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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Extract from ‘Why we Went to Waitangi’

Extract from ‘Why we Went to Waitangi’

The concern of Maori people regarding the use and ownership of land is often overlooked by pakeha New Zealanders. Our towns have been built and our farms are being cultivated in areas that originally were held in communal ownership by various Maori tribes. Sometimes the land was sold. More often it was taken by armed conquest. We forget how and when, by whom and from whom, the land was acquired. But Maori people rarely, if ever, forget.

I remember sitting in a house in Wellington with certain Maori friends, page 258 all of whom had had a university education. On the face of it, their attitudes were no different from those of their pakeha professional colleagues. They spoke of art, politics, sociology, or more private matters. But very late at night the conversation changed.

They talked about the land, nothing but the land. They talked about how to keep the remnants of the Maori lands in Maori control and ownership. Their view was not economic, in the sense that we apply that term. They did not regard themselves as shareholders in the firm of New Zealand Ltd. But a part of their sense of identity came from a surviving relationship to the land. And the memory of the loss of the land was not a source of mild historical nostalgia. It kept alive in them a smouldering and ever present sense of pain.

To understand Nga Tamatoa, one has to see their attitudes and activities in the context of Maori pain and humiliation regarding the loss of the land and the dismemberment of Maori culture during the past hundred years . . . . [The greater part of the remainder of this article is included in ‘The Young Warriors’ (below).]

1971 (639)