Pat Snedden: A place to call our own

COMMENT

A commentator suggested that Don Brash's speech at Orewa tapped, at a very emotional level, the sense of Pakeha feeling "strangers in our own land". How, in short, they needed to reclaim a sense of belonging.

Brian Turner has asserted a deep and intimate Pakeha connection with that land, a connection denied, he believed, by many Maori. He did so, in a Listener article, while objecting to Ranginui Walker, who had said: "I have been here a thousand years. You arrived only yesterday."

Turner responded that that view clearly denied a similar depth of feeling to almost everyone else. He fundamentally disagreed with a presumption about the way in which non-Maori feelings for land and water were dismissed as less heartfelt, less sensitive, less spiritual.

When Trevor Mallard last week claimed proudly, as a boy from Wainuiomata, that he, too, was indigenous, he, likewise, was making a clear statement of his belonging to this country, an unambiguous claim on personal ownership.

It is a claim to cultural authenticity that intuitively feels necessary to all non-Maori. But is indigeneity the right way to go?

Am I, as a Pakeha, indigenous? Well, emotionally yes and technically no.

For me to claim my 140 years of direct ancestry here is a source of pride and this is my home. But can I fairly claim to be indigenous in the same way as Maori who have been here from around 1300?

To do so would be to sideline 500-plus years of Maori experience before my forebears' arrival and would also fail to adequately address a metaphysical reality different from that of our Pakeha experience.

What's more, my forebears were not the first people to settle here, an important element of the definition.

So to claim to be indigenous in the same way as tangata whenua is unfair and, technically, not factual. And if there is one thing that we need to do today, it is to stick to the facts.

But nor do I wish to be deferential in this matter. As Pakeha, we claim our belonging through being descended from the settlers and Crown representatives who agreed the Treaty of Waitangi. This is the same Treaty that, by joint agreement of tangata whenua and tauiwi, gives all subsequent migrants and their communities the right to call this place their own. The importance of this cannot be understated.

The Maori Land Court Chief Judge Eddie Durie, in 1990, first described Pakeha and all other non-Maori as tangata Tiriti, those who belong to the land by right of the treaty. It is our unimpeachable security, our right to belong passed from generation to generation since 1840.

On one side of my family, my migrant ancestors arrived at Port Albert, near Wellsford, in the 1860s. They became farmers. At the Port Albert land wharf, there is a plaque thanking Ngati Whatua for their help in settlement, and acknowledging that without that support they would not have survived.

Today we are shaped by a set of cultural reflexes towards the land, our environment and the interaction between Maori, Pakeha and Pacific peoples that exists nowhere outside of this place. And increasingly, especially in Auckland, our population is playing host to many new communities, and will continue to do so.

Most of us tauiwi, especially Pakeha, no longer have a bolthole to escape to anywhere else in the world that accepts us as their own. I have visited the heart of my Irish and Scottish roots and, except for the most superficial of acknowledgments, they did not see anything of themselves in me, nor me in them.

I am here for good because I have nowhere else to go. And I am content with that.

How much more satisfying would it be if we all claimed and acknowledged our own sense of belonging, different but authentic to its core, Treaty-based in its origins?

Then this discussion would be quite different. The Treaty would become our Treaty and our behaviour in relation to the principles of that Treaty would be inclusive, not exclusive.

* Auckland businessman Pat Snedden sits on the Auckland District Health Board, and is a member of the Ngati Whatua treaty negotiation team.