War takes many forms. It includes culture war, that intentionally adversarial and divisive conflict intended to provoke political polarisation. That’s the war we are experiencing in Aotearoa right now.
There are angry provocateurs who through various media assail what they call “wokeness”. Apparently being Māori and speaking te reo Māori is woke.
At some deep psychological level perhaps, some people would feel more comfortable if Aotearoa were geographically anchored closer to the British Isles, even to Zealand, rather than in the Pacific Ocean, Te Moananui a Kiwa, and Māoriland, as it were.
This tension between our colonial identity and geographic reality is expressed by Justice Sir Joe Williams as the dialectical struggle between what he describes as Kupe’s Law and Cook’s Law.
Justice Williams describes Kupe’s Law as the seminal indigenous law of Aotearoa that developed through tikanga over perhaps a thousand years. Following European colonisation and post Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Kupe’s law was bumped aside and became subsumed by what Justice Williams describes as Cook’s Law, the law that the angry anti-wokes are more comfortable with.
To their distress, Kupe’s law has started to re-emerge, first in legislation and statute, and more recently in common law, jurisprudence. Hence, we see the coalition of attacks on what is seen as an activist judiciary, and the political desire to remove references to Te Tiriti o Waitangi from the narrative in the machinery of government. Yes, this is a culture war.
The question we currently face is how best to respond. One strategy we can deploy is to avoid war on the aggressor’s terms, and, rather, to win the peace.
I can stand as a citizen of Aotearoa New Zealand. But can I stand upright? Can I stand proud? The poet Alan Curnow said: “Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year, Will learn the trick of standing upright here.”
Glenn Colquhoun subtly changed the sense to “the art of walking upright here” that is the need to move forward with respecting the indigenous culture of Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as the exotic culture of one’s ancestors.
Indigeneity and race are not the same thing. Ngāti Kahungunu leader Tareha Te Moananui pointed this out in his maiden speech in New Zealand’s Fourth Parliament in September 1868. Te Moananui said that Māori and Europeans were similar but not the same. Māori had a pre-existing relationship with the land and the mauri of the land, the binding force between the physical and metaphysical.
How do we fuse rather than confuse? Ta Edward Durie gave us a way of thinking when in 1989 as chair of the Waitangi Tribunal he spoke of Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti. David Seymour objects to the terminology of Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti, presenting them as an unwelcome binary divide. On the contrary, I believe these concepts provide us with a basis to unite.
Ta Eddie said that Tangata Tiriti belong to this land by right of te Tiriti. He noted that without Te Tiriti we would have no lawful presence in such numbers nor any legitimate political role in this part of the Pacific. Through Te Tiriti, Tangata Tiriti have a relationship with Māori and can both contribute to and benefit from the bounty of our beautiful, shared, land. We can honour the Treaty by honouring each other.
Mānawatia a Matariki.
The Treaty & Me free Thursday lecture series continues at 7pm on July 25 at St Matthew’s, Hastings, with the topic ‘Living a Treaty-based future – a youth perspective’. Speakers are Te Uranga Lee Belk, Piripi Winiata, Layla Christison and Henry Lyons.
