Tuhoe await their walk into history

Tamati Kruger speaks at a Tuhoe public hui about treaty settlements last year. He is disappointed the Government has backed down. Photo / Rotorua Daily Post

Sixteen months ago, Tamati Kruger was feeling hopeful.

Today, not so much.

Last April the first instalment of a hefty Waitangi Tribunal report into Te Urewera had been released and had found sweeping injustices against Tuhoe had "echoed down through the generations and explains the anguish and anger evident to this very day".

For Tuhoe, the report vindicated their frustration and fury at the treacherous ways land was taken from their ancestors by the Crown and settlers; for war and death and for a policy of destruction and deliberate starvation which was inflicted in and around the Ureweras.

Earlier this year, Tuhoe's long and winding negotiations for a settlement with John Key's Government were also going well.

Their big claims - of mana motuhake (self-governance) and for the return of what is now the Urewera National Park - were said to be nearly ticked off.

They were so close, says Kruger, Tuhoe historian and chief claims negotiator, that he could smell history in the making.

But then in May Key backed off, suddenly announcing the return of the land had never been agreed to.

Now, part two of the Waitangi Tribunal report into Te Urewera has been released. At 1000 pages, it too is weighty reading. The third part is still being worked on.

Many recommendations are likely to come in Part Three, but Part Two has already recommended the return of some land - at Onepoto, Lake Waikaremoana, which has significant pa sites and which the tribunal says should never have been taken.

The report also describes other sweeping confiscations, including four blocks of land at Waikaremoana (about 72844ha), and how other land was removed by fraudulent methods.

And it describes unjust war too, highlighting a series of engagements from the end of 1865 to May 1866.

One, the battle of Te Kopani, was particularly brutal.

It involved the deaths of at least 40 Maori, and was described by tribunal judge Patrick Savage as ranking among the most grim in the New Zealand Wars, with more deaths in battle than the entire campaign against Te Kooti in Te Urewera.

Te Kopani

From the Hawkes Bay Herald, 1866:

"No fewer than 10 settlements were taken possession of and destroyed; and in the vicinity of those settlements were large tracts of valuable land, hitherto wholly unknown to the European settler.

Immense cultivations - the extent of which took the friendly natives completely by surprise - were found in the vicinity of the kaingas, as well as large numbers of horses and cattle.

The cultivations comprised crops of all kinds of cereals, and are estimated to be worth, as they stand, a large sum of money. They were all taken possession of by the expeditionary force, and may not improbably form a valuable addition to the colonial commissariat.

The Crown forces found it difficult to penetrate the rifle pits. But Wahawaha's tactic of firing the fern cover saw the ambush finally fail and the defenders flee as Wahawaha's men charged the rifle pits.

About 20 of Wahawaha's men chased those who fled for the four miles from Te Kopani to Te Onepoto and Lake Waikaremoana. Some escaped across the lake in waka that lay waiting for them; others dispersed into the surrounding forests.

When they reached Te Onepoto the 'friendly natives' took 14 prisoners, nine of whom were men.

Four prisoners were executed the following day by Wahawaha, who called them out of the whare where they were confined, seated them in a row, and shot them with his revolver 'one after the other'."

Kruger says getting this sort of vindication from the Waitangi Tribunal is meaningful for Tuhoe.

It doesn't matter whether you are Maori, Pakeha or other, he says, but when you feel you have been a victim of a wrong, moving on towards forgiveness is impossible when you feel there is no recognition that something wrong happened.

"The first significant move towards forgiveness is when people say 'yes, something wrong happened here' and there is a feeling we can move on now."

Yet Tuhoe cannot move on. The tribe, plagued over the past 150 years with distrust at the Crown, is still having problems with it, especially since Key's U-turn on the return of land - which the Prime Minister followed with a flippant joke about cannibals.

Key said on a radio show it was a good thing he was having dinner with Ngati Porou as opposed to neighbouring Tuhoe, "in which case I would have been dinner".

Key's about-face, says Kruger, was another kiss of death to justice.

"I think," he muses, "there is a point where you miss justice. There is a certain space and time where if you have waited too long, justice is gone.

"We have missed justice. In the report you'll find the tribunal says Tuhoe was failed, yet the courts never offered redress. The courts - like the Maori Land Court, the Native Land Court, and even the Crown, saw great injustices had occurred but they sat by.

"For example, the Waiohau fraud, you know, 2833ha stolen where the perpetrators used the courts to mastermind and to legalise it and the system sat there and went, 'hmm, no, it's not right, it's not good', and they did nothing."

Key is the same, he says.

"You can quite rightly place John Key in the gallery of other people who came so close and then courage abandoned them."

Kruger talks of people who came close to justice and set precedents he thinks this Government should take note of. There was Donald McLean, who in 1871 was Minister of Native Affairs and secured a significant peace deal with Tuhoe chiefs.

Twenty years later Premier Richard Seddon enshrined the tribe's self-governance in law, though this did not last.

The tribunal report also describes how in 1872 Tuhoe set up a governing council of chiefs, called Te Whitu Tekau (The Seventy), which the tribunal says was a remarkable political initiative representing the attempt of the peoples of Te Urewera to regroup after debilitating conflict and an attempt to safeguard their mana motuhake and their lands, though the Crown chipped away at their powers.

However, the tribunal says by the 1890s both the Crown and the people were willing to move on and discuss a form of self-government.

It was at this point that an accord of real promise was reached when Premier Seddon spoke with leaders, brought them to Wellington for discussion and negotiation, and then passed the Urewera District Native Reserve Act in 1896.

The Act embodied an arrangement unique in our history, writes Judge Savage.

The Crown granted real powers of self-government and collective tribal control of their lands to the people, but Savage said it was a matter of huge regret that the legislation did not fulfil its terms, nor its potential to give effect to mana motuhake.

Kruger thinks the return of Te Urewera will one day come to pass. He would like it to be in his lifetime and says he, like all Tuhoe, is waiting for the "the enlightened Prime Minister [who] is not afraid to think, 'why not?"'

The return of Te Urewera, says Kruger, remains Tuhoe's bottom line and the only way a full and final settlement will be achieved. As long as the land remains with the Crown, it remains the lingering symbol of injustice.

"I can smell it," he says. "I can feel history beckoning. We are not going to move and walk away from it and we would like to take all of New Zealand with us and walk into history.

"It will bring so much glory to this nation and I think help with our colonial past which all of us want to kiss goodbye, everyone, not just Tuhoe people. It's just that Tuhoe people are not afraid to pay the price of waiting and waiting."

To read the Te Urewera report so far go to www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz and search wai 894.