Who Are We?

SEPARATISM

This is the second of a series of articles on inter-ethnic relationships in New Zealand in the early 21st century and the development of an informal duality of citizenship, the acceptance of that duality by community leaders and the long-term potential for dis-harmony.

An observation in cultural identity and social cohesion.

Differences

Some Maori leaders however see Pakeha New Zealanders as a threat to their own identity and have attempted to turn the clock back more than a century and now refer to Pakeha as visitors or outsiders who are only in New Zealand by permission of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi which, among other things, ceded sovereignty of New Zealand to the British Crown.

Such opinion ignores the facts of history and the natural birthright of any people born in a country, regardless of ancestral origins. A good analogy is the status of Northern and Southern Irish people. No one today would doubt the right of Northern Irish people to call themselves native Irishmen. Many of them however are direct descendants of an army of occupation installed by King William of Orange after the Battle of Boyne River in 1690 and were originally natives of lowland Scotland and Northern England. More Scots arrived in Ireland following the Battle Culloden in Scotland in 1746. The last major immigration of Scots to Ireland followed the Scottish land clearances of 1848 when thousands of landless crofters were sent to Ireland to take up land confiscated from the Irish. Their descendants today are without doubt native Irish.

More recently Fijian-Indians living in New Zealand have demanded to be classified as Pacific Islanders not Asian or Indian. They are descendants of Indian agricultural workers taken to Fiji by Britain in the 1970s. They claim, with some justification that the New Zealand government classification of them as Asians and not Pasifika is wrong and must be corrected.

In New Zealand that natural evolutionary process has also not been recognised and Pakeha are still considered by many people as English, strangers, visitors or invaders.

Reactions of Pakeha who hear such comments range from mild bemusement to offended outrage. It is for this reason that many Pakeha will have nothing whatever to do with Treaty of Waitangi matters and see them as a threat to their identity.

Others have described the opinion as fertile ground for ethnic cleansing in New Zealand. While this latter reaction is probably overstating the case to a significant degree it is none-the-less an indication of serious disquiet and dis-harmony which some activists have been quick to exploit.

Cultural and Traditional Harvest of Natural and Exotic Resources.

There is a hard core of official advisors and lobbyists who have generated the myth that Maori have some distinctive or separate association with native flora and fauna not understood or shared by non-Maori native New Zealanders and that there was an archaic affinity between people and the natural world similar to modern-day conservation. Archaeology however tells a different story and, like all hunter-gatherer societies, Polynesians had a huge negative impact on New Zealand’s indigenous ecology as did the Europeans who followed them less than 1000 years later.

The myth is well explained in the current campaign for a “Pest Free New Zealand,” which overlooks the fact that humans, beginning with the arrival of Polynesians and followed quite separately by Pakeha, were the first ‘introduced species’ to get here triggering massive environmental degradation and decline in New Zealand’s indigenous biodiversity which continues today.

The myth has its roots in the indigenous people’s rights movement of North America and the mis-application of Article Two of the Treaty of Waitangi which was designed to protect tribal property rights including the right of tribes to own land and the right to harvest natural resources on those lands as they always had. It was never intended to give one group of native New Zealanders privileged access to natural resources over another.

It has also been suggested in the report to Te Puni Kokori, (He Puapua -2019) that Article Two of the Treaty of Waitangi included rights of co-governance of the country between Maori and the Crown including a dominant role in resource management for the nation.

That is a very liberal interpretation of an obscure, poorly written and ambiguous document. There is however nothing in the text of the treaty, in Maori or English, which suggests it was ever intended that there would an ongoing permanent partnership between Maori and the Crown in the sovereign governance of the country at all levels.

Maori were promised the right to manage their own land and societal affairs as they had always done but that is far from taking a dominant role in all other matters governing the entire nation. The principles of British and New Zealand law suggest that those rights are shared by all native New Zealanders without distinction and within the constraints and boundaries of law.

Another unintentional consequence of Article Two of the Treaty of Waitangi is the uncertainty over the ownership of natural resources. By including the guarantees of continued ownership of almost everything in Article Two of the treaty, the Crown excluded itself, probably unintentionally, from the automatic presumption of underlying ownership of land and natural resources.

Put simply the Crown does not own anything for which it cannot show legal and proper acquisition. This was clearly demonstrated when the New Zealand Government introduced the Individual Transferable Quota System for commercial fisheries in 1986. The Waitangi Tribunal found that the Crown could not generate a property right for un-caught fish in the sea as the Crown did not own the resource. In effect, the fisheries in their entirety were, in 1840, owned wholly by Maori tribes and the Crown had not properly acquired the resource in the intervening years. A negotiated settlement took a full decade to accomplish.

The same principle was also applied in the Ngai Tahu Claims Settlement Act (1998) when all natural pounamu (New Zealand jade) became the property of the South Island tribe. The same general rule will no doubt be applied to other natural and mineral resources in the future. This will be particularly interesting if and when claims for fossil fuel resources are ever made.

Once again, the Crown did not acquire the significant New Zealand coal fields from Maori but assumed ownership by statute in 1937 without negotiation or recognition of the previous owners. While this action may fit with Articles One and Three of the Treaty of Waitangi, which give the Crown the right to make laws for the good of all New Zealanders, it can also be seen as a breach of Article Two which guarantees Maori tribal property rights. 

When it comes to the so-called affinity with natural resources however other rules come in to play. The reality is that understanding of and association with native or exotic wildlife and natural surroundings has nothing whatever to do with ethnicity. This knowledge and understanding is entirely based on life experience.

If it is the Treaty of Waitangi, rather than subsequent statutes, which protects the cultural non-commercial harvest and access rights of Maori, that same instrument also protects the cultural harvest and access rights of Pakeha to those same resources as both peoples are natives of New Zealand.

If on the other hand we are forced to accept that Maori have some exclusive association with native resources not enjoyed or understood by other native New Zealanders and that it is only these species that have any certainty of legal protection, we are faced with a serious issue. Notwithstanding the need to protect the comparatively defenceless native New Zealand flora and fauna from exotic introductions, many exotic species now form the basis of the nation’s agricultural economy and recreational hunting and fishing resources.

To be continued…