New Zealand history and the Treaty of Waitangi--Part I

Because I have so much time on my hands, I decided to sit and read an actual book. I hadn’t seen one for awhile, but I’d heard they still existed. After joining the library a few weeks ago, I checked out A History of New Zealand, by Keith Sinclair. Apparently this is a classic text on the history of the country first published in 1959. It was updated twice and goes through the end of the 1990s with the election of the Labour Party government.

I was interested in reading the history of the country for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I have a history degree and love reading history. But I have been trying for more than a year now to get my arms around the issues surrounding the politics of the Treaty of Waitangi, the current government, the political parties, and the Maori people.

New Zealand holds elections every three years. The last election was in 2005, and Don and I watched avidly last fall as the Labour Party was reinstalled for the third time after a nasty, partisan fight. Seems as if the American ways are spreading across the ponds. One of the key issues was the Treaty of Waitangi. I wondered, What is the Treaty of Waitangi and why is it so important? I had no idea, I looked on the web and found nothing. I did learn the basics: the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 and is the official date of the existence of New Zealand, when the Maori tribes signed the agreement to allow English settlers and the Queen to claim the land as a British territory and start colonization.

So why is the Treaty still talked about today, and in the heart of the elections, as a crucial issue? I decided that reading about the country’s history would help me understand. Not that I can recap the 400 years of history of this country—and only in relation to the Maori--in a blog, but I will do my best, and it’ll be a multi-part over many days, like a mini-series! Here goes.

Part I:
New Zealand was “discovered” in 1642. Australia was already being “colonized” by that point, as many of you know, by British prisoners. There had been talk of a great land beyond Oz, and finally Abel Tasman, a Dutch seaman, found it and then later on Captain James Cook actually landed here and took a look around. (The land to the west of Nelson is a national park called the Abel Tasman, so you may have heard this name before.) They found New Zealand. To save time, 200 years passed and included colonization, land purchases, wars, etc.. Finally, in 1840 the majority of the chiefs of the Maori tribes country-wide signed the Treaty at Waitangi and the English claimed the territory.

From my book: “What those who signed or those who refused may have understood by the treaty, it is difficult to say. By the first article, the chiefs ceded their sovereignty to the Queen. In return, the Queen guaranteed the Maoris in the possession of the lands, forests, fisheries and other property which, collectively or individually, they possessed. The chiefs yielded to the Queen the sole right of purchasing their lands. Finally the chiefs were given the rights and privileges of British subjects.”

But then came the laws and the establishment of a parliamentary government, even though centralized government in a decentralized country didn’t really work, for the Maoris least of all who kept to their tribal customs for the most part. Slowly the English government started purchasing a bunch of land from the Maoris for the Queen, and then the wealthy immigrants from England bought the land from the Queen and started new lives in New Zealand. This practice started a class issue, so government decided on a land-buying scheme intended for the poorer of the immigrants to purchase land but resulted in the richer immigrants buying LOTS of land. Same old, same old. This lasted over 20 years and continued to separate the rich from the poor, the Maori from the settlers.

During the latter part of that 20 years, in the late 1850s, the Maori decided to fight back, feeling taken advantage of. They banded together nationwide to fight the change that the white man brought, and they had one goal: sell no more land to the English. They wanted to bring an end to colonization. So they elected a Maori king. And in parts of the country there were localized wars against settlers. The Maori questioned: do we still owe allegiance to the Queen if we have our own king, our own land, and our own laws?