Treaty-based Discourses

The growing stridency of demands reflected an international trend among marginalised peoples. At first, Maori demands had been centred around equal rights within New Zealand’s dominant structures and hegemonic culture. Some sections of Maoridom continued to make this their focus, with conservative leaders concerned that public protest constituted a threat to their congenial relations with the pakeha establishment – through which deals could be struck in the interests of greater equality. Other Maori noted the emergence of bicultural ways of seeing and doing, and argued that the Maori cultural renaissance provided an adequate basis for progress without constitutional upheaval. Increasingly, however, Maori began to conclude that such stances downplayed crucial matters of power and class. As with members of indigenous movements worldwide, they started to reject aspects of the dominant culture and its worldviews, and to opt, to a greater or lesser degree, for alternatives to the established ‘pakeha order’.

A number of radicals claimed that neither at Waitangi in 1840 nor ever since had Maori been willing to surrender their sovereignty. Since this hadpage 173 been ‘seized’ from Maori, they demanded that it be restored, with the return of Maori land to provide an economic and ancestral underpinning of a Maori sovereign order. Such views were not new. Even the Labour/Ratana MP Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan had noted in 1976 that the Maori-language version of the Treaty ‘does not forfeit the right of sovereignty as it is understood in the English version’. But voices in favour of Maori sovereignty were now increasing in number and loudness. Some radicals even insisted, as Donna Awatere would put it, that ‘Maoris should have control of New Zealand because it is our country’. In such an interpretation, ‘Maori must no longer seek a bicultural sovereignty with the white nation’: the Treaty, in effect, promised full independence and control for Maori.²⁹

While this was a minority position, discrepancies between the English and Maori texts of the Treaty had been the subject of much debate since a scholarly article on the subject was published in 1972. The English version of Article Two confirmed Maori rights to ‘full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands … and other properties’ until Maori chose to dispose of them. In Crown eyes, this signified no more than confirmation of pre-existing rights of property ownership. Such a view was reinforced by what became called called ‘Article One readings’ of the Treaty, which dominated New Zealand’s race relations paradigm up until the mid-1970s. In the first article, ‘all the rights and powers of Sovereignty’ – kawanatanga, in the Maori text – were said to have been passed by Maori to the Crown in 1840.

But following the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal, in particular, ‘Article Two readings’ began to assume an ever more prominent place in the national Treaty discourses. These came to focus on the meaning of the ‘rangatiratanga’ guaranteed in the Maori version of Article Two. Rangatiratanga, it was increasingly accepted, implied much more than ownership rights; it was akin to sovereignty or, at very least, to certain forms of sub-sovereignty arrangements between the Crown and Maori authorities. The historical, contemporary and potential meanings of the Treaty of Waitangi were thus being reinterpreted in the light of the differences between the ‘two Treaties’, te reo Maori and English. In the 1980s, especially, the implications of the term ‘tino rangatiratanga’ (often translated along the lines of ‘full autonomy’) became of prominent public concern.³⁰

Such an explicit focus on the word ‘rangatiratanga’ was a new factor in Treaty and indigenous discourse in twentieth-century New Zealand. Maori leaders had long sought greater tribal and other forms of autonomy, and the terminology used for this had altered through time. In the decades of urbanisation and adaptation to modernity following the Second World War, they had seldom characterised their authority as ‘rangatiratanga’ or publicly voiced demands for the Crown to respect it. Ngata’s 1922 published ‘explanation’ of the Treaty,page 174 long afterwards cited as authoritative, had been influential in shaping Maori attitudes on both terminology and meaning in the Treaty. He had asserted that the ‘English expressions in the Treaty were not adequately rendered into Maori’, but sought to dispel the confusion that surrounded the Treaty by privileging the English text.

Ngata had pronounced that, under Article One, Maori transmitted ‘absolute [‘chiefly’] authority … into the hands of the Queen’, and he urged his people to accept all laws made by the Parliament she had later established. While Article Two guaranteed Maori a certain ‘authority’ and ‘sovereignty’, indeed ‘rangatiratanga’, this (he had argued) was merely the ‘right of a Maori to his land, to his property’. He dismissed as ‘wishful thinking’ the various schemes for a Maori parliament or for different types of absolute Maori authorities ‘as the authority of the Maori was set aside for ever by the first article of the Treaty’. Influenced by Ngataism, Maori tended to eschew the word rangatiratanga. But just as Ngata never stopped urging greater Maori control over their own affairs, Maori continued to fight for what was essentially rangatiratanga both during his lifetime and in the decades after his death in 1950.

To the extent that demands for autonomy were raised in the official committees, voluntary associations and other Maori organisations that emerged and flourished in the period of mass post-war urbanisation, these fitted within Ngata’s parameters of indivisible Crown sovereignty. During this period, alternative Maori words or English expressions came into vogue within Maori society to replace those considered outmoded by modernity – words such as mana for rangatiratanga, or tribe for iwi. Others, such as runanga, remained almost as quiet in the context of Crown–Maori relations, and in pakeha consciousness, as rangatiratanga. But a number of these traditional terms sprung back into public discourse during the ferment of ideas and activities of the Maori Renaissance.

One key element in that regrowth of words and the concepts underpinning them was to be found in the energies of the new activist generation of the later 1960s and the 1970s. For many activists, the past Maori tendency for accommodation to European words and ways, including through the operations of the urban committees, associations and clubs, needed confronting and overturning. The ‘various Maori Committees seem to have done very little’, declared an early Nga Tamatoa pamphlet, the protest group which most emphasised language revival. Initially, the new movements focused on cultural renaissance, and did not systematically challenge indivisible Crown sovereignty and Article One readings of the Treaty. But such challenge was implicit, with the Maori Organisation on Human Rights claiming, for example, that Ngata had written his explanation of the Treaty partly as an ‘apologist for the Pakeha government’. The cultural and the political were inextricably intertwined,page 175 and Nga Tamatoa’s (and others’) work on reviving te reo focussed minds on, among other things, connections between politico-cultural suppression and linguistic trends.³¹

From the very beginning of the new wave of Maori radicalism, moreover, Te Hokioi and MOOHR newsletters were concerned with matters of autonomy, self-determination and Maori ‘control over those things which are particularly Maori’. This was in the context of claimed rights to equality, culture and land within the existing constitutional framework. The early renaissance activists wanted Maori to assume ‘that which is rightfully theirs’, particularly ‘the right to determine their own destiny in our multi-racial society’. Like Ngata, however, they tended to accept that, with the Treaty, ‘sovereignty over New Zealand was transferred from the Maori Chiefs to Queen Victoria’ in indivisible form. Thus, in 1970 MOOHR declared that the signing of the Treaty ‘marked the birth of our bi-cultural New Zealand, when by consent of most Maori Chiefs all rights and powers of sovereignty were ceded to the British Queen, who thereby secured to the Chiefs and Tribes…“the full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands”.’

In other words, the English language text of the Treaty still dominated discussion, so much so that when Te Hokioi presented ‘The Differing Versions’ of the Treaty, the Maori version was given in an English translation (with Article Two granting Maori ‘complete dominion over all their lands, houses, customs and goods’). The aim was to emphasise state violations of the Treaty, contextualising protest by pointing out that the Crown had fallen far short on its promise to guarantee ‘complete dominion’ and ‘exclusive and undisturbed possession’ for Maori. In 1974, Ranginui Walker argued in terms of the English version, declaring that the ‘chiefs yielded their sovereignty’ because of the ‘undisturbed possession’ that the Treaty guaranteed them. Even a booklet called Te Tiriti o Waitangi, published in the early 1980s by the radical Waitangi Action Committee (WAC), referred only to the English text of the Treaty.³²

But as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, the significance of the differences between the English and Maori versions was slowly coming to be realised. Walker compared the different versions in one of his influential Listener columns in 1980, and increasing attention was now generally being paid within Maoridom to issues which touched on sovereignty. ‘Maori people are a sovereign people’, declared the Waitangi Action Committee in 1981, while the Maori Peoples Liberation Movement of Aotearoa claimed a couple of years later that ‘the majority of young Maori activists’ were taking up Awatere’s call for Maori sovereignty ‘as a basic thrust’. As Maori terms increasingly entered the English language, talk of indigenous autonomy, self-determination or sovereignty gradually became talk of rangatiratanga. Activists made the tino rangatiratanga guaranteed under the Treaty – a notion which was generallypage 176 applied to the rights of all Maori, not just to the governance roles of chiefly rangatira – a central political focus. They were ever more vocal and proactive in their quest for its recognition by the Crown. By the mid-1980s, sizeable numbers of liberal pakeha, together with the Waitangi Tribunal, had firmly entered the public discourse on the Treaty and the meaning of its different versions. Rangatiratanga viewpoints, including claims relating to equal or greater authority for the Maori-language version of the Treaty, were firmly entrenched in those debates.³³