Māori rise up while Government looks to rewrite history

Opinion: The Māori King Tūheitia was winding up the day’s hui with a predictable list of talking points that was struggling to hold anyone’s attention in the oppressive humidity. But then he paused a moment, almost like he was bored himself, before he started to wander off-script. Suddenly everyone was paying attention.

“I don’t mean to hang out our dirty washing,” Tūheitia proffered. There was a ripple of anticipation about where he was going to go. A woman down the back of one of the multiple rows of seats snapped out of her lethargy as Kingi Tūheitia toyed with how much he should speak his mind in public.

He then observed that it had been nearly 30 years since Tainui had settled its Treaty claim with the Crown, the first iwi to do so. But he lamented that the structure that had served that purpose was still in place and had changed little in that time. He hesitated. The woman at the back gritted her teeth and muttered “say it” under her breath, apparently reading what was on his mind because it was what was on hers too.

“I’ve been trying to change our structure and bring more rangatahi through. But we’ve got more suits in there than in Wellington,” he said.

A surprised delight murmured through the crowd. He’d said it.

But was it dirty washing? Or simply an honest and perceptive observation that in dealing with the Crown – even in something as constructive as a Treaty settlement – iwi end up having to ape the entity they are dealing with? Meanwhile the Crown doesn’t make any substantive changes to the way it operates, bar a few tokenistic name changes. Tuheitia’s ad-lib remarks were made in the context of historic Treaty claims coming to an end. Is it time to rethink the corporate structure that the Crown insisted on when it deigned to recognise the mandate of an “iwi” structure?

He was also implicitly raising questions about how Māori deal with the Crown when that Crown is constantly moving the goal posts. It was the incoming Government’s intention to not just move the goalposts but dismantle them that led to Tūheitia calling the hui. If he was troubled by the Government’s pronouncements, then he wasn’t the only one. Over 10,000 from throughout the motu heeded his call and turned up at Tūrangawaewae Marae.

Tuheitia’s point would have been recognised by Sir Tipene O’Regan who had been sitting next to the Māori King throughout the day. I once heard Sir Tipene make a comment that iwi are now nothing more than a $20 shelf company. In other words, they’re a corporate, paper structure that is set up for nothing more than to bank the cheque that the Crown calls compensation, but is really a go-off-and-leave-us-alone payment. There are a few boxes to tick and then you can go on your merry way. Ngāi Tahu have indeed gone on their merry way, and are now an economic powerhouse (as is Tainui). But they’ve also incrementally changed how they are structured.

Other iwi are carrying out their own experiments, trying to work out how the identity that is derived from whakapapa and relationships should be expressed in legal and political entities in a rapidly changing world. Some have created separate entities whose only purpose is the relationship with the Crown, keeping it at arm’s length from its internal affairs.

But, as Tūheitia pointed out, for many iwi including Tainui those structures that were effectively set up by the Crown remain largely in place. And in taking on those structures iwi have ended up morphing their values to meet the criteria of a corporation, inviting derision from Pākehā who don’t see the irony. It was the Crown that undermined and tried to destroy Māori social structures through, among other things, its dogmatic approach to individualising Māori land title. Māori lost the majority of their land through the Native Land Court as a result. When the same Crown then turned around over a 100 years later to pay out those iwi it dispossessed, it expects those social structures to be resurrected in a form it is familiar with and comfortable dealing with. In corporate parlance, it wants to keep resetting the conditions on its own terms, even though it was the one that breached the contract.

Although Tūheitia didn’t elaborate on his candidness – he joked that he probably shouldn’t say anything more on the matter – his comments were not flippant but rooted in a deep history.

The hui that he’d called was not so much to challenge the government as to challenge Māori to stand up for themselves. That challenge comes in the face of a coalition government of three right-wing parties that all campaigned, in some shape or form, that Māori were getting some kind of special treatment. That this Treaty malarkey was getting out of hand. That Māori needed to be put in their place, whatever that was.

Tainui and the Kingitanga itself can sniff out this rat better than anyone. The Crown’s invasion of Waikato, and the violence, death and dispossession that followed were all instigated on the same premise – Māori were getting too big for their boots and needed to be taught a lesson. The lesson always seemed to involve the loss of land and resources but also the loss of any kind of independent power. The Crown was not ‘just’ taking land – it was rearranging the terms of engagement. It was usurping power.

And so here we are again. The incoming Government says it wants to clarify what the Treaty principles are. Memo to Wellington – it’s already spelled out in the legislation. Even the leaked memo from the Ministry of Justice said the proposed bill was at odds with what the Treaty of Waitangi actually says.

But it seems there’s a classic case of wag the dog going on, because the coalition agreement to review the Treaty principles has been driven by the Act Party with echoes in the rhetoric from NZ First. Election dog-whistling has hardened into half-cocked policy. National is just playing along.

Newsroom has been told that in the meeting Christopher Luxon had with the Kingitanga, the Prime Minister reassured the Kingitanga that it would not let the bill get to a second reading. He was challenged to just stand up and say that publicly. To date, he hasn’t.

It’s worth remembering one of the main reasons – and there were a number of reasons – that the Kingitanga came about. At the time the concept emerged Māori iwi were feeling increased pressure from the surging settler population to sell land and had decided to put the brakes on. The Kingitanga was a vehicle for Māori to act collectively and halt any further land loss.

The Land Wars happened because the Crown would not tolerate being told Māori were not going to sell. But it framed this as a rebellion against its (imagined) authority. The initial impetus for this conflict occurred when the Crown wanted to buy a piece of land from an individual in Taranaki. The senior leader of the iwi in Waitara, Te Rangitake, refused to recognise the sale as the land was collectively owned in line with Māori tikanga. The Crown sent in the troops to force the sale. The rest, as they say, is history. But history is not inevitable. History turns on choices. A few Pākehā men decided to cloak themself in the authority of the Crown and breach the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi. It took two Pākehā men from the National party, Jim Bolger and Sir Doug Graham, to decide on behalf of the Crown over 150 years later that this wrong should be acknowledged and something done to address that. They decided that despite the passage of time, the Treaty of Waitangi still applied.

But the Land Wars weren’t just about a real estate deal gone wrong. The Crown wanted to send a message, and a violent one at that – it was telling Māori that it now made the rules and how Māori ran their affairs could now be interfered with on a whim. If Māori never ceded sovereignty, the Crown decided it was going to take it by force. Colonisation is premised on the right to use violence with impunity. And that violence in justified on the basis of racism.

Many of the flashpoints in New Zealand’s history are often based on that same racism – Pākehā objecting to Māori asserting their identity and acting collectively. This objection takes many guises, and is usually dressed up not in historical fact but in pejorative language.

“Someone has made a political calculation that they can renegotiate our existence.”

Anglican Archdeacon Don Tamihere

Then, as now, the Crown and Pākehā society seem to have a problem with Māori exercising their right to act collectively as Māori. The emphasis is needed. Tūheitia stands in a long line of leaders who have dealt with a Crown that has always tried to break down any collective action on the part of Māori. And if it can’t do that, it tries to co-opt/create Māori entities to do its bidding. That can sometimes bite the Crown in the nether regions – exhibit A, the Māori Council, which caused the Crown some major headaches in the courts in the 1980s. If the Crown has to deal with Māori in any substantive way, it will often try to create entities in its own image that it can manage because it has set the criteria and the terms and conditions.

There’s a certain hypocrisy here. The objection from Pākehā (or politicians trying to win their vote) regarding Māori collective decision-making and exercising of collective rights never seems to apply in the other direction. The New Zealand Company, which was made up of a group of British shareholders, was perfectly fine. British entities like the Royal African Company (a slave trading company) and the East India Company (which pillaged the Indian sub-continent) were companies owned and run by British men acting as a collective and endorsed by the British Crown. Today overseas corporations made up of shareholders acting collectively can come into New Zealand and buy up property, trash the environment, and walk away (and cash up tens of millions in carbon credits care of the taxpayer). And the politicians who loudly denounce Māori barely raise a whimper.

There are all sorts of legal entities that are made up of a collective of individuals, and the rights and powers those individuals hold in that collective entity are distinct from those they hold as a single individual. Those collective entities also engage in political activities advocating for their collective interests which benefit the individuals that belong to those entities – how much did National, Act and NZ First get from corporate entities for their election campaigns? This never seems to bother anyone too much – except when that entity and those individuals are Māori.

The argument that we’re all equal and have equal rights as individual New Zealand citizens ignores the fact that the Crown has implicitly operated in the interests of Pākehā for the entirety of its existence. If Māori interests or ways of doing things got in the way of something Pākehā wanted to do then Māori were ignored or swept aside. The Crown went to great lengths to dispossess Māori of land so they could give/sell it to Pākehā settlers, make it available for a capitalist market and pay its own bills. It’s not only land loss of the past – the little land Māori still have is tangled up in the kinds of absurd regulations that not even David Seymour could imagine in his wildest fantasies of government absurdity.

The Crown has always found the Treaty of Waitangi a pain in the proverbial because it can’t get around it. The Crown wrote it and signed it. The Crown likes to rely on the Treaty to underpin its legitimacy, but then wants to ditch it when it is used to challenge that legitimacy. The Crown has never seriously refuted the finding of the Waitangi Tribunal that sovereignty was never ceded by Māori because that wasn’t what the Māori version said. And that is the version Māori signed and agreed to.

These points were made repeatedly by speakers throughout the hui.

“Sovereignty was never ceded. Those in Wellington aren’t happy about that. I wonder why. It undermines their legitimacy,” said legal scholar Dayle Takitimu.

She said the current Government’s attempts to muddy the waters and claim to be seeking clarity around Treaty principles are dishonest and a distraction from the plain meaning of the Treaty.

“They (the Government) are Treaty illiterate.”

“An illiterate white supremacist is a nuisance, and a hōhā (hassle), but an illiterate white supremacist in power is dangerous.”

Anglican Archdeacon Don Tamihere said that “someone has made a political calculation that they can renegotiate our existence”.

He also referenced the speech by Archbishop Whakahuihui Vercoe on the 150th anniversary of the Treaty where he heavily criticised the Crown, directing it at Queen Elizabeth who was present at Waitangi.

“I stand and weep at what could have been,” Vercoe said at the time.

Before the guests arrived at Turangawaewae, Rahui Papa from Tainui told the hui: “Who cares what the coalition Government arrangements are. Our focus is on charting a pathway to mana motuhake, with or without the Government. We are about being awesome every day of the year.”

While there were calls for civil disobedience and rolling protests from some quarters, many of the messages were pragmatic. After speeches in the morning, the masses broke up into groups to discuss subjects like the future of te reo, the environment, rangatahi, nationhood and identity.

Many of the speakers repeated a focus on setting up a better future for their mokopuna.

A spokesperson for the rangatahi said the fight for mana motuhake might look different for rangatahi than it did for their elders.

“Don’t centre mana motuhake in Wellington, centre it in the kainga,” was one of the points he brought forward.

He also asked why it took the provocations from the current coalition Government for Māori to get together to have these discussions.

If Luxon steered clear of Turangawaewae because of fears of how he would be received, he might want to think twice about heading to Waitangi. While Tainui is the home of the Kingitanga, Ngā Puhi are the guardians and first signatories of the Treaty of Waitangi. They have long argued they never ceded sovereignty and they have thousands of pages of evidence to back up their assertion and the findings of the Waitangi Tribunal. The first stage in a report on their Treaty claim has just landed after years of waiting and it reinforces everything they have said for nearly 200 years.

The Crown has yet to settle with Ngā Puhi and the Government will be playing with fire if it thinks Ngā Puhi will roll over to accommodate a coalition Government that has no idea what it’s talking about. Ngā Puhi has waited a long time to look the Crown in the eye and put its case. That time has arrived and this Government can’t get around it. The rest of Māoridom will be watching with anticipation and also some amusement.

Tuheitia indicated that the hui at Turangawaewae won’t be the last and Māori won’t tolerate being ignored or patronised in the national conversation. But he also said those ongoing hui would be about finding solutions for themselves.

“We don’t want to just korero, we have to plan a way forward. Our plan needs to find solutions to things like housing and employment.”

He also said the greatest response to those who want to erase Māori is to simply live out what it means to be Māori every day.

“The best protest we can do is being Māori. Be who we are, live by our values, speak our reo, care for our mokopuna. Just be Māori, all day, every day.”