Terry Dunleavy: Maori entitled to retain tangata whenua status

COMMENT

One of the greatest of the many tragedies resulting from the untimely death of Michael King has been the loss of an informed advocate with the intellectual firepower to challenge opinions on the alleged decline of biculturalism in New Zealand, such as those advanced in Elizabeth Rata's Dialogue article.

Dr Rata, herself well stocked with intellectual firepower, argued that the era of biculturalism, revived and revitalised in the 1970s, appeared to be ending. She said that biculturalism was a response to the conditions of the 1970s, but times had changed: our population was now much more multi-ethnic.

On the other hand, King, in his monumental literary legacy, The Penguin History of New Zealand, argued: "The bicultural reality remains a given, about which all New Zealanders need to be informed, and through which they will have to continue to negotiate - as national governments, as local governments, as community organisations and as individuals."

What are those of us who are not high-stratosphere academics to make of this divergence?

Let's start by going back to what we can learn from history. Those first identified as "New Zealanders" were the various groups from east Polynesia who, some 800 years ago, settled the islands first named Staten Land by Dutch navigator Abel Tasman, but shown on maps by his compatriot Joannes Blaeu as Nieuw Zeeland.

Certainly, until about 1830 they were always referred to as New Zealanders by visiting voyagers and the British Colonial Office. It is interesting that the word "Maori" does not appear in the English version of the Treaty of Waitangi, which mentions in its preamble "the Aborigines of New Zealand" and in its articles "the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand".

But in the Maori version of the treaty, Henry Williams chose to translate "Aborigine" as "Tangata maori" (ordinary people). This was probably the first official use of "Maori" to describe the Polynesian migrants who first settled here.

The treaty had two main objectives: to transfer sovereignty to the Queen (now referred to as "the Crown"); and to legitimise the presence of "the great number of Her Majesty's Subjects who have already settled in New Zealand" - in effect, to extend to those "subjects" the status of New Zealanders.

One wonders whether those who these days like to proclaim "We are all New Zealanders" realise this could be interpreted as saying "We are all Maori".

The treaty is crucial to the bicultural debate. While there is evidence that the hidden objective of the British Colonial Office was the assimilation of Maori into a rapidly expanded population of British Isles stock, the outward aim at the time was the peaceful co-existence of the first settlers (Maori as tangata whenua) with the second settlers (British immigrants as Pakeha or tangata tiriti) - clearly a bicultural basis on which to build a new and thriving colony.

I have always regarded the treaty as confirming my right to New Zealand citizenship, through birth here and descent from my maternal great-great-grandfather, an Irish colour sergeant, who came to Onehunga as a fencible soldier in 1849.

The fact that some assimilation did occur through intermarriage, and that the non-Maori population was extended over time by arrivals from elsewhere in continental Europe, Asia and the Pacific Islands, did not change the basis on which the modern state of New Zealand had been founded - a treaty between Maori on one hand, and the Crown on behalf of non-Maori on the other.

That's why the treaty has always been important to Maori: it identifies them as one party to the two-sided founding compact. Maori are not, as some modern-day revisionists like to claim, just another of the ethnic strands that make up the multi-ethnic fabric of New Zealand society today.

The fact that non-Maori population growth since 1840 has reduced Maori to a minority in the land which was once theirs alone does not, and should not, affect their status as one party to the two-party deal that the treaty sealed.

Thus, the constitutional reality in 2004 is that New Zealand is a bicultural state in which resides a multicultural society. Elizabeth Rata is right in separating the true meanings of culture ("what we do") and ethnicity ("who we are"), but I'm not so sure about her statement that "Maori culture becomes a constitutive strand in New Zealand culture".

The elusive ideal of a single New Zealand culture becomes more complicated when one considers King's recognition of a separate and distinctive "Pakeha culture".

Maori culture remains strong and vibrant in its adherence to tradition, while being adaptive to the trappings and usages of the westernised society in which it has to live. But Pakeha have absorbed much from Maori culture - words, songs, haka, ingenuity, how to relate to natural resources of land and sea, concern for welfare of people, greater reliance on consensus for reaching agreements.

People from other lands who followed the original British immigrants in the century or so after 1840 quickly absorbed this Pakeha culture along with fluency in the English language, however much their accents might indicate their countries of origin.

For its part, Maori culture became less obvious until the start of its renaissance in the 1970s. That renaissance revived awareness of the bicultural reality of life in New Zealand, and with it came renewal of regard for the treaty, greater legal recognition of the place of the treaty in our laws, and the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal.

More recent inflows of significant numbers from the Pacific Islands and Asia have added exciting new strands to the multi-ethnic fabric of society, but they must be regarded in a constitutional sense as being additions to the non-Maori or Pakeha half of the bicultural covenant on which New Zealand was founded in 1840.

For all their own self-awareness as fellow New Zealanders, and the extent to which they contribute to and interact with the rest of us for the advancement of our country, Maori are entitled to retain their special status as tangata whenua.

And so they should: what makes New Zealand unique, and makes us more than just a collection of different ethnicities, is our Maori dimension, that essential ingredient of our bicultural state.

* Terry Dunleavy, of Takapuna, is a member and former office-holder of the National Party, and a Pakeha member of Te Whanau o Hato Petera Trust.