Waitangi Tribunal 40th Anniversary, 1975-2015

The Waitangi Tribunal has released a special edition of its Te Manutukutuku newsletter marking the 40th anniversary of the Tribunal’s founding in 1975.

The special edition features articles and interviews from thirty current and former participants in the Waitangi Tribunal’s process, including Tribunal members, iwi leaders, historians and lawyers.

Contributors include former chairperson Sir Edward Taihukurei Durie, former chairperson Justice Joe Williams, the Minister of Māori Development the Honourable Te Ururoa Flavell, former Māori Party co-leader the Honourable Dame Tariana Turia, former chairperson of the Ngāi Tahu Māori Trust Board Sir Tipene O’Regan, and lawyer Annette Sykes.

Justice Joe Williams (left) and Sir Edward Taihukurei Durie (source: teara.govt.nz)


I was also asked to contribute and noted as part of my piece the importance of ensuring that the research commissioned for the Tribunal process is made accessible to iwi and the wider public. While the Tribunal's own reports eventually end up on its website, the thousand or more research reports commissioned by the claimants, Crown and Tribunal over the past few decades are usually much harder to access for those outside the claims process.

It is time, I suggested, to give consideration to how these might be made more freely available, perhaps with an online digital repository backed up by hard copies at a suitable institution like the National Library.

The special edition also includes a feature article from Tribunal member Dr Ann Parsonson on the history of the Waitangi Tribunal.

Current chairperson Chief Judge Wilson Isaac writes in his introduction: ‘As the Tribunal moves towards completing its inquiries into historical claims and addressing kaupapa (thematic) and contemporary claims, this edition of Te Manutukutuku highlights the contribution the Tribunal has made towards restoring and sustaining the Treaty-based relationship between Māori and the Crown.’

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sexual Frontier - Contrasting Māori and European Attitudes towards Sex and Nudity in the Colonial Era

Image
In pre-contact Māori society young unmarried men and women had a high degree of sexual freedom. With the exception of a few high-born women who were ceremonially bethrothed, pre-marital sex was considered socially acceptable, though blatant promiscuity was frowned upon and a certain level of discretion expected.   Sex was considered a normal and healthy part of every day life, with no particular taboos around it. Copulating couples were depicted in carvings and bawdy stories and waiata concerning sexual exploits or the size of men’s penises were common. Te Puawai o Te Arawa, 1905, 1/1-003279-G, ATL That relative openness extended to same-sex relationships, of which there is ample evidence from waiata and other traditional sources. Tutanekai, for example, who famously swam to Mokoia to be with Hinemoa, was also known to have had an initimate male companion known as Tiki. (By contrast, in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy death was the mandatory penalty for anyone fo
Read more

'I am an Irishman': Irish and Māori Historical Connections

Image
Just as exceptionalism has formed an enduring strand of American historiography, New Zealand history has its own variant of this. In New Zealand’s case, this rests largely on the notion that the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 between representatives of Queen Victoria and more than 500 Māori chiefs represented a unique experiment in benevolent and humanitarian imperialism. Allied to this is often the notion that subsequent relations between the indigenous Māori tribes and incoming settlers were, after a few early hiccups, vastly superior to other white settler dominions. For much of the twentieth century Pākehā New Zealanders liked to boast that their country had the ‘greatest race relations in the world’. It turns out Māori had a different story to tell concerning the history of their relations with the newcomers. In recent decades New Zealand historians have played their own part in deconstructing these myths. Most historians now acknowledge that the Treaty of Waitangi had much
Read more

A Stain Upon History: The Ngatapa Massacre, January 1869

Image
Imagine this: somewhere between 86 and 128 people, captured or surrendered at the end of a siege, are stripped naked, lined up against the side of a cliff, and summarily executed without trial by government forces. Couldn’t happen here, many people would probably say. But it did, and the story behind the worst massacre in New Zealand history deserves to be more widely known. In July 1868 Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki and nearly 300 other mostly East Coast Maori escaped from the Chatham Islands (Wharekauri) and made their way back to the mainland. This group, known as the Whakarau, had been held at Wharekauri since 1866. None of their number had been tried, and the government admitted that they were being held as ‘political offenders’ while arrangements were made to confiscate their lands back home. Judith Binney suggested that Te Kooti had been included among those illegally imprisoned at Wharekauri because he was regarded as a threat by rival traders back in Gisborne (Turanga). Te Koo
Read more