About 320 years before the birth of Christ, Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes, who was sun-bathing at the time, and asked if there was anything he could do for him. The old man looked up at Alexander and replied, “Yes. Please take your shadow off me.” On 28th April 1840, here in Kaitaia, Pana Kareao convinced his chiefly contemporaries to sign Te Tiriti O Waitangi with these words, “Ko te atakau o te whenua i riro i a te Kuini. Ko te tinana o te whenua i waiho ki nga Maori." (The shadow of the land passes to the Queen, but the substance remains with us). These statements are metaphors for the optimism felt by Maori Rangatira and the Crown at the beginning of this Treaty nation. But they’re also sad counterpoints to the Crown’s broken promises ever since.
Anyway, earlier this year the Waitangi Tribunal put out a report into the impact of the Crown’s Treaty settlement policies on iwi in the Central North Island (CNI). Put simply, the report says that the Crown is setting up Treaty settlement winners and losers and causing once friendly iwi with close blood ties to become enemies over settlement packages.
The thing is that, relative to what the Crown took, these settlements are mingy and mean-spirited. So why, you might ask, do Maori bother fighting over something so piddling? It’s because the settlement assets include key elements of mana and rangatiratanga – cultural cornerstones, like land and authority and the wherewithal for an iwi to enlarge its substance. These are things New Zealanders of all ethnicities have always lived, fought and died over. So it comes as no surprise to see allied iwi going toe to toe over them.
Here in Te Hiku, iwi will have taken note. Te Aupouri, Whaingaroa and Te Rarawa have signed pre-settlement Agreements in Principle with the Crown, and they will not want what has happened in the CNI and Auckland settlements to happen here. Ngati Kuri, Ngaitakoto and Ngati Kahu are not at the table, and they will not want to be left fighting over diminishing settlement resources. All five iwi will not want to return to the Runanga Muriwhenua model of dependence on the patronage of Sir Graham or some other high profile individual, and none of them will have time to waste on ignoring or moaning about their differences. They will all know that they have serious business to do with each other – now.
I have no doubt that if either the Crown or any one of the three AIP iwi in Te Hiku steps one inch too far, the ‘fight filter’ we’ve seen in the past, both here and elsewhere, will click on again. And it will stay on until everyone understands that, while it’s fine for individual iwi to be strong and autonomous, they cannot move too far without the others.
In the end, whether amongst Treaty claimants, Grey Power or Federated Farmers, these ‘fights’ are a filter and protection against the Crown’s tendency to decide who will be the winners and who the losers amongst us. The five iwi now have an opportunity to disagree without being disagreeable, move forward independently but together, and say to the Crown, “Take your shadow off us.”
Hei konei. Hei kona.
No comments:
Post a Comment