Northland - Waitangi Treaty Grounds

We left our Paihia motel to visit the nearby Waitangi Treaty Grounds. Here we met Ben, who had recently quit his job in London to travel NZ and further afield. We all joined a guided tour which helped us understand the Treaty’s part in NZ’s history, and a half hour Māori cultural experience.

I found our Māori guide extraordinary in his calm way of being, and his ability to describe both sides of a triggering history of inequalities, challenges and conflict that supported an understanding of ‘why’ events played out. On such a blue-skied day, walking across bright green grass with the beautiful Bay of Islands panorama behind us, it was hard to evoke the true significance of this historical place, the ‘birthplace of a nation’, where through the aim of unity instead seeds were sown for decades of disagreement and injustice.

Our guide transported us back in time to the lead-up to the treaty. Describing the Māori desire to trade internationally, this led tribal leaders to come together at Waitangi in 1834 to choose a flag - a Flag of the United Tribes - for use by their trading ships. This would enable them to enter foreign harbours (and avoid being regarded as pirates). It was a first step towards tribal unity and NZ’s recognition as a nation in its own right.

In 1840 chiefs came together again to sign what became NZ’s founding document, a Treaty between Māori chiefs and representatives of the British Crown, which aimed to establish British sovereignty while also guaranteeing Māori rights to their land. The Treaty was written in both English and Māori, but the document’s hasty translations resulted in differences in the Treaty meaning in each language. For instance, 'kawanatanga' in the Mãori version is usually translated as 'government’, but in the English version is translated as absolute sovereignty - supreme rule over the entire country. This idea was alien to most Mãori. Also, 'tino rangatiratanga' - chiefly authority or chieftainship - is promised in the Mãori but not the English. These differences - largely around the concepts of sovereignty and chieftainship - have led to years of dispute.

Our guide then led us up to the old Governor-General’s house where the treaty was signed. Opposite, Te Whare Rūnanga, a more recent carved house representing all iwi Mãori (tribal groups) was built on the centenary of the signing of the Treaty in 1940. The two buildings facing each other expresses the ongoing conversation between the Treaty parties. I liked the importance of physical symbolism in this historical place - a visual solidity of the working conversations between two co-habiting peoples.

Our guide left us at Te Whare Rūnanga. Here we were invited to be part of an pōwhiri (welcome) that begins in front of the building and involves a peace offering being laid down by Māori and accepted by our nominated ‘chief’. Once accepted, we moved inside for a cultural performance including songs, dances, and a traditional haka (war dance). I found this exchange highlighted the cultural differences so strongly; to my eyes the pōwhiri was confrontationally terrifying and not at all welcoming! Without guides and helpful translators, I wonder how the welcome was understood and received by those in the past?

Afterwards we spent a bit of time in the museum. Here we learned a lot about the dispossession of Māori land. The signing of the Treaty brought two cultures of land ownership into a head-on clash - communal and individual. Two peoples spoke of becoming unified, but the land they agreed to occupy together would become a source of deep division between them. By the 1860s Europeans outnumbered Māori and governments used the strength of this majority to make laws and exercise power with scant regard for the Treaty relationship. Within a few years lands held communally by Mãori had now diminished to small and scattered pockets.

In 1867 Mãori got a foothold in Parliament with a token four members and they used every strategy to keep Treaty promises to the fore. It was a test of endurance that finally bore fruit with the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act which put the Treaty relationship on firmer legal ground. Mãori now had access to tools of law that the Crown had so often used to their disadvantage.

From the 1970s the general public gradually came to know more about the Treaty, through various protest movements. Notably in 1975 the Māori land march created by Whina Cooper started in Northland and travelled the length of the North Island, arriving in Wellington to protest the loss of Māori rights and land. Over the 680 mile march it grew from 50 to 5,000 people. In 1977, members of Auckland tribe Ngãti Whatua occupied prime real estate at Bastion Point to resist a housing development on their former reserve. Their forcible eviction in a glare of media publicity shocked fair-minded New Zealanders. Efforts to honour the treaty and its principles expanded.

“Today, we are strong enough and honest enough to admit that the Treaty has been imperfectly observed. I look upon it as a legacy of promise. It cain be a guide to all those whose collective sense of justice, fairness and tolerance will shape the future.”
Queen Elizabeth II, Waitangi, February 1990

THE TAPESTRY OF UNDERSTANDING
The tapestry of understanding cannot be woven by one strand alone.
Only by the working together of strands and the working together of weavers will such a tapestry be completed.
When it is complete let us look at the good that comes from it,
and in time we should also look at those dropped stitches
because they also have a message.

Whilst at the Treaty Grounds our guide also took us to see the largest Māori canoe or ‘waka’ - built to mark the centenary of the Treaty of Waitangi’s signing in 1940. We were overwhelmed by its sheer size and impressive stats - at 38m it can carry up to 150 people, when dry it weighs 6 tonnes, once wet and coming out of the water this doubles to 12 tonnes. What I liked most however was the story about Kupe, the legendary discoverer of NZ who also sailed a waka, from his homeland in Eastern Polynesia. Aotearoa, one of this country's modern names, is said to come from the words of Kuramärotini, Kupe's wife, when she first saw the land: 'He ao, he ao tea, he ao tea roa!' (A cloud, a white cloud, a long white cloud).Leggi altro