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Jon Henley13 November 2007 11:59
</IMG>While Maori language and culture have come to occupy a significant place in New Zealand life, many are feeling increasingly alienated. (Photograph: AP)Henry Williams (born February 11 1782, died July 16 1867) is as good a place to start as any. A doubtless well-intentioned former navy man, Reverend Williams was a missionary who had been busy winning antipodean souls for Jesus since 1822. By February 1840, when the first lieutenant governor of what would become Britain’s newest colony landed in New Zealand, Williams was leader of the Church of England’s mission there. He must have seemed like just the man to translate a landmark treaty between the Crown and the Maori chiefs.Unfortunately, he was not. And if last month a shocked New Zealand learned that 17 Maori rights activists had been arrested on weapons and terrorism offences following the discovery of “paramilitary training camps” in the mountains of North Island, it is not entirely fanciful to suggest that the late reverend should bear some of the blame.
Sixteen people are on trial in Auckland following the raids, the culmination of a year-long police operation centred on the North Island hamlet of Ruatoki, gateway to the Urewera mountains that are home to the Tuhoe tribe. The raids followed sightings of “armed men in camouflage moving through forests carrying heavy packs and firearms”. There are unconfirmed rumours that the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, may have been a target.
One of the men arrested has reportedly told police he would “declare war on this country very soon”, and that “white men are going to die here”.
How much of all this will ever be proved true is anyone’s guess. Claims and ­counter-claims have been flying since the first raid a fortnight ago: Maori leaders are livid at what they say is police heavy-­handedness; some have suggested that the camps were harmless retreats. Pita Sharples, leader of the Maori party, says the raids have “set race relations back 100 years”.
What is certain is that these events have exposed wounds that most people could be forgiven for assuming had healed long ago. The Maori had had a hard time, no doubt. But nowadays their culture is all over New Zealand, isn’t it? Maori do very well, don’t they, in all walks of life? And look at the All Blacks! New Zealand and the Maori, they’re pretty much okay, aren’t they? No big issues there.
It turns out, though, that there are -- and that feelings about them are starting to run dangerously high. Listen, for example, to Allan Hawea, a moderate Maori community worker from the Bay of Plenty. New Zealanders of European extraction, known in Maori as Pakeha, he warns, “can harp on all they like about how tired they are of Maori considering themselves above the law, or how sick and tired they are of hearing Maori bleat on about the race issue. Well, friends, get used to it. We will not have you tell us how we will respond to the issues that concern us. If you find our response unreasonable, illogical, perhaps it is because we have been reasonable and logical for too long.”
Some facts. Just less than 15% of New Zealand’s four-million-strong population are Maori. A survey last month from the ministry of social development showed that in all but four of 20 basic socio-economic indicators, they are worse off than European New Zealanders. Maori are nearly three times as likely to be unemployed, and their household income is about 70% of the national average.
A 2006 report by Rodolfo Stavenhagen, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, concluded that while progress had been made, and New Zealand ranked pretty high on international human and social development indicators, “persistent disparities” continue between Maori and non-Maori in fields such as health, paid work, economic standard of living, housing and justice. Some of these, Stavenhagen added, were consistent with “a history of discrimination”, and there was a need for “continued specific measures based on ethnicity” to “strengthen the social, economic and cultural rights” of the Maori. Some Maori have no hesitation in saying what they think this is all about. “It’s quite obvious that underlying all this is a deeply entrenched racism,” says Professor Margaret Mutu of the University of Auckland’s Maori studies department, who is also involved with the Maori rights movement. “The European attitude is: we are superior, we are in charge, and that’s just the way it is. It’s really a huge problem here. And I do consider the patience of the Maori amazing. They could have taken up arms long ago.”
The roots of Maori resentment lie, of course, in the past, and more specifically in February 1840. Back, then, to Williams, who with the assistance of his son, Edward, produced the Maori version of the three-clause treaty of Waitangi.
In article one of the treaty’s English text, the Maori signatories apparently cede their “sovereignty” to the British Crown. Williams’s Maori version of the text, however, which was the one the chiefs signed, used a missionary neologism, “kawanatanga” -- the term means something akin to “governorship”. This was curious, because a pretty good translation of “sovereignty” already existed in Maori: “tino rangatiratanga”.
Even more curiously, article two of the Maori version expressly reserves “tino rangatiratanga”, or full sovereign authority, over “their lands, forests, fisheries and everything they value” to the Maori chiefs. And since the only reason the chiefs were sitting down with the representative of the British Crown was because they had been obliged to asked for Britain’s help in controlling the lawless band of European whalers, sealers and other settlers who had invaded their islands, it seems clear that what the Maori believed they were signing was a document granting the Crown a strictly limited authority over the non-Maori settlers.
What the British signed, on the other hand, was a document granting them full sovereignty over what became the Crown colony of New Zealand. And thanks to a subsequent barrage of questionable land purchases and confiscations of vast tracts of New Zealand, between 1840 and 1890, the Maori lost about 95% of their territories. Over roughly the same period, meanwhile, the Maori population had shrunk from 100 000 to about 36 000, while the European population rose from 2 000 to more than 600 000.
“The land issue is the legal, cultural and spiritual focus of almost all Maori grievances today,” says Dr Tracey McIntosh, a University of Auckland sociologist and member of the Tuhoe tribe. “Many tribes, including mine, never even signed the treaty, so we just view our land as having been stolen. And above and beyond the Maori’s spiritual relationship with their lands, you can make a strong evidence-based argument for saying that the alienation of our land removed our whole economic base and distorted the whole range of social relationships. That’s why this history is so important: for Maori, the injustices of the past have real implications for our present lives. We’re still seeing their consequences.”
There has been some attempt to address the land issue, but not with any tremendous success: the Waitangi Tribunal, established in 1975 to hear complaints of alleged treaty violations, has in the 32 years of its existence registered 1 400 cases, heard about 150, issued 50 reports -- and settled barely 20 claims, for a value of just more than NZ$700-million.
In recent years, Maori have had further cause to question their government’s intentions when it passed the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed Act, overturning a court of appeal ruling that the islands’ indigenous inhabitants enjoyed “customary title” or property rights. The UN is sufficiently unimpressed with this legislation to have formally recommended it be repealed, or at least significantly amended.
Paradoxically, Maori language and culture have come to occupy a significant place in New Zealand life. These days, Maori is an official language and is taught, along with Maori history and culture, at school. Maori place names have been restored; there is Maori-language TV and radio; a Maori party exists and seats are reserved for Maori in New Zealand’s Parliament.
Much of this has been accomplished as a result of the so-called Maori revival, started in the 1960s and 1970s. Fuelled by almost invariably peaceful protest the Maori protest movement has been successful in raising its profile and achieving concrete, if limited, progress in areas such as land rights, the Maori language and culture, and racism. “The problem,” says McIntosh, “is that there may now be a great deal of recognition of Maori issues ... but there’s a lot of tolerance for ignorance around Maori issues.”
It is an environment, many Maori feel, in which “it can all too easily seem as if most non-Maori in the land are saying: ‘We know, we care -- but we don’t really understand, so don’t expect us to do anything about it,’” says one contributor to a New Zealand chat community. “It’s as if their efforts on the cultural front can excuse them from taking the underlying historical grievances and social and economic problems seriously.”
But paramilitary training camps? Police raids? Few Maori seem to believe a word of it, preferring to talk of “ignorance” and a “huge overreaction” by the police. There is, though, a wary acknowledgement that tensions are building. “The powerlessness and disenfranchisement some Maori feel may lead people to explore different ways of articulating power,” says McIntosh. “My worry is that this incident will do a great deal of damage to a group that already feels very alienated. I worry about the response it may provoke.”
Mutu also doubts there was ­“anything remotely threatening going on up in those mountains”, in part because “if there was, I think I would have heard about it”. But, she concurs, “the whole of Maoridom has been traumatised by these raids. Attitudes are certainly hardening. Eventually, I think, we will get together, and we will discuss how to handle it. And yes, I can see a day we will go back to our land and reclaim it. There will not be military action, because that is not our way, but we will go on to the state-owned farms, into the forests, to the wild places where very few people live, and we will say: ‘This is ours, now try and stop us taking it. We’ve been patient, we’ve believed your fine words, for too long. We know what is right’.” -- © Guardian News & Media Ltd 2007 - South Africa
