How I came to do a PhD on it is really quite by accident.
I had taken Sir James Henare to a cup of coffee in Kawakawa, and I was urging him, in a polite
way that a young person tries to urge a rangatira of his status, that maybe he should put all
his things down in writing, so that we could all remember it.
And so he said, "I've got a better idea."
He said, "You go and do a PhD on He Whakaputanga, and do the scholarly side of the oral tradition."
So he saw himself as an oral tradition person.
And he said, "We need some scholarship, because," he said, "there will be a day
when He Whakaputanga becomes a political issue again."
And remember from the 16th Century right up until the 18th/19th Century, Māori society
was just blossoming.
And it's in this period that Māori carvings as we know it today is taking off, painting
was taking off.
So clearly something was happening that enabled this take-off in art and form, and things
like this.
And of course, usually that's because there's a healthy economy to sustain the activity.
So the high level of art form that we see from the 16th Century tells you that there
must have been a dynamic economy, because it meant that certain people were now free
to concentrate solely on art form.
So England suddenly takes an interest because here's this garden producing trees, kauri
trees.
Captain Cook saw trees, and he saw ships, and Māori from the Bay of Islands say, "Yeah.
We'll give you spars for you boats.
And we'll give you timber for your fleet, and for Trafalgar," and so on and so forth.
And you had that lovely mix of Māori entrepreneurial chiefs providing products for Great Britain,
who became the chosen international market for Māori.
And that's all taking place in from the 18th Century onwards.
So there's an articulation of a grand idea to Whakaminenga o Ngā Hapū, is the grand
idea of the Declaration of Independence, because they knew, on the advice of Busby and others,
you can't claim independence unless you have a coherent body that does the claiming.
So they got the rangatira together and formed Te Whakaminenga o Ngā Hapū.
Now there's lot of words for a hui, or meetings in Māori; runanga, hui, all these.
But whakaminenga is a high-level kind of meeting; almost at the spiritual level.
It refers to the coming together of the divine will with the human will.
There is a period before 1840 which explains why 540 Māori leaders in just over six months
would suddenly sign this Treaty with British, which is a phenomenal achievement.
I reckon we would have trouble getting 540 rangatira today to agree on anything.
And so how did this happen?
And how come from the Bay of Islands to as far south as Awarua, Bluff, they all had the
common mind; from Tūhawaiki to the Hongi Hikas.
And that can only be explained because these characters were meeting each other on a regular
basis.
And the hapū were the dominant political institutions at this time; not the iwi.
Iwi would come in the 1850s.
So you have this going on, and once the formed Te Whakaminenga, then they said, "Ko te
Kingitanga mana i te whenua."
And they used the two notions of sovereignty; ko te Kingitanga, the sovereignty of the king,
because they did know that in England the sovereign had all the mana.
So that's why they insisted on the Kingitanga, to get that idea.
And then they expressed it in a beautiful Māori term, they said, "Ko mātou te mana
i te whenua."
What that says is, "We can speak, because we have the mana that comes from the land
to us.
Not "mana o te whenua."
They're not saying we have the mana over the land; we have the mana simply because
the land is in us.
And when we speak, we're saying our country, our whenua rangatira, indeed is free and prosperous,
which is the meaning of whenua rangatira, which in the Declaration.
So there's some beautiful, beautiful phrases in there.
So when you look at all those events together, the six as you refer to them, you'll see
a consistent behaviour, and a consistent thought pattern.
At no stage was a notion of mana or sovereignty ever considered as something to give away.
So the idea that the Treaty is a Treaty of cession or sovereignty is just illogical.
Māori is shifting from an oral tradition to now a written oral tradition; all that
thinking is now put to paper.
And when you think of literacy like that, I mean, a letter, a document is merely a set
of ideas frozen in time; that's the beauty of writing.
So suddenly we now know what they thought in 1831.
Why?
Because they wrote a letter, and it's no longer just oral in people's memory.
And so too with He Whakaputanga, the Declaration.
So they were determined that it should be in writing, not just a public statement.
My theory is that James Busby was a Scot first, and an Englishperson second.
Because he was giving them advice as if they were like Scottish peoples.
In fact he referred to the marae as being a meeting where all the clan leaders used
to meet.
Wherever the clan leaders met, they met on the same patch of land, and that's the similarity
he saw between the clan and the tribe.
So he advised them accordingly.
So when the clan leaders aggregate themselves into bigger interest, they have a parliament.
And he referred also to some of the large rangatira meetings as early Māori parliaments.
So he advised them on principles to do with international law, from Emmerich de Vattel's Law of Nations.
So, yeah.
The rangatira in the 1830s, 1840s getting advice on the latest international law.
And so when they declared independence, they knew, because they had been informed, that
when doing this no cession is given.
And so He Whakaputanga is carefully crafted to make sure that no cession of sovereignty
is ceded.
And it's based on Emmerich de Vattel's Law of Nations.
So when you put all that together, and then suddenly at 1835 they declare independence,
and five years later they cede sovereignty in perpetuity?
The logic of it defies imagination, really.
Most of us were born, raised that we ceded sovereignty; our leaders ceded sovereignty
forever.
And then, I think, as the Māori history started coming out, then a lot of us had to change
our minds; even though our instincts said it doesn't make sense.
But we had no basis for saying it, other than, "I can't imagine our tipuna doing it."
So we've been able to now look at fairly rationally, and look at the reactions, say,
from 1831, 1834, 1835, 1840.
And then after that, in 1847, 1850s, you'll find all the Māori leaders the next generations
afterwards, all singing the same song, "We did not cede sovereignty.
You took it."
And so today, if we're true to the voices of the ancestors, we have no option but to
sing the same song."
[Laughs].
And that's why you get the consistency in expression of understanding of that historical
period, eh?
Basically it goes this way: All the Treaty settlements represent about one to three percent
of the loss.
So some hapū or some tribe might get twenty, thirty, seventy million; that's still only
one to three, maybe four or five percent at the most, of the actual loss.
Well, what I did for - a kind of whimsical thing - but I look to Confucian law, I looked
at Islamic law, and I looked at English jurisprudence on the notions of fairness.
I can tell you this, I couldn't find any moral argument anywhere in the world that
three percent of a loss is considered fair and just.
So we get ourselves tangled in moral problems, which I think, as a nation we're having
trouble coping with.
And so the sooner we own up to this, and then say, "Now how are we gonna deal with reparation..."
Now Germany has just, up until a few years ago, just finished paying back the reparations
for its invasions of Belgium, Netherlands in the Second World War.
Japan has just finished paying off its reparations for its invasion of some of the Asian countries
in the Second World War.
And the way they did it was, they built into their annual budgets; maybe three, four, five
percent of the annual budget is reparation.
What the New Zealand governments do is they look to see how much cash might be left after
they've paid off everything else, and so you come up with these small amounts.
But we just don't have the political will - centre left or centre right - to say, "Well,
let's fix this once and for all, and get the satisfaction."
So when Māori say, "Yes, we are satisfied that what was taken illegally by - doesn't
matter how it was taken - has been compensated."
And therefore it's going to coast billions of dollars, but if you space it out, over
time it's painless.
So until that is addressed, that question of the reparation to do with the loss of the
sixty million acres.
Until that's addressed in a meaningful way, then I can't see how logically any future
Māori community can say, "We have a full and final settlement."
See time is really on Māori's side.
The Māori population is increasing.
It's expected by another twenty years, the Māori population will some 25, 30, 40 percent,
plus Pacific Islanders and Asians; don't forget Pacific Islanders, as I said earlier,
and Asians are not part of the problem.
And very soon, there is going to be a new majority, and my instincts tell me that that
is when we'll be able to look at the problem as a moral one, and then remedy it politically
and economically.
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