a vessel of unarmed fisherpeople lest they “retire ... in triumph”. When we consider Cook’s clear intention to kill as a demonstration of supremacy, and the regularity with which this happened, any suggestion of shared culpability loses credibility.

One has to wonder why the commissioner chose these precise words, which, while they may have been meaningful for those in attendance, fall short of taking full responsibility for the broader and more enduring impacts of Cook’s voyages. Impunity for crimes against indigenous peoples and their territories is not a historical phenomena, we are still seeing it today, largely by colonial state systems, and multinational corporations.

Local Māori elder from Te Aitanga a Mahaki, Wirangi Pera, holds strong reservations about the expression of regret from the British High commissioner Laura Clarke to his people.

“For me, it’s a question of mandate, because she said she’s not speaking on behalf of the British Crown, and that’s who sent Cook, so the question is, who is she speaking on behalf of? James Cook came here on the orders of the British Crown. Our issues have always been with the Crown, and with the New Zealand government who represents the Crown. I expected something official from the Crown, so for me this is just not good enough.”

At a time when neo-imperialism is presenting our planet with an existential crisis, Britain must do better in taking responsibility its role in enduring injustice.