A Sovereign Act
We were taught that in 1840 Maori willingly exchanged their sovereignty for the benefits of becoming British subjects. What if we were taught wrong?
We were taught that in 1840 Maori willingly exchanged their sovereignty for the benefits of becoming British subjects. What if we were taught wrong?
I remember driving into the country early one morning, Mum in the front, my two brothers and I arranged across the back seat. We didn’t have to go far. Within a couple of kilometres, we were surrounded by expansive fields of cool, damp grass. We pulled over, leapt across the swale and hurdled the number-eight-wire fence into a paddock. Cows idled in the morning glow, and we dodged their fresh and fragrant offerings, searching in the long grass beneath the fenceline for mushrooms. Within 10 minutes, we’d collected a couple of bags full. Almost nothing of that memory remains today. What once were open fields have been subdivided and thousands of near-identical houses arranged along curvaceous culs-de-sac occupy the green fields where once I picked mushrooms. There are outlet stores, businesses, an ice-skating rink, and an enormous mall billed as “one of New Zealand’s largest dedicated towns of shopping”. The structure of our society is different, too. Three decades ago, almost every household in the country was like mine—a nuclear family with children under one roof, middle class. Today, I’m in the minority—only 25 per cent of households are composed of a couple with children, and the gap between rich and poor has doubled. It’s a good thing that New Zealanders are now more diverse, more tolerant, more numerous, more... interesting. But I had assumed that New Zealanders also prized an egalitarian social environment. Indeed, to a large extent, it was the primary reason many of the first settlers left Victorian England, and recent immigrants have chosen to set roots here for similar reasons. Many of the findings of Greg Bruce’s feature on population in this issue challenged my assumptions and caused me to look back with pause to those days wresting fungi from empty fields. So, too, did Kennedy Warne’s analysis in this issue of the Declaration of Independence, signed five years before the Treaty of Waitangi. In it, iwi asserted their sovereignty in ardent terms, which casts new light upon the Treaty itself and indeed the constitutional foundation of the nation. New Zealand society is changing rapidly, and may not have even started as we have been told. That might be alarming, or exciting, depending upon your point of view, but it cannot be ignored.
Pipiwharauroa, the shining cuckoo, Chalcites lucidus
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Slowly, almost imperceptibly, New Zealand society is changing before our eyes. Despite being the last land mass to be inhabited by humans, we are now one of the most ethnically diverse. And despite priding ourselves on our egalitarian society, the gap between rich and poor is growing faster in Aotearoa than in almost any other country in the OECD. Our cities are thriving, the regions are declining, and almost as nothing is as it seems.
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By understanding what makes us different, Lisa Matisoo-Smith is learning what makes us the same.
The Waitangi Tribunal has just released the first part of its findings on the treaty claims of Ngapuhi and other iwi from the north. In a pipi shell, the tribunal has found that those tribes did not cede sovereignty when they signed Te Tiriti in February 1840.
Te Araroa isn't all about back-country and wilderness – it encounters a number of New Zealand’s largest cities, including the “super”city, Auckland. For Te Araroa through-walkers, reaching Auckland is either 20% into your journey south, or 80% through your journey north. Those heading south speak of the thrill of being back in “the big smoke” after spending 4–5 weeks en route from Cape Reinga, whilst those headed north need the fortitude to leave behind city comforts, set back out again and complete their trek. Either is made more enjoyable by the visual splendour of this route as it follows hidden walkways, suburban streets and golden beaches along the Hauraki Gulf. Setting out from Long Bay, the Oneroa Track leads into the streets of Torbay, then the Lotus Walk into Browns Bay, which has a number of options for a refreshment stop. More of the same follows as reserve tracks and cliff-top streets take you through Rothesay Bay and onto Murrays Bay, where at the south end a low-tide option exists to walk the covered sewer pipe around the waterfront to Mairangi Bay—a hugely popular walk for local residents, so be prepared for people on sunny days. Mairangi Bay is again full of refreshment choices for those inclined. The route again resumes via walkway and lane through Campbells Bay and Castor Bay to Milford. At Milford the route follows the beach and rocks to Takapuna, with the goodwill of private residents who have allowed public access—often right past the window. The final leg from Takapuna to Devonport has one small stretch where the route uses the footpath along the major road, so keep an eye if little ones are with you. Those with energy still in the legs can take the option at the end of Cheltenham Beach to head up and over North Head, still bearing many WW2 fortifications. At Devonport, many eateries and watering holes are around to celebrate reaching Auckland—and whether that has been done from Cape Reinga or Long Bay, it’s worthy of recognition. The ferry runs over to Auckland’s CBD to take weary walkers home for the night.
For stargazers, the clear skies over Tekapō afford a remarkable view of the heavens.
When Te Warihi Kokowai Hetaraka stood before the Waitangi Tribunal at Panguru, North Hokianga, in 2010, he was the embodiment of the past speaking into the present. He wore a feather cloak and gave his evidence holding a greenstone mere, and although he spoke in English, his subject was Maori to the core. He addressed the reliability of oral history, on which Maori claims for justice rely. When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1835, te reo Maori had been a written language for only 15 years. Unsurprisingly, there are very few Maori written sources from that period, but a rich vein of korero exists concerning the intentions and expectations of the signatories. How much reliance can be placed on that testimony, based as it is on memory and verbal transmission from one generation to the next? This is the $64 million question. Or, rather, $170 million, or $300 million, or whatever figure the Ngapuhi claim may be settled for. It was also a question that nagged me as I attended several days of hearings over Ngapuhi’s sovereignty claim, about which I wrote in a feature in this magazine. As one who struggles with memory—mine seems to be a colander with ever-widening holes—I came to the hearings with the standard Western preference/prejudice for the permanence of the written over the transience of the oral. Hetaraka, a master carver, confronted the legitimacy of that view by referring to his practice of whakairo. He spoke about the intense tapu that surrounds working in timber. Trees are the domain of Tane-nui-a-Rangi, the giver of life, he said. “A tohunga whakairo must therefore navigate the transfer of the superior wairua and the mauri connected to the tree to a new form for human use, and tapu must be strictly observed. There must be no mistake in the whakapapa recitations from Ranginui and Papatuanuku so as not to imperil the project and the people involved.” In the Maori world, knowledge is not to be trifled with, and its transmittal is never haphazard. I recall stories of Dame Whina Cooper, herself from Panguru, being drilled in whakapapa as a child, going over and over the names until they became chiselled into memory. Another speaker at Panguru said that much of her learning took place in Waipoua Forest at 3AM, when the spirit of the forest was strongest and the veil between past and present thinnest. To Ngapuhi, the strictness of whakapapa ensures the reliability of oral history, and the guardianship of that history is a sacred trust. Indeed, the phrase “chiselled into memory” takes on a new meaning when you consider that the chisel is the pen of the Maori people—on skin, on timber, on memory. I was struck by the statement of one Ngapuhi, contradicting the view that Maori was an exclusively oral culture. “Whakairo was our written language,” he said. Carving wrote the symbolism that describes the cosmos. For Maori, oral history fits within a world view that sees no separation of knowledge from lived experience, or history from memory. The Waitangi Tribunal itself has accepted the principle that communal memory holds knowledge that can be found in no other way. In its landmark Muriwhenua report in 1997, the tribunal wrote that its “greater concern” was not so much “with the vagaries of oral tradition, but with the power of the written word to entrench error and bias”. Yet the Eurocentric bias persists, a vestige of the hierarchical thinking that blighted our nation’s beginnings. Settlers, administrators and missionaries alike placed European culture high above that of indigenous people. Still today there is a privileging of the ‘evidence-based’ scientific paradigm over all others. Naturally enough, colonised people the world over repudiate that prejudice. Davi Kopenawa, a leader of the Yanomami people of the Amazon, has said that white people fixate on the written word “because their thought is full of forgetting”. By contrast, “we have kept the words of our ancestors inside us for a long time and we continue to pass them on to our children”, he says. In 1840, when Hokianga rangatira Hone Mohi Tawhai was deliberating whether to sign the Treaty of Waitangi, he said to the Pakeha who were gathered at Mangungu: “Let the tongue of everyone be free to speak; but what of it? What will be the end? Our sayings will sink to the bottom like a stone, but your sayings will float light, like the wood of the whau tree, and always remain to be seen. Am I telling lies?” He was not. His prediction has come to pass. Several Ngapuhi elders at the hearings said that this was the first opportunity they had been given to present their stories to the Crown in full. Ngapuhi see this claim as a way to lift their suppressed history—so long invisible—to the surface. To let it speak.
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Hatched in rivers, mayflies rise to the surface and unfurl new wings, the final phase of their precarious and astonishing lifecycle.
The voyage to the Antipodes was anything but plain sailing.
Methane, ammonia, hydrogen, a dash of iron, a cup of carbonate, then lightning for a little zest. Voila - primordial soup.
Walter Buller makes a book
Photographers rely on light, which creates a peculiar set of problems when shooting in the dark
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