Tribal Assertion and Pan-tribal Unity

Some iwi and other organisations had refused, on rangatiratanga grounds, to undergo the scrutiny required by the Labour government in order to gain official mandates for various purposes, and they were prepared to pay the price of their independence. Others had been initially franchised to provide some services, but had later refused to be named as ‘agent[s] of the Crown’, with the consequent lapse of the arrangements. Debate on the issues was rife within Maoridom. In the Far North, for example, a number of elders reportedly ‘argued with trust boards, runanga and the Maori Council’ that marae shouldpage 244 resist being forced to produce state-required ‘constitutions, even though it meant turning their back on Government dollars’. All around New Zealand, kaumatua, kuia and other tribal leaders had long felt that to accept state funding and to opt into its legal structures, values and agreements was to accept western political and cultural hegemony. In the words of one tribal leader: ‘if you take their money you become their … servants. You end up with the Government telling Maori how to run their lives’.

Tribes operating officially-franchised governance mechanisms would also at times draw a line, as with Tainui after the time in 1988 when trust boards were finally empowered to enter into contracts with the Crown. Following media-led public opposition to the way MANA, MACCESS and other programmes were being run, the government had sought tighter accountability for such contractual expenditure. The Tainui Maori Trust Board, believing that it was being required to enter a master-servant relationship, refused to sign new contracts; these, it declared, did not incorporate any real concept of partnership. Now, many critics were arguing, the master-servant situation had worsened. Given that power had remained, actually or potentially, firmly in state hands under the various proposals to devolve service delivery, the Crown was really promoting ‘institutional assimilation’ through its much touted partnership with runanga iwi; this, it was claimed, was a denial of rangatiratanga rather than progress towards it.²⁶

The proposals for devolution of state functions to iwi-based runanga had intensified the debate and soul searching about the means to, and ends of, rangatiratanga. A number of Maori leaders, both those for and against the Crown’s plans, had felt the need to counteract one potential outcome of the government’s tribal focus: internal strife within Maoridom, given that its various collectivities, inside and across rohe, would be compelled to compete for government mandating and funding. Because the renaissance had been a Maori-wide one, broader than the sum of its tribal parts, there were now a number of proposals to revive some sort of pan-tribal organisation that could deal with the Crown, untrammelled by any state connections of any nature at all. Not only would a new and independent kotahitanga have to stretch beyond any of the existing unity movements, many argued, it also needed to be untainted by past tribal and other configurations: all significant tribes should be able to feel comfortable about opting in. In other words, something quite new – as opposed to, say, a widening of Kingitanga – was required. After many discussions within Maori leaderships, a representative intertribal Hui Rangatira was convened by Sir Hepi Te Heu Heu, paramount chief of Tuwharetoa, on 23 June 1989 at Taupo.

The gathering stressed that total independence from the Crown was as important as pan-tribal unity. This was ‘the obvious response to a governmentpage 245 that directed rather than listened to the people’. Hui-franchised discussions on a proposed pan-tribal body progressed over the ensuing months, at a time when the major changes in the Crown’s Maori policy and structures were being planned and implemented. On 14 July 1990, the National Maori Congress (NMC; later, the Maori Congress) was founded. Regular meetings would be held in different locations, as with the late nineteenth-century Kotahitanga movement, providing opportunities for addressing cultural and political issues of concern to all Maori. Unlike the NZMC, the congress would refuse all state funding, with iwi contributing the resources necessary to sustain its administration and other expenses.

The NMC was widely seen at the time as an expression of kotahitanga which held great potential precisely because it was an ‘autonomous Māori development’. Some even hoped that it might constitute the embryo of a Maori nation state. From the time the new pan-tribal grouping had been first mooted, the Crown saw both difficulties and opportunities in the proposal. A completely independent initiative promised a strong rangatiratanga-based challenge to the state, but it might also offer consultational and safety-valve opportunities. True to form, elements within the state noted that the new body might even hold out prospects for the Crown to co-opt or appropriate some of its expertise and energies. The Iwi Transition Agency, for example, entered into discussions with the congress on the possibility of government funding for a national Maori organisation able to assist iwi in their new service-delivery role. The NMC’s insistence on financial and well as political independence, however, quite apart from its criticism of the lack of rangatiratanga embodied in the devolution system, quickly put paid to any such suggestion.

While the NZMC remained the ‘official channel’ for transmitting the Maori point of view, the new congress quickly came to present a united front to the Crown on a number of key issues, and soon all major tribes were participating in its deliberations to a greater or lesser degree. Meanwhile, tribal and other collectivities continued developing their own relationships with the Crown. Each of these had its own dynamic and concerns. Ngati Awa, for example, had restructured itself during its preparations for obtaining historical justice, and on the day its new runanga was established (late in 1988) the tribe secured a pardon for ancestors unjustly executed during the Anglo-Maori Wars. By 1990, Ngati Awa not only felt ready to assert ‘tikanga Maori in our territory’, it was also putting the Crown under pressure to provide reparations for land confiscations.

The major aim was to overcome, in the words of tribal leader Hirini Mead, the legacy of ‘a pretty sullen, disorganised and very oppressed people who carried a heavy sense of being unfairly treated by the government and people of New Zealand’. The iwi’s claims for reparations began to meet with a degreepage 246 of success, as did those of some tribes elsewhere. In sesquicentennial year, Ngati Awa gained back a significant farming operation situated on confiscated lands, and discussions over its reparations package would eventually lead to it regaining possession of its magnificent Mataatua Wharenui in addition to land and other resources. With their radio station, investment company and other development initiatives, Mead believed, the people of Ngati Awa were ‘shaking off the shackles of feeling oppressed and put down and rising up to meet the challenges of today’s world’. There was ‘a new mood taking over our iwi’.²⁷