Land and Treaty Settlements

But the government was prepared to move on the question of both land retention and reparational claims based on unjust land alienation. The Treaty claimants’ stress on the major ways in which their land had been lost in the nineteenth century – by unfair and pressured purchases, confiscations, and the results of individualisation of tenure through the Native Land Court – and their strong desire for ancestral land still in Crown hands to be returned, reinforced in public and official eyes the centrality of the whenua to Maori. While the quest for autonomy did not stand or fall on the issue of turangawaewae, the symbolic and practical significance of the latter for Maori cannot be underestimated. The long-awaited, painstakingly negotiated Te Ture Whenua Maori Act of 1993 aimed to promote the ‘retention, use, development, and control of Maori land as taonga tuku iho by Maori owners, their whanau, their hapu, and their descendants’. It was a sea change from the assimilationist land legislation of some quarter-century earlier.

The Act prohibited the alienation of the remaining pockets of Maori customary land, and strengthened the pre-existing trend towards control of Maori-owned land returning to those who held the interests in it. In light of the inexorable political and cultural pressures of the Maori Renaissance, the Crown no longer believed that collective ownership was undesirable per se, or even that it was necessarily an impediment to full production in the public interest. The new legislation, then, addressed the wishes of the Maori owners of land. It also provided some empowerment over land at flaxroots level, to bodies such as marae committees and different types of trusts, including whenua topu trusts representing the interests of tribal collectives. Overlapping membership between these and other organisations, such as those operating under the NZMC structure, helped reinforce the intimate links between the people and the land – including for the great majority of Maori who now lived away from their tribal base.¹²

Land was at the centre of most claims before the Waitangi Tribunal. The Tribunal’s Ngai Tahu Report was released in 1991, and as a result of preliminary negotiations with the tribe, a ‘land bank’ was set up to hold surplus Crownpage 259 land identified for possible use in reparations. This method, preventing selling on the open market until final settlements were forged, provided a precedent for other negotiations. As claimants saw it, return of land would help create a material base for self-determination, re-establish the significance of turangawaewae in their collective identity, and see the return of sacred/wahitapu sites of cultural significance. The Tainui federation focused its Waikato raupatu/confiscated territory negotiations on return of all land within its rohe that was still in Crown hands, consonant with its longstanding principle that ‘as land was taken, so land should be returned’.

The Crown had confiscated 1.2 million acres of Waikato land after the wars of the 1860s in punishment for ‘rebellion’, and a number of subsequent hand-backs to ‘loyalists’ and others were not necessarily to the appropriate people. In the 1920s, a royal commission of inquiry had acknowledged that injustice had been done, and Waikato leaders had later (along with Ngai Tahu and the Taranaki tribes) negotiated annual compensation payments. But with no land returned, these had been generally seen within the tribe as constituting no more than a ‘blood money’ admission by the Crown of its ‘sins of the past’. In 1985, the Waikato–Tainui leadership (representing 33 hapu grouped under the trust board established upon the previous settlement) had lodged a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal centring on land confiscation. The pioneering ‘direct negotiations’ with the Tainui Maori Trust Board in 1989–90 had resumed fully in 1992 under Graham and his negotiating officials. In 1993, the decommissioned Hopuhopu and Te Rapa military bases were handed back to the iwi (one as a gesture of goodwill, the other as a ‘downpayment’ on a final settlement), with title vested in the entire tribal collectivity in the name of the founding Maori King, Potatau Te Wherowhero.

December 1994 saw the parties sign a ‘heads of agreement’ for full and final compensation for the land-based tribal claim. The Waikato–Tainui Raupatu Treaty settlement, for land and money totalling a value of $170 million, was signed on 22 May 1995. The settlement was for some $150 million more than the government had been prepared to offer less than five years before. A mere six years before the signing, in fact, there were no state plans to supersede the 1946 agreement. Matters had, certainly in international terms, moved fast. The Crown, moreover, apologised for its past breaches of the Treaty, something which held tremendous significance for the claimants and which created both national and international precedents. A new governance structure was established by Waikato–Tainui in order to manage their settlement proceeds. An uneasy mix of ancient and modern structures and values, this created problems in the ensuing few years, but the pioneering settlement did provide funds for Tainui to invest in marae upgrades, educational grants and facilities, health services and other forms of development.¹³

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Armed with its Waitangi Tribunal Report, from 1991 Ngai Tahu had also been negotiating with Graham and officials. Eventually, it gained ‘recognition from the Crown’ for its rangatiratanga in its own chosen fashion, by being constituted by statute as a ‘legal entity’. As the chief iwi negotiator’s daughter would describe it, 1996’s Te Runanga O Ngai Tahu Act ‘gave us back by way of the law, the Cloak they stole from us in 1865 … The Cloak we wear now is one that we ourselves have made’. The leaders stressed that, despite the legal identity that the legislation gave, they ‘would be accountable first and foremost, once more, to Kai Tahu and not the Crown’. With distinctive governance mechanisms in place to manage a settlement that also attained a value of $170 million (in 1998), the tribal leadership set about ‘creating an enterprise culture within the community collective’ and building future prosperity. As a member of Ngai Tahu later put it, ‘[b]ecause of the claim settlement we have our own autonomy … and we can start creating and imagining what will be our future’.¹⁴