MĀORI THOUGHTS, PAKEHĀ RULES

In the early 1970s my grandfather, Andrew Rollo, was a board member on both the Parengarenga A Incorporation and the Aupōuri Māori Trust Board when the return of the Wairahi farms was being negotiated.  The question was asked, in which entity should the farms be vested? 

Now, both boards were largely made up of the same people, and yet both boards resolved unanimously that they should each be the vested entity.  After arguing with themselves a bit, they eventually allowed the farms to be vested in the Trust Board.

I laughed when I first heard this story.  But I now understand why my grampa and his contemporaries contradicted themselves; they were thinking as Māori but acting under Pākehā rules, and this kind of confusion still happens today for the same reasons.

To illustrate, in the past week I have received and read three different but connected reports on mining in Taitokerau.  They are different in style and some of their content, but connected in other parts of their content and in their target audience; i.e. Māori.

Māori and Mining is a paper out of Ōtago University authored by a multidisciplinary team of nine.  It brings together information on the involvement of Māori in mining, the process of mining, the values Māori bring to mining, Māori and mineral law, the economics of mining, and the environmental impacts of mining.  This report is what one would expect from academics; a largely neutral and somewhat dry analysis of the pros and cons of mining. 

Home-Land-Sea is a paper written by well-known environmental activists.  It presents mining in the context of a government agenda that includes – rushing to conclude Treaty settlements, aggressively transferring ownership of mineral resources to multinational companies, allowing those same companies to influence the re-writing of New Zealand’s environmental laws while at the same time issuing prospecting and exploration permits to them, and secretly negotiating a trade deal that gives them the right to sue future governments if they pass improved environmental laws.   As can be expected from activists, this paper is a full-blooded guard dog of a read.

The Extractive Industry Discussion Paper was written in response to a direction from some members of the Te Tai Tokerau Iwi Chairs Forum to explore and report on the pros and cons of mineral extraction as an activity with implications for Iwi roles and responsibilities.  Made up of four parts plus appendices, this paper is confusing because it clearly leaves the door open to mining, but its appendices clearly oppose mining.  It turns out the reason for this confusion is that the appendices are actually the Home-Land-Sea paper. 

This Friday there’s a hui in Korou Kore marae when NZPAM and EPA come to ‘consult’ on oil exploration. 

In preparation for it I’m grateful to have read all three reports, especially Home-Land-Sea.  But I’m more grateful for the reminder that Māori thought cannot be defined by Pākehā rules.