SHOW US THE DEEDS

While an American visitor was shocked at the racism against Māori that he witnessed from a policewoman in Kerikeri during his recent visit here [Lance O’Sullivan’s column in the Northland Age 10 Nov 2011], most New Zealanders would have found it unremarkable, in the same way that they find the Crown’s Treaty settlement dealings with Māori unremarkable.

In fact, of all the letter writers to the Northland Age, only a handful can be relied upon to remark at all about the insitutitional racism which is endemic in this country against Māori and, of those, most blame Māori for it.

Anyway, rather than rage ineffectively against the machine I prefer to target its power source, or as close to it as I can get. With that in mind I have written today to Chris Finlayson, Crown Minister of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, as follows:

Dear Chris,

Last week we asked your staff at the Office of Treaty Settlements for copies of the deeds they had drafted to settle our claims against the Crown for breaching Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The reply was that the documents were too large to email and would be uploaded to the OTS website on Monday just gone. They haven’t been.

Given that we are expected to ratify your Te Aupōuri deed in less than 6 weeks and your Te Rarawa deed not long after that, we want to see the actual deeds. In this age of electronic scanners and high speed broadband, we had expected them to have been made available to us by now. In fact we would have preferred to have seen them before they were intialed by our self-proclaimed chiefs; a courtesy your Pākehā constituents take for granted when agreements are being made in their behalf. But we know that is not how you deal with Māori.

It is not up to Te Runanga o Te Rarawa or Te Runanga Nui o Te Aupōuri to give us access to these documents. They are already very busy posting us explanatory booklets about them, and preparing to hold hui to explain those explanatory booklets to us. So these chiefly persons cannot be expected to also send or give us access to the actual documents. That’s your job.

Please instruct your staff to upload the Te Aupōuri and Te Rarawa deeds of settlement to the OTS website pronto; preferably before the chiefly ones hold their first explanatory hui.

In closing, I shall be in Wellington on the 25th of this month at the Waitangi Tribunal where these deeds will be part of the evidence presented to show why the Tribunal should make binding recommendations on the Crown to return all Ngāti Kahu lands (currently occupied and used by State-owned Enterprises or leased as Crown Forest Licenses) to Ngāti Kahu - plus compensation.

Na,

Anahera Herbert-Graves (Inside an Iwi)