Humans have altered natural environments for millennia and there is growing recognition that past human activities have a persistent influence on contemporary ecosystem structure and function. Today, large declines in lake ecosystem state are occurring globally and they play out against long histories of human influence. By altering the relationships between lake and catchment, and restructuring internal lake ecosystem dynamics, past human impacts may have legacies that modify how a lake receives and responds to stress, reducing lake resilience and heightening the effects of subsequent disturbance. Thus, to contextualize the effects of current anthropogenic land use on lakes it is fundamental we identify historic human stressors and understand their role in structuring lake ecosystems. However, in regions where histories of human occupation are long, disentangling the signal of human activity from natural lake evolution and climate change is challenging and the influence of past human impacts on contemporary lake trajectories remains poorly understood. Aotearoa has a relatively short human history that is delineated into two waves of human settlement; Māori around 1280 AD, and European around 1800 AD, and presents a unique opportunity to better understand how historic impacts may have legacies of effect on lakes. Here we used lake sediments from Aotearoa to investigate the influence of historic human impacts on lake diatom response to contemporary land use change. We hypothesized that lakes with histories of Māori land use would be less resilient to the effects of European land use than those without. Among the study lakes, both waves of human arrival had significant influence on lake diatom community composition. However, the presence of Māori land use history in a lakes catchment did not predict the magnitude or rate of lake response to European impacts. Instead, the effects of European land use practices, predominantly agricultural, have outstripped any potential legacies of Māori land use impacts, highlighting the severity of the effects of current land use practices in Aotearoa.