Strong Nations emerge from Honoured Promises

Another year has passed and we are back debating The Treaty of Waitangi.

For those of my readers who have never heard of The Treaty of Waitangi, it is New Zealand’s founding document signed in 1840 by the British Crown and over 500 Maori Chiefs. The principle of social and economic equality underpinned the Treaty. However, in the years that followed, the terms of the agreement were eroded by broken promises resulting in massive land loss by Maori, loss of their economic base, their impoverishment, and near cultural extinction. From the 1860’s the power base shifted from Maori to Pakeha.

Every year New Zealanders observe the Treaty of Waitangi and every year we debate its relevance in today’s world. Thankfully, the debate is becoming less confrontational/critical and more generous in spirit as understanding of what the Treaty strove to achieve, grows.

This year I have seen two things which give me hope.

One was Pakeha high profile economist, Gareth Morgan, saying, We have to Get Radical on Racial Issues (NZ Herald, Jan 22). This is encouraging, as he has dared to come out in public and defend the injustice of the economics of the Treaty settlements in terms of return per dollar for Maori.

The other was an event that happened late last year - the publication of the book Tangata Whenua, an Illustrated History. This wonderful book, edited by Atholl Anderson, Judith Binney and Aroha Harris, tells the history of Maori pre and post settlement. In this publication, we read the story of the way New Zealand was settled from a Maori perspective, written by highly respected academics, whose authority no-one would question.

So we are now beginning to hear from people who were once silent on this matter; and the other encouraging thing is that we are beginning to hear from people who once would have no view - that is Pakeha with no stake in the debate, or a view that is biased towards the Pakeha perspective.

Why am I encouraged by this? I grew up in a remote area of Hokianga, and that shaped me for the rest of my life. I saw poverty that I would never have believed possible unless I had seen it. I learned in my tiny two-room school about how wonderful we were as Pakeha, how we had brought civilisation to the world and with it advanced technology, arts and literature. I never heard about Maori technologies, and I thought there was nothing wrong with that. The teachers never told the Maori students (the majority) their centuries old knowledge was irrelevant. But they also never spent time teaching us about how clever it was. Those Maori students heard all about how great the Westminster political system was. We never heard about how Maori politics worked. The subliminal message was that one was greater than the other.

My parents owned a smallish dairy farm and we worked hard. Everyone did. But my Maori friends lived on tiny plots of land and eked out a living catching eels, growing crops, eating flour and water bread and wild fruit, cooking bully beef stew on a woodstove and living on benefits. It never occurred to me to ask why the disparity existed until later when I realised that ‘all was not well in Godzone.’

But I could never put my finger on why….until I grew up and I began to put some things together.

I remember a friend saying, many years ago, in an utterly confused tone, “Their kids come to school and they haven’t washed for days so I make them stand under my shower to clean them up. There’s no excuse for that.” And then there’s the time when a friend pointed to the Raglan Golf course and said, “See, we give them back their land and all they do with it is grow gorse.”

There were many more, but those two examples will do because they stayed with me forever as I tried to figure out why I hadn’t been able to respond to these criticisms. Then the penny dropped. If someone has lost all hope, and is depressed, the first thing to go is his or her sense of personal hygiene. It is also not helped by a lack of running water.

And the gorse growing on the Golf Course? I discovered that it was almost impossible to access loans to develop land if the applicant was Maori and the land had multiple owners.

So I hope this Waitangi Day will see further movement in a genuine desire to understand, to learn and to discover what it means to be powerful and powerless and how those two states play out in people’s day-to-day lives.