Relational Dialogue

Whatever the difficulties, most notably over the foreshore and seabed (but also other matters, such as the state’s armed raids on Urewera Maori in 2007), dialogue continued between Crown and Maori in the early years of the new century, from the highest to the lowest levels. As J G A Pocock has noted, despite a ‘perpetually contested’ relationship between the parties to the Treaty, conversations, negotiations, mediations and discussion remain integral to this ‘history of contestation’. Ever since the final armed clash between Crown and Maori in 1916 (also in the Urewera), the indigenous quest for Crown recognition of rangatiratanga has remained remarkably peaceful, partly because of the willingness of both parties in most circumstances to keep talking, to korero. Moreover, that propensity to discuss frequently led to Crown concessions to rangatiratanga – even if these often involved a motive to ultimately appropriate Maori organisational forms, energies and policies for state purposes.

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Growing pakeha awareness of the dispossession of Maori in the colonial and more recent past has underpinned the continuing dialogue since the time of the Maori Renaissance, making the prospects of realising Crown recognition of rangatiratanga to some level of Maori satisfaction rather less unlikely than during the assimilationist years. While movement in pakeha and Crown circles on issues of historical justice was slow, it was nevertheless significant. The Labour government of the later 1980s implicitly accepted responsibility for past Crown wrongdoing by mere dint of its pioneering negotiations, but it refused to admit this publicly out of concern for possible downstream effects. At the beginning of the new millennium, however, the incoming Labour minister in charge of Treaty of Waitangi negotiations openly acknowledged that she represented a Crown that ‘through war, trickery and neglect deprived Maori of land, resources, cultural rights, language and, in some cases, life itself’.

Despite greater pakeha awareness of the Maori past, however, and the huge advances since 1950 in political and public appreciation of the need for reconciliation, any forging of Crown–rangatiratanga relationships acceptable to all parties seemed a long way off in 2008. When an anti-poverty ‘hikoi of hope’ headed for Wellington in 1998, Whatarangi Winiata (who would later become founding president of the Maori Party) reminded politicians that Maori leaders generally saw constitutional (or equivalent) change, based on Treaty partnership with the Crown, as the only way forward. In the years since, most serious observers and scholars of Crown–Maori relations, Maori and pakeha, have believed that the Crown needs to engage with the very many sustained and insistent calls for constitutionalising rangatiratanga. At the very least, there seems to be an emergent consensus in such circles on the need for the Crown to engage in a public debate on the possibilities of formalising governance arrangements which will satisfy Maori aspirations to rangatiratanga. No such ‘conversations’ will lead to quick-fix remedies to the many actual and perceived problems, if history is to be any guide.

But the extreme difficulties of finding adequate ways of recognising rangatiratanga can be alleviated in different ways by the various parties. The Crown might consider re-examining its weddedness to interpretations of (indivisible) sovereignty which preclude meaningful devolution of powers, for example, and some Maori parties might reconsider better dovetailing of the terminology employed with the goals sought. Furthermore, Crown and Maori cannot find in isolation that elusive solution to balancing the aspirations of the indigenous people of New Zealand against other ‘public good’ responsibilities of state. A pakeha population reportedly suffering from ‘Treaty fatigue’ will need to appreciate better the roots of the grievances underpinning the reparations system, and, even more importantly, to understand that the Treaty symbolises, in this country, the autonomist aspirations of formerly colonised peoples aroundpage 287 the world. It is not, in other words, something that will disappear when the last historically-based grievances of Maori are resolved (currently destined by official decree to occur in 2015). The Treaty of Waitangi, in its various forms, interpretations and updatings, constitutes an iconic affirmation of the need for the Crown to commit to negotiating organisational modes and relationships which embody Maori aspirations that are not going to go away.

In the ongoing dialogue with Maori, and in any relational arrangements that might be negotiated out of it, governments will do well to learn from the history of Crown–Maori relations. This might alert them, inter alia, to avoid the twin temptations of attempting to control and appropriate the organisations of Maoridom. Greater knowledge of the past history of Aotearoa/New Zealand should assist the pakeha public, too, to better appreciate that the Treaty of Waitangi is a ‘living’ document that embodies the Maori quest for rangatiratanga, and that its successful evolution in the new millennium depends on continued dialogue and negotiation based on good faith. New Zealand is often singled out internationally as a prime example of a nation in which ‘bicultural’ aspects or ways of life are successfully emerging, with both state encouragement and assistance. Bicultural Aotearoa/New Zealand, moreover, is frequently viewed as a country which accommodates a multicultural diversity based on widespread acceptance of the customs and mores of immigrant ethnicities. Its ‘race relations’, despite many difficulties, are seen to provide cause for cautious optimism, especially if all parties are willing and able to heed the lessons of the past.¹¹