Whenua is a New Zealand Herald project to show and tell stories of our land and explain how our history affects the present day. In this story, Tā Tipene O’Regan tells Julia Gabel the Ngāi Tahu story.
The landscapes of Te Waipounamu first came alive for a young Tipene O’Regan as he travelled on a train to his grandmother’s house in Bluff. As he stared out the window, the boy’s beloved “Uncle Targe” told him the history and stories of landmarks that passed them by.
He watched rivers, lakes, valleys and mountains zoom past the train window that all had a special meaning to young Tipene’s family and their iwi, Ngāi Tahu.
Eight decades later, after being appointed to the Order of New Zealand – the nation’s highest royal honour – Tā Tipene O’Regan still remembers those stories.
They come to him as he passes those landmarks in his car.
They come to him as he flies home to Christchurch and watches the mountains, peninsulas and valleys pass below him from the aeroplane window.
And they come to him whenever he is required to introduce himself.
“When I greet you, I greet you from Te Waka o Aoraki, from the canoe of Aoraki.
“The stories become what you identify with. So that’s who I am, that’s where I’m from.”
But those landscapes were part of 34.5 million acres of Te Waipounamu land that passed from Māori to the Crown in a series of 19th-century land sales under what Ngāi Tahu has described as dubious circumstances where the terms of the transaction were not honoured.
This is Ngāi Tahu’s story of the whenua.
Promises made, promises broken
Everyone, O’Regan says, has a sense of place. For Ngāi Tahu, this tends to be the rugged, formidable landscapes of Te Waipounamu.
For others, it may be another part of New Zealand, a forest, beach, suburb, park or street. Perhaps it’s a family home or a much bigger area.
Perhaps Captain William Hobson was trying to recreate a sense of place when he arrived in New Zealand in 1840 and used the name “New Munster” to describe the South Island in honour of the Irish province he was born in.
It wasn’t long after the first tangata pora (boat people) – an early term used by Māori to describe settlers – arrived that Ngāi Tahu’s sense of place was destroyed through a series of “deceitful” land sales that saw almost all of the South Island pass from Māori to the Crown in two decades, O’Regan says.
Ngāi Tahu has meticulously recorded and archived their history. O’Regan founded the Ngāi Tahu Archive in Christchurch in 1978 which houses maps, books and documents that date back to the mid-1800s when the contentious land sales began.
The iwi has several online resources, such as Kareao (the Ngāi Tahu Archive website) and Kā Huru Manu (a digital atlas mapping traditional Ngāi Tahu place names and associated stories).
O’Regan also commissioned a series of books by historian Harry C. Evison to canvas the history of the iwi. The Herald has relied heavily on Evison’s work for this article.
Evison speaks of the South Island around the 13th century as a pristine whenua rich in pounamu (greenstone). The land was rugged and unforgiving with steep mountain ranges and remote valleys, sweeping bays pounded by surf and rocky bluffs.
These formidable lands were rich in food – oceans were full of fish, forests were full of birds and estuaries were full of eels.
Along with gardens and other mahinga kai (traditional food resources), this was how Ngāi Tahu sustained themselves.
By the 1830s, Evison says, Ngāi Tahu had built a thriving trade with whaling ships and exports to New South Wales including pigs, potatoes and dried fish. Chiefs had established their own whaling and sealing stations as well as a successful harakeke (flax) trade with Australia.
The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, gave the Crown the right of pre-emption, meaning only the Crown could buy land directly from Māori, which was pitched as being in the best interest of Māori.
This ultimately prevented Māori from getting a competitive price, despite chiefs being astute in business dealings and establishing prosperous industries and international trade deals for their people.
As plans for organised colonial settlement grew, the Crown turned its attention to obtaining lands in the South Island – and advised its land agents to make deals with Ngāi Tahu using the provisions of “tenths”, hospitals and schools to make the deal more appealing, Evison wrote.
O’Regan says these promises were commonly dishonoured.
“It wasn’t the sale itself; it was what was done to the sales,” he says.
“The terms weren’t honoured, particularly the schools and hospitals. People were decimated by consumption [tuberculosis], which was a rampant disease and there were no hospitals for Ngāi Tahu.”
The term “tenths” is a reference to a Crown rule at the time that every tenth rural and urban section should be reserved for the vendors. This was meant to ensure sufficient land, that would be ultimately owned by the Crown, was allocated for Māori to live on so they could thrive.
“They didn’t allocate reserves that they promised they would,” O’Regan says.
“The reserves were not awarded, or if they were, they were poor and inadequate land.”
The iwi had also grown an admiration for literacy and the early missionary schools where it was taught. It presented a new way of passing – and retaining – knowledge from one to another.
The Crown had promised chiefs if they sold their land, they would build schools for their children. O’Regan says this promise was never fulfilled.
“You had an oral literature in which your kaumātua would sit by the fire and tell stories and the children would learn them,” O’Regan says.
“The myths and the whakapapa and all these things were transmitted by memory. Being dependent on an oral literature, it had a huge weakness. That dependency meant that you could wipe out your national library with one smack of a patu.
“Then they encountered the idea that Pākehā could write down stories, that they had this written form. They could hold the stories and not have to depend solely on memory.
“Literacy gave you a way of having your stories, your traditions, your heritage, your identity, locked down in a written form. You could make a map on the beach, you could describe Te Ika-a-Māui [North Island] on the sand, but the tide came in and washed it away.”
The Waitangi of the South
The Kemp purchase has many of the features the Crown used to force low-value sales: promises of reserves and hospitals that were never fulfilled; competing claims to the land by other iwi; and poorly defined land boundaries.
The Kemp purchase was signed in 1848 and became the largest block of land brought by the Crown. Its 20 million acres make up almost a third of New Zealand’s land area.
It was considered so significant that in 1935 the North Canterbury Gazette newspaper referred to the contract as the “Waitangi of the South Island”, in reference to the Treaty of Waitangi.
“By this Waitangi of the South Island, practically the whole of the South Island from the Ashley River to the Clutha was ceded away,” the Gazette reported.
Evison says the Kemp deed was possible because of a smaller land sale that had happened just before it in Wairau.
There, Evison says Governor George Grey had bought about 220km of coastal land from Wairau to Kaiapoi from Ngāti Toa, an iwi that had invaded Ngāi Tahu and claimed “ahi ka” or possession by conquest of their land, although, according to Ngāi Tahu, they never occupied it. Grey paid £3000 for the block.
As Evison explains, buying the land from Ngāti Toa was of huge offence to Ngāi Tahu as it not only meant they lost the land without compensation, but it also acknowledged Ngāti Toa as the rightful owners of the land rather than themselves, disrespecting their mana.
Ngāi Tahu chiefs became nervous more of their land could be “sold” to the Crown by other iwi and this would have been heavy on their minds when Grey approached them to negotiate the Kemp block.
Grey began initial negotiations about the Kemp sale with chiefs but passed the job of finalising the deal to Henry Tacy Kemp. Kemp negotiated the deed with some Ngāi Tahu chiefs, but, as Evison says, of the 65 chiefs and heads of whānau who held customary rights over the land block, less than a quarter actually signed. Kemp also made the chiefs sign the deed on a warship in the presence of armed men – something unheard of at the time.
Evison says many of the chiefs signing the deed did so to uphold their people’s mana against further encroachment by Ngāti Toa.
Once the deed was signed, a third British Consul, Walter Mantell, was tasked with allocating the reserves, even though he was not present at the sale.
Evison describes Mantell as parsimonious – he substantially reduced the areas of land for Ngāi Tahu reserves from the large areas that were initially discussed.
He also refused to recognise mahinga kai – Ngāi Tahu traditional food sources – as reserves. Ngāi Tahu historian Helen Brown says the Kemp deed specifically included the promise Ngāi Tahu would retain their “mahinga kai”, which was the main way they sustained themselves.
The Crown’s failure to set aside mahinga kai in Kemp’s deed was central to the Ngāi Tahu settlement claim at the Waitangi Tribunal.
When Mantell was done allocating reserves, Ngāi Tahu were left with 6359 acres out of the 20 million acres of the Kemp deed – less than half a per cent of the total land area.
Kemp: The Hole in the Middle
Chiefs negotiated the boundaries of the block with Kemp, but much contention, still to this day, has arisen over what the agreed boundaries were.
Evison says the block had not been officially surveyed at the time the deal was discussed and chiefs present at the signing of the deed disputed seeing a map of the boundaries. The chiefs took what was articulated at the time of the agreement as the boundaries of the block.
Brown says the boundaries discussed were between the east coast and the foothills, from Maungatere (Mount Grey) in North Canterbury to Maungaatua at Taiari in the south – a much smaller section of land than what the Crown later described as the boundaries of Kemp’s Deed.
Ngāi Tahu calls the difference in these boundaries the “Hole in the Middle”.
“There is contention around what was agreed. A sketch map, known as Kemp’s Deed plan, shows the purported purchase area, extending from the eastern seaboard over to the West Coast. But this sketch map was never seen by the people who signed,” Brown says.
O’Regan says the debate over “the Hole in the Middle” has been long-standing.
“Our concern with the Hole in the Middle was essentially the connection of it to mahinga kai, because the tribe, particularly north, south and east, would converge in there in season for food.
“They’d carry poha, or kelp bags, in with them, which they’d be preparing on the coast. They’d carry those into the Mackenzie Country and those territories.”
Ngāi Tahu would gather in the “Hole in the Middle” area annually for meetings and marriages, O’Regan says.
“It was a significant arena of regular interconnection. That area in the centre was the ground where our people met annually on a regular basis to either make peace or have arguments or marriages.”
It was also home to important mahinga kai, says O’Regan, particularly river areas that gave access to weka during the hunting seasons.
“Basically, the rivers and those areas in the centre were notable for weka and tuna [eels] in the season. They were almost as important to us historically as the Tītī Islands where the mutton birds are.”
Mahinga kai: Poverty & protest
As colonial settlers arrived in the South Island, Ngāi Tahu’s mahinga kai were destroyed and the land was cleared to make way for farming and settlements.
Ngāi Tahu suffered greatly.
The land allocated to them as “reserves” was not enough to support their populations.
In 1890, Alexander Mackay, a Native Land Court judge, produced a Royal Commission report which included harrowing accounts of the grinding poverty and despair that gripped Māori in the South Island.
Evison included anecdotes from the report in his book The Long Dispute. Younger men with insufficient land to support their families said it would be better for them to die as they felt as though they did not have a future. Every year it was harder, Evison says, for them to find employment, and without employment, they would not be able to exist on their small portion of land.
Eel fisheries that once provided food for their families were mostly destroyed after being drained by settlers while rivers and streams were unavailable because they were now stocked with imported fish settlers targetted as game.
If Māori did try to gather food from the land, Evison says, they were turned away by the landowners. Those who were employed by Europeans could eke out a livelihood, but their peers lived in semi-starvation.
People could not afford medical attention, Evison says, and became heavily in debt to shopkeepers.
As land was subdivided for pastoral farming and homes for new settlers and their families, Ngāi Tahu continued to suffer.
Ngāi Tahu whānau did not have enough land to live off and it affected them physically, emotionally and spiritually.
At Waitaki, for example, all mahinga kai had been cut off. Evison says runholders had forbidden Māori from catching weka (a key Māori food source at the time) because they wanted them for their game. Evison says runholders threatened to shoot any Māori who went hunting for the birds.
“The tuis and all the other birds are gone,” Ngāi Tahu elder Rāwiri Te Maire said, as recorded by Evison.
“The roots of the kāuru and fern have been destroyed by fire when our custom was to only take what was required. We can get meat now only by paying for it and we have no money for the purpose.”
Ngāi Tahu had expressed despair at seeing large numbers of eels, for example, being killed for sport until the rivers were run dry while they themselves starved.
“In former times our whata [storage shelves] used to be full of food, but now we do not need whata because we have nothing to put in them through everything being taken from us by the Europeans.”
Meanwhile, a Ngāi Tahu rangatira wrote to Queen Victoria in 1849, pleading for mercy amid the mass land losses:
“Madam, tenakoe. Let your clemency be shown to us, as our respect for you is great unto the end... for you have become as near as a relation can be to us because New Zealand has been named as a messenger of wealth to the Queen.
“With regard to my pieces of land, I retained them because I was not one of those who consented to sell the land. I retained them for my permanent use. They are not large pieces, they are small. Let your graciousness therefore be shown to us and to New Zealand generally because these lands are our own and were handed down to us by our ancestors.
“The pieces my father had are the portions I now claim. This is my friendly address to you, and therefore please be kind to us.”
After the land sales, Ngāi Tahu were almost landless.
The prosperous industries that existed once before were gone and the fertile gardens and mahinga kai that fed their people comfortably had been destroyed.
They wanted to participate in the new booming settler economies, such as farming, but, as Evison explains, their fertile land had been taken away and any land returned to them as reserves was often poor quality.
Ngāi Tahu were hungry, and they were displaced. But they were not complacent.
Ngāi Tahu rangatira Matiaha Tiramōrehu launched the first official complaint of land loss to the Crown in 1849, the year after Kemp’s Deed was signed. From then onwards, nearly every subsequent Ngāi Tahu chief has continued the fight for justice for the iwi with further protests.
Ngāi Tahu’s grievance claim eventually became known as Te Kerēme. Its nine chapters became known as the “nine tall trees of Ngāi Tahu”, eight represented land sales, and the ninth represented broken promises over mahinga kai.
‘It’s a divisive time but that doesn’t stop us from dreaming’
In a quiet suburb of Christchurch, among newly built houses and green backyards, sits the Ngāi Tahu Archive building.
With modern timber and vast windows, this building is also new and was recently rebuilt after the Christchurch earthquakes.
Inside, it houses pieces of history more than a hundred years old.
Inside, O’Regan is waiting to tell the story of Ngāi Tahu.
At 84 years old, he is as regal as ever, a crisp suit, tie, pounamu, warm smile and quick wit.
There is no disdain – but a thirst for New Zealand to truly know our history.
There is no resentment – but a dream of a country where Ngāi Tahu has a harmonious relationship with Tangata Tiriti and the Crown.
”It was time to make peace with the Crown,” he says.
“We turned our waka around.”
In 1991, the Waitangi Tribunal released its Ngāi Tahu Land report, covering the major land purchases between 1844 and 1864, and access to mahinga kai.
As Martin Fisher explains in his book, A Long Time Coming, Ngāi Tahu claims over a lack of reserves, schools, hospitals, miserly paid prices for land and claims to mahinga kai were all validated.
But the tribunal rejected Ngāi Tahu’s claim to the “Hole in the Middle”. O’Regan says Evison, the historian, had wanted the Ngāi Tahu Maori Trust Board to take the tribunal to court over its decision, but the iwi eventually decided to go for a settlement instead.
“That caused a certain amount of strain even within our own membership, but the decision was overwhelming, we would go for a settlement,” O’Regan says.
“We would not continue the fight because it was time to make peace with the Crown and negotiate as well as we could.”
The Ngāi Tahu claim, Te Kerēme, was passed to O’Regan by Frank Winter, a Ngāi Tahu leader and political activist who had mentored O’Regan while he was part of Victoria University’s Māori Graduates Association.
Under Winter, O’Regan learnt how to draft petitions to Parliament for small things, such as getting funding to fix door hinges at a marae. This, he says, set his political activism alight.
“Apparently, I worked on something in the order of nearly a hundred parliamentary petitions,” O’Regan says.
“That’s when my political agnosticism started to really develop.”
O’Regan says the Ngāi Tahu settlement is his most important achievement.
The Ngāi Tahu negotiations team – made up of O’Regan, as the Chief Negotiator, Kuao Langsbury, Trevor Howse, Charles Crofts, Edward Ellison, and Rakiihia Tau Senior, succeeded by Rakihia Tau jnr – reached a settlement with the Crown in 1998, more than 140 years after Tiramōrehu’s first Ngāi Tahu land protest.
On the day of the settlement, almost nine generations were “represented at the table”, O’Regan says.
“For those generations, you’ve got a culture and a heritage founded on resentment because Te Kerēme became our culture. If you’re forcefully separated from your land, a part of your identity becomes resentment.
“The settlement permitted you to put that behind you.”
The settlement included $170m in value – much less than the $20 billion of economic losses the iwi faced from the Crown’s land purchases – but enough for the iwi to build up its assets through its own initiatives that are today valued at more than $2b.
“We think that the Ngāi Tahu dream is a dream about ourselves, but ourselves as partners in Aotearoa New Zealand,” O’Regan says.
“We’re not there yet, but you saw some big signs of what we might get over Matariki and the public commemoration and celebration of Matariki that we’ve just had. It’s a snapshot of what we could become.
“It’s a divisive time but that doesn’t stop us from dreaming. The only opposition to having a dream is despair and we should be dreaming about what we can be as a people, as a nation, and have a clear notion of what we, Ngāi Tahu are, as part of that nation.”
For Māori, knowledge is their mana, mauri and wairua. It is a clarification of their whakapapa to Ranginui and Papatūānuku, to their whānau and iwi.
It is clarification of who they are and their reason for existence. Recording it in a written form or storing it in an archive offers the opportunity for the next generation to acquire what is inherently theirs and help them grow up knowing who they are.
O’Regan hopes the settlement and the wealth of resources stored in its physical and digital archives give Ngāi Tahu rangatahi the ability to dream of realities beyond the shackles of grievance, penury and resentment that came from the loss of their heartland.
He hopes it gives the young Ngāi Tahu a sense of identity beyond resentment.
“That’s why we have taken the course we have after settlement. That’s why we’ve had to focus on building the archive, the literature, the stories, to build a positive view so we could start dreaming of our forward evolution.
“The most important thing to know is your own heritage and your own identity, your own language and your own songs and to keep singing them.”
Whenua is a New Zealand Herald data-led project, supported by the Public Interest Journalism Fund, in association with Māori land legal expert Adrienne Paul (Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tuhoe) from the University of Canterbury law school.