THE PAST IS STILL PRESENT

Last week I received an email advising that the Police had been “assigned to provide an Intelligence Risk Assessment” regarding the upcoming “national commemoration of Captain Cook’s arrival in Aotearoa”, and asking if they could attend the hui-a-marama of Te Rūnanga-ā-Iwi o Ngāti Kahu… “as an observor … to identify any potential issues that might develop”.

I politely advised them that they could not attend but were welcome to make an appointment to meet with one of my staff to discuss their issue.

Ngāti Kahu had nothing to do with Cook because he never came to our rohe.  The European ‘explorer’ that did come was de Surville who responded to the manaakitanga of our tūpuna Ranginui by kidnapping him in retaliation for the taking of a small boat that had drifted ashore.  More than a century later, we learned that three months after being kidnapped, Ranginui died of scurvy on board de Surville’s ship, having never again touched land.

As for Cook, we learnt at school that he was a paragon of virtue and seamanship.  However, tangata whenua where he landed saw him quite differently.  Long after he left, the whippings, woundings, massacres and murders perpetrated by Cook and his crew on them were found to be recorded in his and others’ journals.

Cook’s journals also depict a man who struggled with his conscience, but it didn’t stop him and his crew from leaving a trail of massacres, murders, abductions, torture and theft across the Pacific before they even arrived in Aotearoa.

In a Stuff opinion piece titled ‘Was James Cook a White Supremacist?’, Dame Anne Salmond found that he was likely not.  However, Cook’s journals and his ‘secret admiralty instructions’ depict a man who, like de Surville, came from a racist culture with supremacist notions that allowed them to take the lands (and lives) of any non-white non-Christians they met in their voyages of exploitation.

So, that brings me back to this year’s commemoration.  Following unfavourable tangata whenua reaction to the original proposal, it was renamed Tuia250 Encounters. 

Supported by fifteen government agencies, co-chaired by Dame Jenny Shipley and Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr, well-resourced with a healthy budget ($20million in total) and slickly marketed, its purpose is ‘… to enable a more balanced telling of our stories about Māori and European settlement of New Zealand to guide us as we go forward together.’

But wait – is this the same government that continues to ignore the well-researched stories already told to its own Waitangi Tribunal, refuses to make New Zealand history a compulsory subject in schools, and is targeting Ngāti Kahu for police intelligence gathering leading up to this one-off event?

In her article, Dame Anne Salmond wrote of that first encounter in 1869, “Māori had never seen guns before, and Cook's men had never experienced a wero. Neither side knew the other's protocols for handling meetings with strangers.”  250 years later, it appears the past is still present.  Watch this space.

MISNAMED MINISTRY

Last week’s painful exposé by Newsroom showing in real time an ‘uplift’ by Ministry of Children [M.o.C.] social workers of a newborn baby from his 19 year old mother at Hawkes Bay hospital, provoked strong and polarised public reaction. 

On the one hand – the very much larger hand at that – there was condemnation of the Ministry from inside out and top to bottom; on the other hand, there was condemnation of Iwi Māori, Māori parents, Māori mothers and even Māori midwives and kaumātua, as well as Newsroom itself.  However, awful as the video story was to watch, it was the state’s reaction that was most repellent. 

Reminiscent of the fictional Ministry of Magic [M.o.M.] refusing to believe and trying to shut up Harry Potter and anyone else who proclaimed the horrifying truth that Voldemort was back, the M.o.C. CEO defended her staff, the Minister defended her CEO, the Prime Minister looked sad, and the Ministry attempted to sue Newsroom into changing the story. 

For Māori, this latest exposé and its fallout are very déjà vu.  Since the first modest system of public welfare was established by the state in 1860, we have been subject to innumerable cycles of bad outcomes, reviews, inquiries, restructures, changed policies and revised practices.  But the outcomes for our most vulnerable remain stubbornly bad.

Tim Garlick’s 2012 book, SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS: An organisational history of the Ministry of Social Development and its predecessors, 1860–2011, provides a decent overview of those cycles and identifies their root cause; i.e. the deeply ingrained and deliberately sustained systemic racism of the state which keeps Māori from controlling and implementing our own Kaupapa Māori systems. 

Is there any answer or cure for that?  Māori have always had the answers and cures for ourselves.  

Kaupapa Māori like Maatua Whangai, Kohanga Reo, Te Roopu Wāhine Māori Toko i Te Ora, Kura Kaupapa Māori, Ataarangi, etc – all work really well under our tikanga.  Yet, as soon as government adopts them, we run into problems.  Someone should do in-depth research on why that is.  I already know it’s not because we or our tikanga and kaupapa are inferior – far from it. 

There is very little trust (if any) in the state’s M.o.C.  Sadly, some of that distrust has trickled down onto the NGOs, including  Iwi Social Services.  But the fact is that those NGOs are forced to chase the state’s social service contractual crumbs and are expected to do more for far less. 

There are some brilliant individuals working for the state and M.o.C.  But they can’t effect the necessary change which is for government to cede control of the Māori tax take to our own governing body(ies), get on with curing its own racism,  and get out of our way. 

As the Kahungunu Kaumātua Des Ratima said last week, “these are OUR whānau OUR problems OUR solutions OUR way."  He also said it was time for the M.o.C. to quit using OUR words to misname itself.  E tautoko ana mātou – we agree.

WHY LIE?

On 4^th June 1936, a pre-treaty transaction was purported to have taken place between a Pākehā called Thomas Ryan and a Māori called ‘Nukewa’ in which Ryan said he had traded £5 6s worth of goods for 320 acres at Whakaangi in the rohe of two Ngāti Kahu hapū, Ngāti Ruaiti and Ngāti Aukiwa. 

After Te Tiriti o Waitangi was signed, Thomas Ryan was amongst a number of Pākehā who made a claim in 1843 to the Godfrey Commission, the first in a series of Commissions that were set up by the Crown, after Te Tiriti o Waitangi was signed, to hear the ‘Old Land Claims’ of Pākehā immigrants that Māori had ‘sold’ lands to them pre-treaty.  

141 years later, the Crown’s own Waitangi Tribunal found these transactions were tuku whenua, not ‘sales’.  However, many Europeans of that time had actively lied to make those tuku whenua look like legal ‘sales’ in European terms.  That included the lie that all the Pākehā claims were fully investigated.

The Crown’s own records show that less than 10 per cent of those claims were ever investigated, and none of them fully.  Certainly, no Ngāti Kahu rangatira were ever present let alone examined. Te Rarawa’s Panakareao was visited in 1843, but neither he nor his Ngāpuhi rival, Pororua Wharekauri, represented the Ngāti Kahu hapū on the whenua.

Following each Old Pākehā Land Claim hearing, the Commissioner executed one of three options:

1.       Wrote a piece of paper called a ‘Crown grant’ giving ownership of some or all of the claimed land to the Pākehā claimant; anything not given was called ‘surplus’ and the Crown stole it for itself.

2.       Wrote a piece of paper called ‘scrip’ giving the Pākehā claimant the equivalent value of land in the rohe of Ngāti Whātua.  The knock-on impact on Ngāti Whātua of having their land stolen in this way was horrific.

3.       Rejected the Pākehā claim outright and instead stole the land for the Crown as ‘surplus’.

During the 1843 hearings, to avoid clashing with Pana Kareao,  Commissioner Godfrey declined to write Thomas Ryan a grant and offered him 438 acres of ‘scrip’ instead, but Ryan rejected it. 

In 1856, Ryan appeared before the Bell Commission to again press his claim to own Whakaangi.  Following in Godfrey’s footsteps, Commissioner Bell upped the offer of scrip to 1,146 acres, which Ryan again rejected.  So, Bell finally wrote him a Crown grant … for 3 acres!  The Crown kept the remaining 317 acres for itself as ‘surplus.’

The only good thing that came out of this particular lie is that Ngāti Whātua had one less ‘scrip’ holder turn up in their rohe claiming to own a piece of their whenua.  

While immoral and unethical, the motivation for the original lie is understandable.  However, the motivation of those few who still tout the lie is less so.  If they are not culpable for the skullduggery of their predecessors, why continue to uphold the lie?