‘Crown grants’ was one of the first flash
terms applied by the Crown to its thefts of Ngati Kahu lands. So what were Crown grants in reality? To answer that we need to look at the background
and the dealings of the Old
Land Claims Commissions.
Set up by the Government under
the New
Zealand Land Claims Ordinance 1841, the first Commission heard the claims
of European immigrants to Ngati Kahu lands which various rangatira had granted for
their use in pre-treaty tuku whenua.
Tuku
whenua were not ‘sales’.
Their nearest English equivalent in 1840 and since would be the transaction-based
concept of a ‘lease’. But even that does
not fully describe the deeper, relationship-based concept of tuku whenua.
In any event, the main purpose of the New Zealand
Land Claims Ordinance was not to protect Ngāti Kahu interests under Te
Tiriti o Waitangi. Instead it
was to provide a legal beard to disguise the illegal theft of our lands and their
distribution amongst Europeans.
The ordinance stemmed from the racist
European presumption of superiority, and the wrong
European assumption that pre-treaty tuku whenua were English custom
land ‘sales’.
Based on that flawed ordinance, which breached Te
Tiriti, and on the lies told by many of the European claimants that the
rangatira had ‘sold’
lands to them, Commissioner
Edward Godfrey reported to Governor Robert Fitzroy
who then wrote and gave those claimants pieces of paper of different kinds. That included the mechanisms of theft called
‘scrip’ and ‘Crown grants’.
In reality ‘Crown grants’ were nothing more than pieces
of paper on which the Governor of the day endorsed the lies told about certain
Ngati Kahu lands and expressed his desire that the Crown had magically become
the owner of those lands, so that he could give them to his favoured subjects.
Thus we see that many Europeans of that time were
active parties to the initial thefts of our lands, and to the lies told since to
make them look legal.
That includes the lie that all tuku whenua in
Muriwhenua were fully
investigated, first by Godfrey in 1843, and then by Bell in
1856.
In fact, of the 62
European land claims lodged for pre-treaty tuku whenua in all
Muriwhenua, only 14 were ever investigated, and in none of those cases were any
Ngati Kahu rangatira present let alone examined. Te Rarawa’s Panakareao
was visited by Godfrey, but neither Panakareao nor his Ngapuhi rival Pororua
represented Ngati Kahu.
Yet, even though an examination of the historical record (written and
oral) proves them to be fictitious, many Europeans of that time and since have tried
to pretend that ‘Crown grants’ were real and to convince Ngāti Kahu that means other
people, rather than us, now
own our lands.
Ngati Kahu have never believed the lies those thieves seem to like making up. We know that our 'tuku whenua' generosity never meant the same as their 'took your whenua' greed.
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