NZPS 2 (2) pp.

139–156 Intellect Limited 2014

Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies

Volume 2 Number 2
© 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/nzps.2.2.139_1

MICHAEL BELGRAVE
Massey University

The politics of Maori history

in an age of protest

ABSTRACT Keywords
Urbanization, Maori political radicalism and the re-emergence of the Treaty of Maori history
Waitangi have all been part of the resurgence of Maori pan tribal and tribal identity Treaty of Waitangi
since the beginning of the 1960s. This article traces the impact of this political resur- Waitangi Tribunal
gence on the writing of Maori history. It argues that in the 1960s Maori politics had kaupapa Maori
little use for history as Maori communities responded to the contemporary experience biculturalism
of urbanization. As critical Maori voices emerged from the late 1960s, they drew on Maori urbanization
contemporary sociological and anthropological theory to explain Maori disadvan- politics and history
tage, only gradually finding historical explanations for political marginalization and
economic disadvantage. These explanations had by the early 1980s emphasized the
universal experience of colonization and national Maori sovereignty. It is argued
that only gradually did these narratives become located in specific tribal experiences,
reinforcing claims of tribal sovereignty. The work of the Waitangi Tribunal accompa-
nied by the devolution of the state sector encouraged the development of these tribal
histories, which were often contested. However, early enthusiasm by historians for
Tribunal history was from the late 1990s accompanied by a more critical response,
concerned about the extent that history was serving and being distorted by political
purposes. The article concludes by exploring Maori history in the post-Tribunal era,
not only freed from the limitations of supporting Maori claims under the Treaty of
Waitangi, but also from the political polarization of the 1970s and 1980s.

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The relationship between academic history and everyday politics is often

ignored. Historians prefer to see history as driven by internal imperatives,
by the arguments and evidence of historians, rather than by their politics, or
even more generally, by pressures placed on historians from external political
debates. This discussion examines the development of Maori history in New
Zealand from the 1960s, arguing that the politics of urbanization and Maori
activism in the 1970s and the early 1980s and the emergence of the Treaty
of Waitangi claims process have had dramatic influences on Maori history.
At the same time, postmodern, postcolonial and the new Imperial histories
have provided inspiration for historians less directly involved in treaty claims
research, providing greater but far from complete insulation from politically
charged debates about history and colonization occurring outside the univer-
sity. This article reviews the close interrelationship between Maori politics and
New Zealand history from the 1960s to the present.
Maori had little political engagement with history in the 1960s. The Maori
intellectual preoccupation of the late 1950s and early 1960s was urbanization
and the contemporary consequences of Maori migrating to towns and cities.
The Hunn report, in 1960, was a catalyst for an emerging academic and political
debate of Maori in the modern world that would intensify as the decade went
on (see Hunn 1961: 11; Harris 2007; Hill 2009). Maori were increasingly located
in cities and they were young. As whanau (family) adjusted to this new experi-
ence, they and the academic world focused on the problems of petty racism,
poor accommodation and getting a job and, in particular, what were described
as the ‘problems’ of Maori youth (Ausubel 1961). From the 1940s through to
the mid-1960s, perhaps, urbanization had a positive impact on Maori commu-
nities in the countryside, as they supported each other to deal with the huge
social impact of urban migration (see Metge 1964; Hohepa 1964).

URBANIZATION AND THE ALL-EMBRACING PRESENT

Economics, sociology and, above all, social anthropology proved more useful
than history in responding to contemporary Maori needs. Joan Metge and
Pat Hohepa’s work demonstrated the leading role of social anthropology in
describing and speaking to the current Maori experience (Metge 1964; Hohepa
1964). Anthropology adapted well to the needs of urbanization, cultivating in
New Zealand an interest in the modern and the urban. The contemporary
focus on race relations also emphasized the present, given the international
predominance of race relations in the early 1960s. New Zealand race relations
appeared similar to elsewhere. The debate in New Zealand was informed by
those occurring in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Civil rights defined themselves in terms of colour, not history. Black South
Africans, black Americans and migrants to the United Kingdom shared
common experiences of racism, but not common histories.
A small number of Maori entered universities and training colleges and
becoming academics were primarily interested in promoting Maori culture
and te reo (Maori language). Those who became politicized as the decade
went on (and not all did) responded to the increasing protest outside the
university rather than within, particularly as opposition grew to the National
Government’s attempts to take Maori land out of the jurisdiction of the Maori
Land Court in 1967. Maori graduates were, until the 1960s, under the inspi-
rational sway of leaders such as Apirana Ngata, Pei Te Hurinui Jones and
Mick Te Rotohito Jones, who had found accommodation with the European

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world more useful than confrontation. They had also remained committed to
language, to tribal histories and to their own communities (Bennett n.d.). The
post-war cohort of graduates, such as Mira Szaszy and John Rangihau, could
take their culture for granted and focus on the social needs of the present
(Rangihau 2014). Teacher training colleges provided an introduction to
academic life for most (see Pawley 2012; Diamond 2003). Maharaia Winiata,
Hirini Mead and Hoani Waititi all combined a passion for language, waiata
(song) and haka (war dance) (Winiata and Winiata 2012; Ballara and Marlu
2014). As headmaster, Mead encouraged the boys of Minginui to carve and
the whole school to celebrate waiata. These graduates were intent on defying
the assimilationist education of Maori children, working to transform rural
Maori schools, agents of quiet reform rather than public critics of racism or
colonization. But they did so discreetly in the 1950s.

NEW ZEALAND HISTORY IN THE 1960s AND 1970s

New Zealand history was reconsidering the Maori world in the late 1950s
and, from the University of Auckland, incorporated the Maori past into a
new form of cultural nationalism. The Auckland historians, Keith Sinclair,
Keith Sorrenson and Judith Binney, were politically sympathetic towards
Maori aspirations. Nonetheless, their work as historians helped create a
divide between emerging Maori studies and history departments. History
departments focused substantially on New Zealand’s archival record, draw-
ing extensively on the voluminous and accessible Appendices to the Journals
of the House of Representatives. Although their attitudes to oral history would
change, at the time they were sceptical of Maori traditional history, which
was dismissed as unreliable because of its reliance on oral transmission. Up
until the 1950s, histories produced by Maori historians such as Pei Te Hurinui
Jones and Apirana Ngata, which were whakapapa (genealogy) based and
centred on tribal experiences, had sat alongside other forms of New Zealand’s
history. But from the 1960s these two forms of history became substantially
separated. Maori concentration on contemporary issues disguised the extent
to which New Zealand history, although now focused on the Maori experi-
ence of colonization, was becoming increasingly detached rather than more
integrated with Maori political life.
Historians were deliberately attempting to shrug off the inheritance
of empire, to see New Zealand’s past as the emergence of an independent
nation state with its own heritage, culture and identity. And the historians
were not alone. Nationalist literature and visual arts and the emerging social
sciences, political studies, sociology and social anthropology explored the
unique aspects of New Zealand’s social and cultural make-up. Unique to New
Zealand, Maori played an important part in this nationalist preoccupation.
Sinclair and W.H. Oliver’s New Zealander histories, published respectively in
1959 and 1960, made Maori relationships with settler society a key theme, but
this attention needed to be seen alongside the integrationist aims of the Hunn
report, not in opposition to them.
General over-views of colonization, such as Alan Ward’s impressive
survey of nineteenth-century government policy to Maori (1974), were slow
in coming. Only in 1979, did Tony Simpson’s Te Riri Pakeha: The White Man’s
Anger provide a broad, encompassing, historical narrative which explained
contemporary deprivation with historical oppression. The book had a wide
popular Maori audience, but was shunned by historians. Until Simpson,

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Maori understandings of the past were only loosely linked to critiques of

the present. It was not that the past was not important: it certainly was.
But the past was loosely dispersed across distinct tribal narratives, not all
of which stressed Pakeha or Crown perfidy. Those narratives that did often
confused the role of government, Europeans, Maori neighbours and even
tribal members in their loss of tribal mana (power) and land. The past did
not fall into neat narratives that could be shared across tribal communities.
Often it was associated with kainga (village) and marae (communal space),
with whakapapa and te reo.

TOWARDS A MAORI NARRATIVE OF COLONIZATION

Michael King’s 1975 collection of Maori essays, Te Ao Hurihuri: The World
Moves On shows these very different approaches to the past and present.
Most of the articles evoke the past but they do not tell stories about it. For
Sam Karetu, it was the language of the marae. For Te Kapanga Dewes,
waiata could recall the past, could be a voice of protest in the present. While
the details of Maori history, the Treaty of Waitangi and land loss are the
facts of history, they were not linked in a comprehensive historical narrative.
For Harry Dansey and Maori Marsden the past is kept alive through tangi
(funerals) and Maori cosmology. In sharp contrast, Douglas Sinclair does
provide a narrative, beginning with the land and Maori relationships with
it, exploring the background to the Treaty of Waitangi, which Sinclair saw
as a gigantic fraud, and continuing through land losses effected by the New
Zealand Company and the Native Land Court. Douglas also significantly
located the narrative and the experience of his own iwi (tribe), Ngai Tahu. It
would take time before historical narratives emerged that linked the pre-Eu-
ropean Maori world, the Treaty of Waitangi, war, confiscation and the Native
Land Court into a grand narrative of colonization, one that applied to all
tribes, but could be located in the experience of individual iwi. Api Mahuika
took a very different approach to Maori history, concentrating on whakapapa
and its influence on identity and contemporary models of leadership, and
grounding himself in the experience of Ngati Porou. Mahuika emphasized
Maori understandings of time, relationships and events, an approach which
starkly contrasted with Sinclair’s more European sense of historical time and
action.
Douglas Sinclair, Simpson and Mahuika’s approach to the past demon-
strated an increasing gulf between Maori and professional history. The profes-
sionalization of academic history privileged Keith over Douglas Sinclair,
and research based on archival documents over oral tradition. Simpson and
Douglas Sinclair were also dismissed because although they used the language
of academic history, they lacked its rigour. At the University of Auckland,
Ranginui Walker would use Te Riri Pakeha as his text, until his own general
history of colonization was published (1990), while Sorrenson, teaching first
year history, refused to have it on the book list. Only two professional histori-
ans straddled the widening gulf between evolving Maori views of the past and
academic historians. Binney was working with the women of Maungapouhatu,
Rua Kenana’s remaining followers, and King continued to work with Maori
communities while for the most part writing history outside the university.
Precisely because King attempted to mediate between Maori and historians,
he became the visible target for increasing Maori disquiet over their treatment
in historical texts. While Maori political consciousness remained focused on

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the present, it took some time for Maori to articulate their concerns about the
way they were portrayed by historians.

MAORI AND ‘WESTERN KNOWLEDGE’

History was only one of a number of Maori targets. By the 1970s, Maori
communities were seeing the gaze of the university as increasingly intrusive.
Few Maori received university education and even fewer became academ-
ics. Outside the university, urbanization took Maori from small, tribally-
centred communities to New Zealand’s rapidly expanding towns and cities
where they were ‘pepper-potted’ in suburban homes. All this brought Maori
into greater contact with non-Maori social workers, health workers, child
psychologists and teachers – workers seeking to enhance their claims to
professional status through university qualifications, but inexperienced in
dealing with Maori families and Maori children. Previously, many of these
services had been provided through the Department of Maori Affairs, an
institution with a high number of Maori staff and a long-term relationship
with rural Maori communities. The professionalization of knowledge and
skills in social services, in particular, denigrated Maori cultural strengths
and made communities dependent on the skills of others, built on a body
of research which privileged the gaze of outsiders. Welfare officers were, in
the 1950s, often Maori, comfortable in both communities and skilled in te
reo and employed by the Department of Maori Affairs. In the 1970s, Maori
dealt with Pakeha social workers with little knowledge of the Maori world.
Rural Maori communities were also experiencing an increasing dependency
on university trained professionals as kainga and marae became subject to
more intrusive planning regulations and waahi tapu (sacred sites) became
recognized for their historical significance for the first time, but their value
was interpreted by outsiders, Pakeha anthropologists and historians. Maori
history and association with the land were given new significance, but Maori
were rarely consulted about interpretations and the ongoing relationship
was often unacknowledged.
Maori disaffection grew across a wide front. In the 1970s, Maori voices of
protest were difficult to pick out from the prevailing noise of political agitation,
from those protesting against the war in Vietnam or American imperialism,
the nascent feminist movement and militant environmentalism. Young Maori
looked to the United States, less to the emerging American Indian Movement,
than to militant black resistance and, in particular, the Black Panthers. Both
groups emphasized the solidarity of colour. Beyond colour, there was no single
unifying idea to provide a coherent model of resistance. Importing the politics
of colour had its limitations. In 1978, Walker dismissed the likelihood that
Black Power and Mongrel Mob, gangs growing in significance among Maori
youth, would pose a significant threat to civil order, because they lacked any
political ideology of resistance.

THE EDUCATED VOICES OF MAORI RADICALISM

Nga Tamatoa, the young warriors, who emerged primarily from disaffected
Maori students, articulated a more radical approach to protest and Maori
cultural marginalization in the cities. Maori were experiencing more intense
assimilationist pressures by the 1970s, often without the cultural and te reo
skills of their first-generation urban parents (Harris 2004). Many of these
young students or trade union leaders had not been brought up in Maori rural

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communities; some were even middle-class. Debates among Maori students

and staff about the nature of political action were intense within the univer-
sities during this period. Donna Awatere provided a voice for such nascent
disaffection and reduced the number of emerging themes of protest to two
words – Maori sovereignty (Awatere 1984). Her book of the same name was
published by feminist collective Broadsheet in a series of articles, and then
together in 1984. The idea of Maori sovereignty provided an encapsulation of
Maori sense of alienation and as both programme and critique crossed over
from Maori academic debate to popular protest.
This Maori debate over sovereignty coincided with nationwide protest
against the Springbok (South African rugby team) tour in 1981, which posed
worrying questions for Maori activists about the extent that Pakeha New
Zealand was prepared to mobilize itself against racism in South Africa, but
much less prepared to recognize racism at home. In 1981, engineering students
at the University of Auckland engaged, as they had done for many years, in a
mock haka, as part of their capping celebrations. A number of young Maori,
who had warned them of the cultural offence that they were causing and been
ignored, disrupted their festivities. Some protesters were tried on charges of
riotous behaviour and, despite the sympathies of the judge, were convicted.
The newly appointed race relations conciliator, Hiwi Tauroa, produced a
report called Race Against Time, which justified their grievances (New Zealand
Human Rights Commission 1982). In such a divisive environment, Awatere’s
Maori Sovereignty was strident and uncompromising and gave a voice to the
militancy of the time. Using the language of North America, she talked not of
Maori and Pakeha, or of Maori and European, but of white and black. White
society was responsible for all Maori woes and the white view of the Maori
world was caricatured as ‘white hatred’.
Maori activism focused on cultural issues, particularly the loss of language.
Awatere’s focus was on the present, Maori equality and white oppression,
dipping into the past unsystematically, but conscious that colonization, the
imposition of the white world on the non-white, was the source of Maori
degradation (Awatere 1984: 65–66). For the white world, she maintained, the
history of New Zealand began with Cook and the history of India began with
Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal, appointed in 1773. Her
target was Keith Sinclair and his History of New Zealand, although Sinclair
had started his history not with Cook but with, ‘In the beginning Papa and
Rangi’, a line in which the stridently secular Sinclair both acknowledged the
Maori past and relegated it to myth (Sinclair 1959). By 1984, Sinclair could
be dismissed, however unfairly, as an ideological pillar of white supremacy.
Awatere’s ideological centre, at the time, came not from the marae, but from
the leading critics of colonialism of the 1970s, Antonio Gramsci, Paolo Friere
and Franz Fanon (Awatere 1984: 29).
Gramsci allowed Awatere to discredit any indigenous compromise with
the colonizer (Awatere 1984: 96–8). As a political movement, Maori radicalism
of the 1980s fostered the collective sovereignty of Maori, linked colonization
with capitalism, and relied for its inspiration on theories of the present rather
than the lessons of the past. Politically, the movement demanded the revi-
talization of Maori language and Maoritanga, a broad label used to describe
a distinctly Maori cultural identity. However, its calls for Maori sovereignty
were blunted by its challenge to the generation then exercising Maori leader-
ship, and the Maori institutions, Maori Council, trust boards and incorpora-
tions, through which this leadership was exercised.

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BRINGING OUT THE TREATY OF WAITANGI

Achieving a Maori consensus about the Treaty of Waitangi was as pivotal
in providing a historical narrative of colonization as it was in healing the
inter-generation rifts of the 1970s. While many Maori communities contin-
ued to appeal to the treaty, Maori protest literature and historians were more
sceptical of the place of the treaty. Calls for exposing the Treaty of Waitangi
as a fraud were every bit as common as those demanding it be honoured.
Douglas Sinclair, Ruth Ross and Tony Simpson were critical of British intent
and expectations, and willing to see those involved in drafting and selling the
treaty to Maori as engaging in at best deception and at worst outright fraud.
Even Claudia Orange’s The Treaty of Waitangi, published in 1987, treated
Henry Williams’s role in translating and advocating for the treaty as deliber-
ately aimed at fudging the consequence of the transfer of sovereignty, an idea
developed first by Ross (1972; for critics of Ross, see Bell 2009; Belgrave 2005:
49–52). Despite this, Orange’s book provided an alternative grand narrative
of Maori and colonization. It was acceptable to the historians because it stood
back from the fatal impact narratives of Douglas Sinclair and Simpson. At the
centre of the story were Maori relationships with the Treaty of Waitangi, which
promised to protect Maori rangatiratanga (chiefly authority) and Maori assets
and culture. Maori economic, political and cultural marginalization could be
explained by the Crown’s failure to keep its promises in 1840. The story of the
treaty was not just that of Crown policy, but of iwi resistance and resilience,
as they appealed to the Treaty of Waitangi to have their rights recognized and
their mana restored. By the end of the 1980s, this narrative had pushed aside
most early attempts to explain Maori disadvantage in the present.
After 1984, the Fourth Labour Government placed the Treaty of Waitangi
at the centrepiece of its attempts to hold onto its Maori constituency and
to respond to increasing demands for Maori autonomy. During a period of
dramatic change, the treaty became the focus for relationships between Maori
and government. Although the Crown’s responsibility under the treaty was
highly contested, the treaty became the measure of contemporary policy and,
after 1985, when the tribunal’s jurisdiction was extended back to 1840, of
the Crown’s responsibilities to Maori over a century and a half of coloniza-
tion. More radical views of colonization were appeased by an interpretation
of the treaty which emerged in the 1980s, which saw the treaty not as trans-
ferring sovereignty to the British Crown, but as acknowledging Maori sover-
eignty as defined by chiefs in the earlier He Whakaputanga, the Declaration of
Independence (1835). The treaty’s interpretive malleability, meaning one thing
to the Crown and the very opposite to many Maori, allowed a broad consensus
to form around its importance, if not its meaning. The tribunal was the oracle
declaring treaty principles, from which some form of workable consensus could
emerge.

THE TREATY AND BICULTURALISM

The Treaty of Waitangi also provided an accommodation between govern-
ment and Maori leaders, as government turned to iwi organizations to provide
social, health and educational services at a time of increasing poverty and rising
unemployment. Roughly labelled biculturalism, this accommodation extended
to professions such as nursing and social work as well as to disciplines such
as history and social anthropology. Partly this was achieved by recognising
the right of Maori to control their own destiny and by acknowledging Maori

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expertise – in principle at least. But it was also achieved by the State funding
of Maori organizations. These developments brought the radical leadership of
urban Maori activists into alignment with the earlier generation of the Maori
Battalion and the Maori Women’s Welfare League, based on the toning down
of protest, a consensus about the importance of the Treaty of Waitangi, and
refashioning Maori sovereignty into tribal sovereignty. Whakapapa became
more important than peer group.
Biculturalism was based on the assumption that culture mattered, that
Maori were different and because of this difference were entitled by the Treaty
of Waitangi to take charge of their own affairs and to make their own deci-
sions undefined over their own futures. For Puao-te-Ata-Tu, the influential
1986 review of the Department of Social Welfare:

The most insidious and destructive form of racism, though, is insti-

tutional racism. It is the outcome of monocultural institutions which
simply ignore and freeze out the cultures of those who do not belong
to the majority. National structures are evolved which are rooted in
the values, systems and viewpoints of one culture only. Participation
by minorities is conditional on their subjugating their own values and
systems to those of ‘the system’ of the power culture.
(Ministerial Advisory Committee on a Maori Perspective
for the Department of Social Welfare, 1986, p. 19)

Explaining cultural difference was one of the major strengths of the early
reports of the Waitangi Tribunal (Waitangi Tribunal 1983; Waitangi Tribunal
1984; Waitangi Tribunal 1985; Waitangi Tribunal 1986; Oliver 1991). With
the Fourth Labour Government lurching dramatically to the economic right
in the decade marked by the fall of the Soviet Union, culture supplanted
class as the symbol of protest politics. But biculturalism was also incor-
porated into government policy from social services to museums (see
McCarthy 2011).

THE HISTORIANS AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE

By the 1980s, historians working with Maori and predating the development
of the Waitangi Tribunal, were increasingly taking a cultural approach to the
Maori past. King, Binney and Anne Salmond all focused on Maori as culturally
and intellectually distinct, with race relations exploring the cultural border-
lands between these different world-views and cultural practices. Binney’s
study of the missionary Thomas Kendall focused on the clash of world-views,
locating ideas of cosmology and religion in the cultural politics of encounter
(Binney 1968). Salmond carried much of her background as a cultural anthro-
pologist into historical writing (Salmond 1975; Stirling and Salmond 1976;
Salmond 1991, 1997). Her reworking of Cook’s voyages showed a Polynesian
perspective, which, was overlooked in J.C. Beaglehole’s magisterial accounts.
Binney’s work on Rua Kenana placed the Maungapohatu prophetic leader
in a world that only made sense through a Maori cosmology, however much
Rua co-opted aspects of European culture in his ideas and even in his archi-
tecture (Binney and Chaplin 1986; Binney et al. 1979). Her superb study of Te
Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki explained virtually all his actions as the result of
decisions that were culturally specific and uniquely Maori (Binney 1995). Like
Rua, Te Kooti’s ideas were overlaid with Christianity but he could only be

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understood through an understanding of te reo and Maori cosmology. King’s

work was less dominated by such cultural essentialism, but his biographies
of Whina Cooper and Te Puea Herangi were sensitive to the cultural milieu
in which both women operated (King 1977; 1983). Published in 1990, during
the sesqui-centenary, and with its bilingual title, The People and the Land: Te
Tangata me te whenua, was a celebration of biculturalism, with separate chap-
ters and equal space given to Maori and European (Binney et al. 1990). James
Belich’s themes in Making Peoples were making Maori and making Pakeha
(1996).
A cultural approach to Maori research was also developing amongst Maori
academics advancing a Maori sovereignty agenda. Gramsci, when applied to
culture, allowed for Maori and Pakeha to be redistilled as two distinct cultures,
with Maori geographically centred in New Zealand and European relocated
to a reified cultural heartland in Europe. The ideas of hegemony and false
consciousness allowed for any middle ground to be cleared. Maori alienated
from their own identity by colonization could be reclaimed as Maori, while
Europeans were exposed as agents of cultural assimilation and oppression.
The publication in 1978 of Edward Said’s Orientalism provided added texture
to these polarized ideas about culture, and they brought criticism of European
colonialism into the university, attacking much of the expansion of university
knowledge of Maori as justifying European supremacy and indigenous subor-
dination. At a time when the persuasive power of Marxism was waning, Said
emphasized the ‘deep articulation of knowledge with power’ (Young 1990:
11). Orientalism encouraged the development of what has become known as
kaupapa Maori research, research by Maori and for Maori. Critics argued that
this was about racial preference, but this was not the case. Kaupapa Maori
research was about method and the purpose of research, about ensuring
that research met the needs of and was driven by Maori communities them-
selves. The most influential exponents of kaupapa Maori research have been
Linda and Graham Smith. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies
relied not just on Said, but on an emerging international indigenous litera-
ture influenced by his arguments (Smith 1999). For Said provided a language
for explaining the common experiences of indigenous communities within a
global critique of colonization. Indigenous scholars could draw on a burgeon-
ing literature which emphasized the universal nature of cultural oppression
and the value of an autonomous and self-defined indigenous vision as the
essential method of resistance.
Decolonizing Methodologies was a far more sophisticated and academically
driven critique of colonization than Maori Sovereignty had been two decades
before. Gone was much – but not all – of the stridency from 1984, and in its
place was a sense of self-assurance from Maori voices more securely located
inside the university. But Smith still owed much to Awatere. Smith’s grand
vision was based not on a historical narrative of colonization, but on colonizing
relationships. These were structural and needed little contextualizing in histori-
cal time, although, others, outside New Zealand – notably Robert Young – were
doing just that (Young 1990; 2001). At a time when colonization was becom-
ing a tribal rather than a national story, Decolonizing Methodologies provided a
national and a global reference point for the more local and historical narratives
being told before the tribunal. Maori at the tribunal shared Smith’s commit-
ment to Maori self-determination and to the importance of Maori perspectives,
but had to present their claims as history, not contemporary social science, and
they were unable to rely entirely on insider researchers.

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MAORI HISTORY BEFORE THE TRIBUNAL: FROM NATIONAL TO

TRIBAL HISTORIES
The Waitangi Tribunal’s investigation of historical claims did provide a cultural
approach to Maori history, but it was not kaupapa Maori history. Claimants
drove the process, but the process was determined by the tribunal’s overarch-
ing legislation, its role as a commission of inquiry and the specialist research
needed to investigate historical claims (see Belgrave 2006). Nor did the tribu-
nal put oral history, te reo and Maori cosmology at the centre of its method-
ology. Tribunal history was much more conventional. Only in investigating
claims relating to events in living memory, environmental and fisheries claims
in particular, did oral history play a central role (Waitangi Tribunal 1988, see
section on mahinga kai; Waitangi Tribunal 1991). The tribunal’s work was
concerned with the actions of the Crown that were the stuff of archives. Alan
Ward’s critical over-view of government policy proved far more influential
than Binney’s more bottom-up approach to Maori history (Ward 1974). In the
end, Binney knew one tribe really well. Ward knew the nineteenth-century
Crown, and this was relevant to every claimant group. Maori customary histo-
ries did become extremely important in the tribunal, but only as statements
of contested tribal identities, as claims rapidly became disputes over mana as
much as against the Crown.
The politics of devolution and the politics of tribunal claims almost immedi-
ately began to break up the alliance of national Maori sovereignty, placing the
recently emerged grand historical narrative to one side, complementing it with
tribal histories and tribal identities (see Sharp 1990). These tribal perspectives
demonstrated the relationships that specific communities had with the Treaty
of Waitangi and with the Crown. The histories were also argued within groups
as old alliances broke down and were reformed, and where recognition by
the Crown was the key access to resources (Ballara 1998). Emphasizing tribal
rights rather than the solidarity of colour inevitably took the focus from the
present to the past. The change also divided Maori groups against each other.
When Maori identity became linked to a struggle against colonization that
could only be described through the specific voices of individual communities,
history became important. Maori needed to demonstrate standing, tangata
whenua (people of the land) status, which meant describing their historical
relationship with the land and with the Crown (Ward 1993). Because coloni-
zation was undertaken as a bureaucratic and judicial process in New Zealand,
Maori claimants had to show how the Crown had taken their land, their fish-
eries and eroded their mana: this was a historical problem. Maori assertions of
tribal sovereignty were clearly linked to a belief in autonomy, and the assertion
of tribal identity made Maori communities sceptical of outside historians, but
as tribes came to recognize their need for professional skills, even in pursuing
customary claims, they came to a bicultural accommodation. The complexity
of historical research required to advance and defend treaty claims inevitably
required professional skills. There were simply far too few Maori historians to
deal with tribunal history and its inevitable paper trails.

HISTORIANS AS CRITICS OF TRIBUNAL HISTORY

Historians were initially enthusiastic about the sudden discovery of their
relevance not only in the Maori world but in policy-making generally. The
expansion of the Waitangi Tribunal was only one of a number of areas of
public history which took professional history outside the university and into

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policy-making and even a commercial market. The Dictionary of New Zealand

Biography gave attention to a national history and was ‘modestly decolonis-
ing’ (Oliver 2002: 155). Relevance led to jobs. In the 1990s the number of
historians employed in the Waitangi industry increased dramatically, funded
initially by the tribunal and then by the Crown Forestry Rentals Trust, which
came to bankroll the entire treaty investigation and settlement process from
interest on Crown Forest royalties. Sorrenson, a historian member, and Ward,
its primary historical consultant, became advocates for the process, and the
tribunal and its staff took its historical role as a commission of inquiry seri-
ously (Sorrenson 1987, 1990; Ward 1990, 1991, 1993). The second edition of
the Oxford History of New Zealand, edited by Geoffrey W. Rice in Canterbury,
reflected the biculturalism of the period and was strongly defined by the Ngai
Tahu claim, which had been reported the previous year (1992).
As the 1990s went on, historians outside the process became more scepti-
cal of its value and contribution to the discipline. Some had concerns about the
quality of the history being written. Writing for the tribunal, in its early years,
was fast and furious, often commissioned, written and heard in evidence in a
matter of weeks, despite extending over several hundred pages. Sometimes
this led to sloppy history. Historians not involved in the tribunal process, but
with an interest in empire or in New Zealand’s history of colonization, were
excluded from the enormous resource being generated by this extensively
funded project. Many were conscious that the history was written according
to a series of imperatives that were not shared academically across the disci-
pline, and not linked to developments in historiography occurring elsewhere
(see Howe 2003).
Tony Ballantyne demonstrated how a new history of colonization and
empire could be developed despite largely ignoring all of the work that had
been done by the Waitangi Tribunal (Ballantyne 2012). While not directly crit-
icizing the tribunal, Peter Gibbons’s critique of empire took attention away
from the role of the Crown, from government, and back to the day-to-day
impact of capitalism, the trade in commodities and services and ideas which
made up colonization (Gibbons 2002). These issues were untouchable for the
tribunal, locked by legislation into a battle between the Crown and Maori. The
tribunal, of necessity, concentrated on the State, at a time when the State was
seen by historians as increasingly irrelevant, an actor in the past, one whose
influence had been overstated and which should be discarded as the primary
focus of historical research.
More strident criticisms came from those who were primarily academic
historians, but who had experience in the tribunal process, providing assist-
ance to claimants or to the tribunal. Oliver and Giselle Byrnes were particu-
larly critical of the tribunal but for different reasons (Oliver 2001, 2002; Byrnes
2004). Oliver had provided assistance to the tribunal on a number of occa-
sions, writing a short history of the tribunal’s early reports and then being
called upon to assist claimants in the contentious Muriwhenua inquiry. In his
view, at least some of the tribunal’s reports were fatally flawed by present-
ism. Howe defined presentism as the ‘projection of today’s moralities onto
the unsuspecting people of the past’ (Howe 2003). Paul Monin’s experi-
ence in writing on the Hauraki unsettled his own ideas of history and was
treated uneasily by claimants (Monin 2002). Oliver was particularly critical of
the Taranaki report, for its overstatement of Taranaki’s grievances by inter-
national comparison and in accusing the tribunal of being ahistorical in its
reasoning. Byrnes took a postcolonial swipe at the tribunal, which illustrated

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Michael Belgrave

a widening gulf between some historical approaches and the tribunal’s work
(Byrnes 2004). The extent to which the tribunal’s historical findings were
reasonable was debated in the New Zealand Journal of History in 2006, with
James McAloon coming to the tribunal’s defence (McAloon 2006; Byrnes
2006; Belgrave 2006; Oliver 2007). More recently, the tribunal has become
responsive to these criticisms as Grant Phillipson, also a tribunal member, has
argued that its reports were now applying a measure of the Crown’s actions
based on what could be regarded as reasonable, or at least plausible, at the
time (Waitangi Tribunal 2006: 1206–7; Phillipson 2010, 2012, 2014).
In the last decade, the tribunal’s historical reports have been less peppered
with the contentious and more professional and prosaic in their findings.
This is not just the result of a change in approach to history by the tribunal.
Although, the very recent finding that Northland Maori did not cede sover-
eignty at Waitangi and Hokianga may well open the tribunal to renewed
claims of presentism (Waitangi Tribunal 2014). Professional witnesses can still
be combative and debates over historical events intense, but the ground has
shifted. The Treaty of Waitangi has been displaced as the focus of Maori politi-
cal activity by political action in a proportionally elected parliament since the
introduction of MMP (mixed member proportional electoral system) in 1996,
and especially since the emergence of the Maori Party in 2004. The Treaty is no
longer the single conduit for dialogue between the Crown and Maori. As the
tribunal begins to wind up its historical inquiries, the majority of claimants have
shifted their attention from the tribunal to negotiating settlements. This process
includes historians, but in a much more peripheral role, drafting short histori-
cal accounts which provide the rationale for settlement, but which are often
concluded after the other aspects of the settlement have been agreed.

MAORI HISTORIANS
Once historians and Maori researchers have been freed from the responsibility
of providing evidence for the tribunal, their historical imaginations have often
moved on. Maori writing on contemporary issues borrows more from Smith’s
kaupapa Maori theory than from the tribunal’s research. Maori views of the
treaty are still important and rely heavily on the assumption that sovereignty
was not transferred in 1840 and, if anything, was confirmed in the treaty
rather than extinguished (Mulholland and Tawhai 2010). Most Maori writ-
ing also continues to see culture as the defining explanation of Maori behav-
iour. Colonization is at least as much about cultural assimilation as economic
marginalization. The Crown, rather than the European world, is blamed for
Maori disadvantage and the erosion of mana Maori. However, only so much
can be blamed on the Crown.
Perhaps surprisingly, many leading Maori historians appear little influ-
enced by the Maori sovereignty model, with its emphasis on Said and Gramsci.
They still grapple with the consequences of colonization and they still see
Maori self-determination and community well-being as the primary focus of
Maori life, irrespective of colonization. But their communities are local and fail
to fall easily into a bicultural dichotomy. Maori historians are addressing one
of the major weaknesses of the Maori sovereignty approach to the Maori past,
the failure to explain Maori adoption and accommodation with the European
world. The Gramsci-led model has difficulty dealing with the adoption of such
institutions as Christianity or enthusiasm for Native schools and sponsorship
of the legislation to suppress tohunga (Maori priests/healers). In a Gramscian

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 The politics of Maori history in an age of protest

approach, such actions have to be explained as a form of false consciousness,

hegemony or as evidence of colonized minds, particularly as these adoptions
of European ideas were made with such enthusiasm at the time, or like the
Tohunga Suppression Act 1907, were Maori initiatives.
Some Maori historians have returned to re-establishing a Maori episte-
mology in the writing of history (Tau 2003), while others have given historical
context to Maori decision-making and responses to contact with the European
world. Angela Wanhalla’s exploration of Maori life in mixed Ngai Tahu commu-
nities is an excellent example of this exploration of a middle ground and she
has extended this into a national setting (Wanhalla 2009, 2013). Wanhalla has
also gone beyond the national in her study of the wartime children of US serv-
icemen in the Pacific (Wanhalla 2013). So also has Damon Salesa’s study of
inter-marriage on an imperial stage, although Salesa is Samoan rather than
Maori (Salesa 2011). This is not Richard White’s middle ground, based on
mutual misunderstanding, but one where Maori live, conscious that their world
is changing and making decisions for their own time (White 1991). In the same
way, Aroha Harris’s work on Maori urbanization draws on themes developed
earlier by Metge and Hohepa, but focusing on the urban rather than the rural
experience. Being Maori is applied in new contexts and with new priorities
which reflect unfamiliar situations. Melissa Williams has continued this theme,
exploring Panguru’s accommodation with the Auckland Power Board and the
Department of Maori Affairs, as a creative means of securing an economic place
in the urban environment, but also with maintaining community in Panguru
as much as in Auckland (Williams 2005, 2010). Some Maori historians have
been particularly interested in the many Maori who travelled abroad, detached
from their kin, illustrated by the 2010 Manurere: Travelling Maori symposium at
Victoria University of Wellington, and in Paul Diamond’s study of the expatri-
ate University of Oxford student, Makereti Papakura (Diamond 2007).
Maori historians have consciously seen themselves as breaking away from
the confines of tribunal research, while still appearing before the tribunal for their
own claimant groups and even, in Harris’s case, while sitting on the tribunal.
With a few exceptions, this new historiography is still little informed by the new
imperial history, and cautious of Orientalism. By 1999, even Linda Tuhiwai Smith
had difficulties in sustaining her indigenous Orientalism when applying it to the
New Zealand experience. As a result, and partly because of her acceptance of
tribal based decision-making, even major European interpreters of nineteenth-
century Maori life, such as George Grey and Elsdon Best, were treated ambiva-
lently because of the connections they made with rangatira (chiefs) in the past.
Smith is too aware an academic to be overwhelmed by her own model.

CONCLUSION: BRINGING THE LOCAL AND THE INTERNATIONAL

TOGETHER
Most of these schools of history have in common a focus on the personal
and the intimate, on relatively small-scale communities. The current Waitangi
Tribunal inquiry into the Rohe Potae is working with around a dozen distinct
tribal communities, in the small area of Kawhia and Aotea, each with their
own identity and distinct history. Harris, Williams and Wanhalla are all
concerned with the intimacy of personal relationships in small groups of hapu
(sub-tribe) or whanau. Ballantyne’s study of Gore is at the core of his appeal
for a renewed emphasis on locality. Only some of these schools are linking
locality into the transnational, and to debates which have emerged from the

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Michael Belgrave

new imperial history. Salesa and Wanhalla have done this, but other Maori
historians have not.
While the tribunal’s attention rarely goes above the State, its records and its
inquiries have demonstrated the resilience of Maori memory and provided the
resources to integrate this memory with historical sources and historical narra-
tive. This memory relies not just on oral history, but also on the voluminous and
detailed testimony presented in the nineteenth century before the Native Land
Court and other inquiries. In the past, and Binney’s work with Ngai Tuhoe is a
strong example, historians tended to work with a limited number of informants,
as did anthropologists. They risked leaping to conclusions that encompassed
all Maori. The tribunal’s work is so extensive and so varied that the histories of
dozens of different Maori communities are told in its research – if not necessar-
ily in its reports. These numerous local histories define affective communities.
It is now possible to explore how these communities come together, and
distinguish themselves from other communities while also being part of them
(these communities need not just be cultural or geographical). However, these
studies cannot be isolated: they must be informed by international themes,
placing New Zealand communities on both the edge and centre of major
areas of change of the last two centuries. All of these communities have in
their own way been driven by, responded to, and even created by large global
forces – empire, global capitalism and individualism. The much calmer politi-
cal environment of the present allows for more productive dialogue between
these different schools. In an unexpected irony, the Maori-focused research
and non-Maori focus on locality illustrates a common ground in seeing the
interpersonal and the colonial as inextricably tied. This distinguishes history
from Maori scholarship in the other social sciences, still locked into a view
of culture as two tectonic plates sliding past each other, jammed together by
colonization and forever in conflict.

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Belgrave, M. (2014), ‘The politics of Maori history in an age of protest’,
Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies 2: 2, pp. 139–156, doi: 10.1386/
nzps.2.2.139_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Michael Belgrave is Professor of History at Massey University, Albany, and
was previously research manager of the Waitangi Tribunal. He has continued
to maintain a strong interest in Treaty of Waitangi research and settlements,
providing substantial research reports into a wide number of the Waitangi
Tribunal’s district inquiries and has been heavily involved in negotiating the
historical aspects of Treaty settlements with a number of iwi. He has published
widely on treaty and Maori history, including being lead editor of Waitangi
Revisited: Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi (2005). He is also the author of
Historical Frictions: Ma-ori claims and reinvented histories (2005).
Contact: Massey University Albany, School of Humanities, Private Bag
102–904, Auckland 0743, New Zealand.
E-mail: m.p.belgrave@massey.ac.nz

Michael Belgrave has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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