Bruce Moon: Yet Another Of The Ilk

Dear, Oh Dear!  Here is yet another one from a University which cannot – or wilfully will not – even get the name of our country right.[i]

Do I have to tell them yet again that “Aotearoa”, which they will never find in that text, near-sacred to some, the Treaty of Waitangi, is a fake name for our country, “certainly not known to Maori as Aotearoa in pre-European times.”[ii]  One might have thought that a Senior Lecturer in Maori history could at least have got that one right, even if his University cannot!

So here is Dr Peter Meihana, doing the usual thing of listing his ancestral Maori tribes – four of them – but with not a word of his apparent European ancestry.  If an academic, or anybody, cannot, or will not, give an accurate summary of such significant details, how much reliance can we put in anything else he says?  We’ll take a look.

Thus,  on the basis of his racial disclosures,[iii] we can take Dr Meihana to be that very rare bird: a full-blooded Maori which is fascinating, if true.  Else, why does he fail to disclose the rest of his genetic contribution,[iv] albeit this is, we note, a very common practice amongst “Maori” academics and commentators.  We ask:

-would it be consistent with the alleged significance of his Maori family background to be clearly impolite and misleading? 

 - is he embarrassed by his non-Maori heritage? Was it one or more unhappy unions across the races that gave rise to him? 

- is he choosing to rewrite the nature of those relationships in order to justify his focusing on the Maori components only?

-  or  is it because the Maori aspect entitles him to distort NZ history – which we discuss further below?

We invite Dr Meihana to address these questions – to comment on and clarify his family history and to explain his perspective.  We simply pose the questions. 

How conversant is he, for example, with the history of Ngai Tahu, from which he informs us that he is descended?  Is he aware, for instance that Ngai Tahu a North Island tribe, emigrated to the South, killing, eating and enslaving earlier inhabitants and indeed in the 1820s in the so-called “Kai Huaka[v] feud” eating their own relatives?  Is he aware of their massacre of Kati Mamoe at Goat Island (Mapoutahi) and similarly the slaughter and eating of the pathetic remnant of that tribe at Dusky Sound who were kindly treated by Captain Cook on his visit there in 1773? 

Is Dr Meihana aware that when Ngai Tahu received their fourth “full and final settlement” in 1944, Southern Maori MP Whetu Tregerthen-Sullivan informed Parliament that this had been accepted in 109 formal resolutions passed at 80 meetings.  Is Dr Meihana aware that notwithstanding the foregoing, Ngai Tahu received a fifth such settlement in 1997, described on close analysis as a “swindle and a fraud”?[vi]

But to proceed ...

As he is reported as saying: “When early observers came to Aotearoa New Zealand they used tools that helped them understand indigenous peoples... Around 1840 the prevailing idea was that Māori were savages, but a superior kind of savage.”  Well, their cannibalism, sometimes on a colossal scale, might be an indication of that.[vii]

Aha!  There’s that fake word “Aotearoa” again!  Would he choke if he omitted it?  And however early observers sought to understand them, Maoris were certainly not indigenous but certainly savages.

To quote him again: “The British Government and the New Zealand Company looked to colonise New Zealand. The Crown said that to protect Māori from land speculators (the Company) they needed to become British subjects and be afforded Her Majesty’s protection.”  Well, no, not exactly.

While the New Zealand Company certainly sought to colonize our country, the British Government certainly did not.  “England has colonies enough” said Colonial Secretary, Lord Glenelg, in June 1837, echoing the Duke of Wellington.  It was primarily the Maoris themselves who sought British protection – from the French and themselves!  As Hobson explained to the assembled chiefs at Waitangi on 5^th February, “the law of England gives no civil powers to Her Majesty out of her dominions.”[viii]  So that was the chiefs’ choice on that memorable day:  if you want protection from the French and yourselves, sign.  They did.

As for land ...

Hobson was well aware that the Maoris themselves were selling land at a breakneck speed in order to have funds for European consumer goods which they fancied.  No longer obliged to be hunter-gatherers, they had much land surplus to their requirements.  I have personally counted the titles of 179 sales of Maori land willingly sold and registered in Sydney before 1840.  Talk of “dispossessed lands”[ix] are mischievous at best.

Meihana asserts that “The Crown said that to protect Māori from land speculators (the Company) they needed to become British subjects and be afforded Her Majesty’s protection” is far from accurate.  Of course the New Zealand Company sought land for permanent settlement.  Saying they were “speculators” is simply untrue.  Neither was it true that Maoris sought protection from land speculators.  On the contrary... !

It is true that Hobson recognized the chaotic situation of land sales so that on his very first day in the country, he issued a proclamation to review and control all land sales should the chiefs cede their sovereignty to the Queen.  As is well-known, procedures were made complex by the differing practices: communal land-holding by the tribes, and the British practice of named individual title and so the Native Land Court was established to deal with this situation.  Much land was indeed sold in consequence - “Alienation” says Dr Meihana – it is not clear why.

Leasing of Maori land was tried.  “[T]the settlers didn’t like the idea of Māori landlordism. They claimed leasing would make Māori indolent” he says. Well there was some truth in this as reports from the Otago Peninsular are to be believed – the Maoris being the squirearchy which the settlers had striven so hard to escape in their homeland.  As for “indolence”: in 1896, just 857.5 of the 45,000 odd acres in Ngai Tahu possession in the South Island were in cultivation.  As Rev. Stack noted in 1872: “Though very fond of milk and butter, there is not one household that provides itself with these things.  Everyone shirks the trouble.”[x]

Then he makes the quite extraordinary statement: “notions of privilege deployed in the 19th century have been redeployed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries by anti-Treatyists who see any form of Māori development as a form of privilege.”  Who, just, are his “anti-Treatyists”?  One could well say that they are those people of part-Maori descent who falsely claim that the chiefs didn’t cede sovereignty when they signed the Treaty, or that “tino rangatiratanga” meant something vastly more than simply “possession” of ordinary property or that “taonga” meant vastly more than that ordinary property. We nominate Hugh Kawharu, Claire Charters[xi], Sandy Williams[xii] and Moana Jackson[xiii] as just a few examples.  And how many acts of Parliament have specifically addressed Maori privilege?  It might surprise Dr Meihana to find out!  Says he: “whenever there are claims and assertions of Māori privilege, Māori are about to lose something.”  He must be joking!

He goes on to say that he is a “trustee on Te Runanga a Rangitane”, referring to the “archaeological site at Cloudy Bay in Marlborough date[ing] back to around 1300AD.”   Well, actually, the skull of a woman found at the Wairau Bar and other artefacts found by a boy, James Eyles in 1939, was not a Maori at all!  She was possibly one of the ancient Lapita people who pre-dated the Polynesians, the genuine indigenous people of New Zealand.  There is a bit of research for Dr Meihana to do there it seems.[xiv]  Such people were displaced, presumably killed off, by Rangitane who, in turn were largely killed off by Te Rauparaha and his ferocious tribe and then the murder by Te Rangihaeata of helpless colonist prisoners at the Wairau Massacre, sorry “Affray”. 

We could go on – about more and more Maori privilege in this country.  Curiously Dr Meihana sees only “ideas of Maori privilege ... to ...1940.”  He has plenty of work to do to bring his survey up to date.

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Footnotes:

[i]The Director of Research at Massey, Professor Giselle Byrnes, was so reluctant to discuss with me the flaws in one Master’s thesis (concerning Rangiaowhia) that she blocked my email address from her system.  (So much for the free exchange of ideas in a university.)

[ii]M. King, “Penguin History of New Zealand”, 2003, ISBN 0-14-301867-1, p 42

[iii]     Ngāti Kuia, Rangitāne, Ngāti Apa ki te Rā Tō, Ngāi Tahu,

[iv]A very common practice we note amongst part-Maori commentators and academics. Hasn’t it been said that a half-truth is sometimes worth less than no truth at all?

[v]“Eat relation”

[vi]A. Everton, “Ngai Tahu’s Tangled Web”, “Free Radical”, August December 1997; and others.

[vii]At the Mauinaina pa at Tamaki in 1821 and at Pukerangiora in 1831, for instance. (References available)

[viii]W. Colenso, http://www.waitangi.com/colenso/colhis1.html

[ix]S. McMeeking, ”The Press”, 2 July 2011, for example

[x]Everton, op.cit

[xi]She argues for the “implausibility of the claim to sovereignty”!  “The myth of sovereignty” 30 October 2022

[xii]“Waikato Times”< 1 December 2017

[xiii]Quoted by Meihana

[xiv]“New Zealand Voice”, December 2017, pp 6-11

Bruce Moon is a retired computer pioneer who wrote "Real Treaty; False Treaty - The True Waitangi Story".