Historian's case for Tuhoe independence

A trip to the Ureweras sparked Dame Judith Binney's interest in Tuhoe. Photo / Dean Purcell

Once, not such a long time ago, in colonial New Zealand, Tuhoe were permitted to rule themselves within the boundaries of what was left of their land.

It was the late 1800s and they were the only tribe to gain legal autonomy from the Pakeha Government. For a short while. Then it was taken away.

The desire for autonomy never dulled though, nor was ceded by the Urewera mountain people; and today it is on the table again with John Key's Government, as part of a singular constitutional claim.

In a powerful new book on Tuhoe, eminent New Zealand historian Dame Judith Binney argues for that autonomy to be restored.

The time has long come, Binney told the Weekend Herald. She believes there is nothing to be feared from a separate Tuhoe nation operating within New Zealand and that the tribe has a strong case.

Such precedents exist around the world, she says, from Scotland and Ireland to Catalonia, which has been restored as an autonomous area within Spain, and the large Inuit state of Nunavut in Canada.

Her book makes plain that Tuhoe never wavered in their efforts to retain self-governance, from the moment colonists first began taking their land.

Her book Encircled Lands: Te Urewera, 1820-1921 is a painful, yet compelling, account of the treacherous means used to strip them of their land and subjugate them to Pakeha rule.

The book exposes in meticulous detail, gleaned from historical records and oral histories, the scale of the hurt inflicted by a colonial state hungry for farm land, and driven by the mistaken belief there was gold in the Ureweras.

Within the book's 600-odd pages Binney describes how every method possible - confiscation, war, poverty, sickness, starvation, fraud and ever-inventive legal mechanisms - was relentlessly exploited to take more land.

Just one of the many so-called legal methods used was to insist on surveying land, against Tuhoe wishes, only to charge huge sums for the survey then take the debt back in acres and acres of the best land.

Encircled Lands also rewrites the perception of little-known Tuhoe leaders of the day.

Once considered savages to be feared, Binney says as the men spoke to her unexpectedly across the pages of early records and she got to know them, she found the opposite was true.

She came to admire them as leaders of integrity and determination, men to whom sovereignty was everything.