Modes of Rangatiratanga

The interpretation of Crown–Maori relations in this book, however, has avoided prescriptive or instrumental definitions and modes of rangatiratanga and its recognition. Many Maori and pakeha have believed that iwi provide the sole or best possible basis for achieving rangatiratanga, and a number of both experiments with devolution and Treaty settlements have occurred at iwi level. The head of the Ngai Tahu negotiating team, Tipene O’Regan, defined rangatiratanga as ‘iwi in control of themselves and their assets in their own rohe’. Many agree with this perspective, whether or not they accept thepage 277 argument that iwi were reinvented or boosted in the 1980s in ways which suited the Crown and/or capitalism.

Others claim that the Crown’s negotiating focus on iwi is artificially and destructively imposed upon a socio-cultural situation in which hapu, whanau, urban organisations and pan-tribal or non-tribal bodies individually or severally occupy an important place within the socio-political foundations of modern Maori life. Proponents of such views sometimes argue that only those institutions or collectives which they nominate can truly embody rangatiratanga. Still others suggest flexibility: either iwi or hapu can perform the function, for example, according to the protocols and history of each tribal grouping; while in certain cases, tribal federations are best placed to represent the people. Proponents of rangatiratanga residing in either ‘original whanau’ or reconstructed whanau often also allocate rangatiratanga to higher level structures. Urban Maori advocates generally allow for its exercise within tribal or sub-tribal milieus. Rangatiratanga, then, can be expressed multiply, according to the tasks to be performed and the groups involved.

Most iwi and other broad-based groupings, indeed, have stressed that they act as overarching bodies for their component parts. Te Runanga a Iwi o Ngapuhi was created to ‘confirm the enduring tribal structure to represent its Tino Rangatiratanga’, but in a way that aimed to preserve the ‘independence of each Constituent Community’ within it and to ‘recognise the fundamental importance of whanau’. A number of scholars and others believed, when post-war urbanisation and assimilation policies were at their height, that hapu, iwi, whanau and other tribal configurations were becoming defunct (or changing into quite different types of entities). Few would now make such an assessment, but an influential sector considers that contemporary rangatiratanga resides most appropriately or predominantly in pan-tribal or non-tribal groupings – in urban authorities or some kind of regional or national organisation, for example, or in various other non-tribal manifestations of ‘Maoridom’. In such views, the strong continuation of tribal organisation and ‘mentality’ undermines the united endeavours necessary for negotiating autonomist arrangements. Opponents of the pan-or non-tribal approach, however, argue (among other things) that any such prescription gives succour to assimilation impulses which continue to lurk within Crown circles and policies.

Any scholarly effort to define rangatiratanga precisely, or to limit it to particular organisational forms, ignores the clear evidence that different times, places and circumstances have presented different (and always contestable) definitions, configurations and opportunities. And that the Crown, in its ongoing interactions with all incarnations and manifestations of rangatiratanga, contributes to shaping the way rangatiratanga is organised and expressed. Each Maori collectivity, however, debates and selects its own path to rangatiratanga,page 278 one that emerges from the past to fit the present – and which may change in the future. Hana O’Regan notes, with regard to those descended from the base genealogical document of Ngai Tahu, that the ‘tribe is the entity which is seen at the present time to be the best and most effective mechanism for Kāi Tahu to achieve the dreams and visions of the people … [I]t is the tribal identity that the descendants of the Blue Book have opted for to lead them through the new century’. However, she continues, ‘[t]his may change as societal and political pressures change and impact upon the collective … Although on the surface there is a strong primordial influence governing that identity, such as the role of the whakapapa as a determining feature, the way in which those factors manifest themselves within Kāi Tahu culture and society are continuously changing and adapting as a response to the politics of the time’.²

This book’s focus on Maori attempts to gain Crown recognition of the rangatiratanga promised them in the Treaty and of the Crown’s responses to these continuing efforts has largely omitted discussion of autonomous developments that were (to a greater or lesser extent) outside the purview of the state. Ngati Maniapoto, for example, has a long history of autonomist actions and visions that had little reference to ‘external’ factors such as the state and its assimilationist aims. Some tribes have tried to counter the effects of urban migration through independent means. In the 1970s, for instance, Urewera iwi set out to ‘lure people out of the cities’ and back into the ‘self sufficient’ life of the autonomous community. In 1991, Ngati Te Ata put forward a ‘tino rangatiratanga charter’, part of a process of establishing its ‘own measures of self-determination and self-government’ and asserting its ‘right to govern its own affairs’. Those wishing to deal with it, including agencies of government, were told that they needed to adhere to its protocols and deal with the ‘legitimate authority within its tribal territories’. Its ‘Tribal Policy Statement’ was seen as the iwi’s first step towards ‘breaking out of th[e] cycle of reacting and being controlled by others to a state of control over its own affairs’.

Ngati Te Ata and many other tribes cited the 1835 chiefly Declaration of Independence (inspired and recognised by the British) to boost – or, in some cases, to attempt to supersede – arguments based on the ‘rangatiratanga clause’ written into the Treaty of Waitangi some five years later. Insofar as the Treaty was relevant, many argued, it endorsed the Declaration, and so full and indivisible Crown sovereignty had never been acquired over their people and rohe. Thus, Ngati Te Ata asserted that ‘all sovereign power and authority reside in the iwi’ and that the tribe was a ‘sovereign people and a sovereign nation’. Yet even this was not couched as an all-or-nothing separatist claim. Ngati Te Ata’s policy statement put considerable weight on the views of the chair of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples (who had visited the tribe in 1988) to the effect that Maori had the right to ‘formal andpage 279 substantive self-government over their own local and internal affairs’. This stance situated Ngati Te Ata’s claims within the mainstream of aspirations for rangatiratanga in the twentieth century. Declarations of, and rhetoric about, independence and autonomy often amounted to tribes promoting ‘their collective identities’ in idealised form, while seeking autonomist outcomes which could potentially be accommodated within existing or modified constitutional and legal frameworks – at least for the time being.³

Autonomist movements with little direct engagement with the state were not confined to iwi, hapu or similar tribal collectivities. There was, for example, often little state–Maori interaction (apart from the relationships all citizens have with the Crown) in circumstances where Maori chose to express their collective impulses in whole or in part through religion, both mainstream or otherwise. The politico-religious Maramatanga movement on the North Island’s western seaboard (which had picked up many Ratana followers when T W Ratana closed his spiritual mission in 1928) operated largely outside official (or pakeha) knowledge, even after it began making annual pilgrimages to Waitangi in the 1970s. The Te Pikinga movement in the Urewera, founded in 1929 and dominated by Tuhoe women, promoted material and cultural well-being among its people without connection with the state.

Many marae-based and community groupings aimed to operate independently not only of the state, but also of other Maori organisations. This was particularly the case with pan-tribal or non-tribal groups in the cities and large towns. A leading member of Auckland’s Waipareira urban authority proclaimed, not atypically: ‘We will not tolerate directives and commands from bureaucracy and government. We will not tolerate the same nonsense from a minority presently leading the tribes’. In 1998, the Waitangi Tribunal’s Whanau o Waipareira Report found that urban groups could be deemed to possess and exercise rangatiratanga, although it also indicated the difficulties inherent in the rhetoric of total independence. In view of the realities of the state’s supreme power and enormous resources, the report made a strong recommendation for much greater Crown coordination and consultation with Maori in development and delivery of social services.⁴