What a curiously ambivalent day is Waitangi Day.
I can never pretend it's just a "bank holiday", as they say in England. Perhaps to many this year, it is simply going to represent the chance to kiss off Friday work and take a four-day weekend, thanks to the day surfacing on a Thursday. But you'd have to be living in a box to be ignorant of the controversy that surfaces every February 6. Waitangi Day is like a badly made cake. It varies from surprisingly edible, but not perfect, to an inedible mess.
According to the Te Ara encyclopaedia, Waitangi Day became a holiday in 1974, at which point it was renamed New Zealand Day. That didn't go well - the name lasted two years. Protests seriously got going in 1971 and the height of protests is regarded, by Te Ara, as 1984, when a 4000-strong hikoi marched from Ngaruawahia to Waitangi. This year, a small anti-drilling hikoi is walking from the Far North. And we've already had abuse and "jostling" directed at Governor-General Sir Jerry Mataparae at the warm-up event at Te Tii Marae.
I reflect that protests are perhaps generational in nature and quality when it comes to grievances rooted in origins older than us all. A 4000-strong hikoi shows the mana and dignity of those with a united cause. A 50-strong hikoi is barely a ripple. It is up to the younger generation now to carry on the march, but they seem to lack the cohesion and organisation - and the mana - of their fathers and mothers.
What also hasn't assisted is linking 21st century infrastructure projects with the Treaty of Waitangi. We can be honest; just about anything in modern society can go against the principles of the Treaty, because an evolving society will inevitably trample on a document drafted in the 19th century. I can see that off-shore drilling is a risk to the ecology, and Maori are hardly alone in protesting against that. But demanding a share of the money from the sale of hydro-electric power stations, based on the idea that disputed water generated the power, was stretching people's tolerance. But even that's not a new argument and the Waitangi Tribunal found the grievance was valid.
