Kīngitanga and Crown: New Zealand’s Māori King Movement and its Relationship with the British Monarchy



A new book published last month as part of Manchester University Press’s Studies in Imperialism series explores the many connections between European monarchies and their overseas colonies. Crowns and Colonies: European Monarchies and Overseas Empires is edited by Robert Aldrich and Cindy McCreery and draws in many cases on papers presented at a conference on the same theme held at the University of Sydney in June 2014. I presented a paper at that conference on the historical relationship between the Kīngitanga and the British royal family and a revised version of this appears in Crowns and Colonies. The following synopsis sets out some of the key themes explored in my chapter.

In December 1953 Queen Elizabeth II became the first British monarch to meet with a Māori monarch when she travelled to Tūrangawaewae. King Koroki (right) and Princess Piki, the future Te Arikinui Dame Te Ātairangikaahu (left), welcome the British visitors on to the marae. http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/1712/queen-elizabeth-ii-at-turangawaewae-1953

In June 1858 Potatau Te Wherowhero was installed as the first Māori King. Although the move was by no means a unanimous one even within his own Waikato tribe, European observers keenly debated the meaning of this act. Whether the Māori King movement (the Kīngitanga) was intended as a challenge to British sovereignty over New Zealand or was a more benign gesture became the question of the day. Yet supporters of the Kīngitanga saw nothing incompatible between allegiance to it and ongoing adherence to Queen Victoria (though colonial governments were a different matter). They declared themselves to be for ‘The Queen, the King and the Runanga’ (a kind of tribal assembly or council).

As this chapter outlines, even after British imperial troops invaded the Waikato district in 1863 in an effort to destroy the movement and confiscate its supporters’ lands, the Kīngitanga tribes continued to place great faith in the Queen and her successors. For them, the relationship was a deeply spiritual bond, cemented through the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 that had installed her as a great chief of New Zealand. Their deep and abiding conviction that the British monarch would bring justice to her Māori people if only she knew their true situation resulted in deputations to Britain from the late nineteenth century onwards, led by the Māori King, in an effort to have their grievances redressed. 

Queen Elizabeth with Te Arikinui Dame Te Ātairangikaahu, Prime Minister Jim Bolger and Minister of Treaty Settlements Doug Graham at the signing of the Waikato Raupatu Claims Settlement Act, Auckland, November 1995. EP/1995/4375B/33A-F, Alexander Turnbull Library

But in the twentieth century royal visitors to New Zealand found themselves caught up in intricate local politics over whether the (still not officially recognised) Māori monarch should be granted a meeting with his British counterpart. For Kīngitanga supporters, this mattered a great deal. Long after the British government had ceased to have any meaningful role in the governance of New Zealand, Kīngitanga leaders continued to look to the monarch to honour the undertakings entered into by Queen Victoria at Waitangi. Although Kīngitanga dealings with colonial governors and officials are well known, there has previously been little specific consideration of these monarchical relationships and their significance.

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