Land and people

Modern scholars, especially Maori writers, have stressed the integral link between land and rangatiratanga. A direct linkage is often made between the results of the three major modes of land alienation in the nineteenth century — Crown purchases, state confiscations and Native Land Court operations — and the ongoing loss of autonomy for Maori: 'With their land base gone, the chiefs were totally disempowered … Land is the very basis of Maori, of mana Maori motuhake, of tribal sovereignty. So once the land goes, the mana of the chief goes with it.' page 66Land is also used as the crucial interpretive device to explain the endurance of politico-cultural loss through to the present, as a recent comment by a Maori scholar on the centrality of land in the Maori world-view indicates: 'The key symbol between past and future in the present context is land.' Another writer assesses that '[t]raditional Maori society was based on the land. Once this basis was removed, only chaos could follow'.

An overwhelming focus on land, however, can obscure the agency of people. It is clear that the various movements for Maori autonomy in the early twentieth century were underpinned by a yearning for a rangatiratanga that was rooted in the land and its resources. Most of these movements sought at the very least to retain all land still remaining in Maori hands. Most Maori land, including almost all of the fertile land, had disappeared by 1900, however. And thereafter, despite initial hopes for retention, an almost inexorable loss of land – through taking for 'public purposes' as well as further purchases – continued, with very limited chances of getting even some of it back in any conceivable future. Yet Maori continued to maintain great pressure for autonomy. However significant the autonomy–land nexus, then, the quest for rangatiratanga was pursued from a state of relative (or even total, for some smaller tribal groupings) landlessness, with little prospect of altering this situation in the lifetimes of those involved. It is hard to escape the conclusion that for Maori, as with indigenous people throughout empires and within post-colonies, the quest to regain autonomy took total precedence over all else, including reacquisition of land. But a significant landed base always remained one ultimate goal of rangatiratanga.⁴⁷