The withdrawal of the deal to return iwi land has caused ongoing grief, writes Paul Moon.
History can be informative, instructive, and sometimes even illuminating. Cicero admonished us that without learning from history, we will continue as children, while Hegel viewed human history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
However, what the ghosts of history past did not mention was that history can also
be frustrating, even painful.
This month marks a year since one such lesson was foisted on Tuhoe by the Crown in a saga that has dragged on intermittently for more than a century.
At the start of May last year, all the indications were that the Crown and Tuhoe were putting the finishing touches on a deal that would see Te Urewera National Park returned to Tuhoe, with enough caveats to ensure that access and other rights for the public would remain practically unchanged.
Tuhoe would have what all the evidence shows rightfully belongs to it, and the rest of the country would not be adversely affected in any way in the process. The sort of settlement one would have expected the Crown and the public to welcome with open arms.
The deal was a long time coming. The Waitangi Tribunal has documented in excruciating detail how successive governments since the 19th century trampled over Tuhoe rights - appropriating their lands with disregard for the occupants and with contempt for any sense of natural justice.
In the roughly 18 months before last May, negotiations between various Government departments and the iwi looked promising.
All that remained were the formalities confirming the transfer.
Then, someone blinked. A rushed announcement was made by the Prime Minster that Tuhoe were not going to have the National Park returned to them after all.
The iwi's clearly stunned negotiators were left wondering what had suddenly gone wrong with negotiations that had appeared to have been progressing so well.
The excuse the Government used last May - and has stuck to since - was that the return of Te Urewera National Park might set a precedent for other Treaty settlements.
Putting aside the sui generis nature of Tuhoe's claim, the argument that doing something right in dealings with one iwi might mean having to do things right with other iwi, hardly seemed to be a good basis for the decision. The moral rectitude of returning Te Urewera National Park to Tuhoe ownership was completely airbrushed out of the political equation.
Yet, in spite of the enormous frustration of having the expected return of the land snatched away at the last minute, Tuhoe's response in the subsequent 12 months has been one of patience, restraint and dignity.
Its negotiators have persisted with their calm, informed approach in dealings with the Crown, while all the time, the Crown's tactic has been one of delay.
No doubt the beguiling character of Te Urewera National Park has been a consideration for those who oppose returning the park to Tuhoe.
Its long-lauded sublime characteristics have for more than a century left visitors to the area in awe of its staggering beauty.
Toothers, it is a drug-addled and gang-choked backwater - a dystopia in the middle of utopia. Either way, it is a part of the country where the links indigenous communities have with the land is strong, and where experiences since the 1860s have left an ingrained sense of grievance among many of the inhabitants.
With one year having passed since the Government's decision to pull the rug out from under the feet of Tuhoe, on the surface, things seemed to have stalled.
Low-level talks have continued, but the momentum lost last May has yet to be regained. Yet a resolution is still tantalisingly close.
Courage on one side and continued goodwill on the other seem to be all that is now required to produce a lasting settlement for an area that has for too long been victim to reticent government policies.
And that for just as long has lived with the mounting despair of a major grievance left unresolved.
