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Relational Difficulties and Opportunities

After the ‘fiscal envelope’ fiasco, the Crown did attempt to develop a better relational working nexus with Maori, albeit one which excluded certain issues such as the fiscal cap itself and constitutional change. In practice, its efforts sometimes amounted to little more than consultation with more or less preconceived outcomes, or the incorporation of some tikanga Maori into state-sanctioned public practices. While Maori understandably saw this as very far from satisfactory, it needs to be seen in the context of huge progress in Crown–Maori relations since the 1960s, a time when it was officially believed that tribes and indigenous knowledge practices would gradually disappear, and that their disappearance should be encouraged. The Crown was now increasingly willing, for example, to draw on traditional Maori knowledge in the interests of service provision. In doing so, it was building on the many developments in the Crown–Maori health relationship since the beginning of the Maori Renaissance.

Both conservative and radical Maori voices had long joined forces to argue that western medicine needed to be complemented by traditional indigenous herbal and other healing techniques, and Maori-generated health programmes had been supported even before Tu Tangata – and more so in the years since. Early in the 1990s, especially, officials and ministers began to respond far more positively and rapidly to Maori health initiatives, such as requests from Maori healers for recognition within the public health services. From 1993, discussions were held at national level, and a pioneering contract was soon signed for traditional Maori medicinal services to be provided by a Napier healing clinic. By the end of the decade, contracts were being routinely arranged with providers whose healing methods incorporated Maori tikanga as well as medicines. Customary healing practices were often explicitly linked by their practitioners to autonomist causes. One healer who signed a contract with the Ministry of Health was later to state that it ‘is very important that in all we do we retain our tino rangatiratanga, or ensure self determination, so that we never sell our souls to that which is not in our tikanga and the beliefs of our ancestors’.

The Department of Corrections was among other state agencies which also drew on Maori expertise. By 1998, it was ‘working with tribes to find tohunga’ to act as ‘providers of Maori services to inmates’, a far cry from the days of the Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907. Yet as the new millennium approached, the Crown’s political and bureaucratic policy-makers, continuing to operate within fundamental (and ethnocentric) ideological, hegemonic and cultural constraints, remained seen by many Maori to be moving only glacially towards recognising rangatiratanga.¹⁹

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There was one partial exception: the rapid progress in the 1990s, despite the fiscal envelope, in resolving historical grievances. Even though most Maori felt that the processes were too slow, there was now some considerable movement where there had been little before. Tribes had always been adamant that Crown recognition of its past breaches of the Treaty was a necessary prerequisite for significantly advancing Crown–Maori relations. That considerable movement on this issue could be made under a National government reflected a number of factors. These included a conservative leadership’s propensity to better understand (if not approve) the supreme significance to Maori of rangatiratanga, as opposed to Labour’s emphasis on socio-economic improvement for the Maori people. National, led by an energetic Graham, was prepared to apologise for past injustices whereas Labour had not been. Negotiations could be depicted as ‘chiefs talking to chiefs’. Moreover, the National government sought to hasten the processes by which iwi could ‘move out of grievance mode and into development mode’. This would, it was believed, operate for the good of all New Zealanders by adding to national productivity, helping remove Maori from welfare dependency and getting youth away from temptations to engage in crime and create disorder.

Many Maori also judged National less harshly than they otherwise might have done for reasons other than progress on Treaty settlements. At a time of electoral reform proposals, for example, it succumbed to pressure to retain the Maori seats despite much ‘expert advice’ to the contrary. Large numbers of Maori also retained a deep consciousness of the Lange ministry’s unilateral abandonment of the longstanding Labour–Ratana pact to protect the interests of the tangata whenua. While Labour’s leadership now rejected the most destructive aspects of the Rogernomics years, the party was still not seen to be addressing issues of rangatiratanga with any conviction. At the 1996 general election, the first to be fought under the ‘mixed member proportional’ (MMP) representation system, Ratana leaders pointedly did not endorse Labour. Many Maori voters abandoned the Labour MPs whose party they saw as having both betrayed them and expressed itself unwilling to seek redemption.

But neither did they vote for National, which had not only continued but intensified the right-wing policies that had devastated the lives of so many within Maoridom. The Maori electorate seats went to New Zealand First, a populist party founded by the minister ousted from National for his open defiance of some of their key policies, Winston Peters. The clear expectations of the Maori electorate had been that Peters’ party would support Labour, forcing it to keep its election promises. Finding itself pivotal to the formation of the next government, however, New Zealand First established a governing coalition with National. Over the next few years, there would be much Maori discussion on the need to better strategise under MMP.

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In addition to the Waikato–Tainui and Ngai Tahu settlements, other progress was being made on Treaty matters. There were both negotiations over middle-level claims and some small settlements, as well as landmark tribunal reports such as that on the Taranaki claims in 1996. In 1997, negotiations over longstanding problems surrounding lands reserved for Maori but administered under state trusteeship were finally completed. Grievances asserted by the nominal (and multiple) owners had focused on denial of both physical possession and market rentals. The Maori Reserved Land Amendment Act addressed such issues and provided for compensation. Owners widely saw this as recognition of their rangatiratanga – albeit as a result of compromises that many believed had given them too little and had come too late.²⁰

Treaty-based negotiations and settlements, all in all, could both affirm rangatiratanga (to a greater or lesser degree) and introduce or perpetuate strains in the relationship between Maori and the Crown. Treaty-based discourses were becoming ever more complex. Some prominent Maori, such as former Labour minister Sir Peter Tapsell, condemned any ‘reversion to tribalism’ as a ‘tragic mistake’ that ignored the realities of modern life, especially its urban dimension. Others believed that with the Crown continuing to privilege iwi in negotiating settlements – rather than hapu, whanau, marae or other sub-iwi organisations – the dynamic complexities of Maori society were being ignored. Not only was a simplified or Crown-engineered view of Maori identity becoming entrenched by such means, but also (it was argued, often vociferously) the state was heaping new injustices upon sub-tribal collectivities when iwi-level Treaty settlements were signed.

There was considerable opposition, too, to the fact that the Crown preferred dealing with institutions representing what it perceived to be the ‘highest natural grouping’ for various of its relationships with Maori. In all such processes, the state was often depicted as commodifying certain descent groupings and practices to make its governance and development task easier, or even to appropriate collective Maori energies in new ways. In meeting such criticisms, the Crown would note that it was logistically impossible to easily or quickly negotiate or forge relationships with the many thousands of sub-iwi or non-tribal groupings, even if they were ready to do so and had agreed on their jurisdictional boundaries. Maori themselves, it would point out, were urging that speedy progress be made, untrammelled by the bureaucratic and jurisdictional delays which had dogged Crown–Maori relations in the past.

Reparations processes were included in the critiques of those who attacked ‘tribal fundamentalism’ for providing the ‘structures for the materialisation of [an] indigenous identity’ said to be required by international capital. Settlements with tribes were interpreted as the Crown brokering the emergence of a ‘comprador bourgeoisie’. Other critical voices suggested that Treaty settlementspage 268 with iwi codified ‘Maori social and political relationships according to capitalist notions of property ownership’, and in doing so perpetuated ‘colonial practices’. While such arguments seldom impinged upon Treaty negotiations, the Crown did need, from time to time, to address concerns that its mandating of particular entities to undertake the negotiations was discouraging positive cooperation between groups within Maoridom – or encouraging divisions in a classical divide and rule sense. Undoubtedly, negotiation processes involved many tensions and conflicts, especially after the imposition of the fiscal cap, but both Crown and claimant groupings sought to find ways of minimising these in the processes of maximising their own positions, often with some success. Whatever the reconciliation processes chosen, the socio-tribal fragmentation consequent upon colonisation and urbanisation would have meant major difficulties in finding agreements to suit all parties. Most people involved knew this, and claimants generally took it into account in the processes of pursuing rangatiratanga by way of Treaty settlements.²¹