Bruce Moon: Spotlight on Ngai Tahu

“He who is greedy is always in want.”  Horace, (65-8 B.C.)

Well, greatly enriched with taxpayer money, the Ngai Tahu tribe is really getting used to throwing its weight around.  Sometimes of course this may be appropriate in the general scheme of things but perhaps it is time to have a closer look at what it amounts to.

First and foremost, it should be made crystal clear that the immense wealth of this tribe is largely due to a very dubious “Treaty Settlement” inflicted on our long-suffering taxpayers.  Flagrant in the extreme is the Ngai Tahu Claims Settlement Act of 1998.  An exhaustive examination by Alan Everton,[i] substantially confirmed by the studies of Michael Butler[ii] and Denis Hampton,[iii] asserted that, in Everton’s words “any settlement of Ngai Tahu’s claims based on [the Waitangi Tribunal’s] report will be nothing short of a fraud.”  Plain words!

And that is why, fellow taxpayers, Ngai Tahu Inc. is now one of the richest corporations in New Zealand.  And that is not more than half of the story because in 1969, when Ngai Tahu’s fourth “full and final” settlement was negotiated, Southern Maori MP, Whetu Tregerthen-Sullivan reported in Parliament that at 80 tribal meetings, 109 formal resolutions were passed accepting it.  She rejected an argument that their claims had not been fully and finally settled.  If we accept Everton’s lengthy and careful analysis, Ngai Tahu’s so-called “Treaty Settlement” of 1st October 1998, actively supported by Messrs Bolger and Graham, was a fraud inflicted on the taxpayers of New Zealand by the Shipley Government, with subsequent “relativity payments”, apparently ad infinitum, likewise.

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And yet, in 1842, Ngai Tahu were a miserable remnant of little more than two thousand members, eking out a miserable existence, mostly in a few coastal villages.[iv]  Compare that with the 54,819 members of the tribe reported in its 1998 “Treaty Settlement”.

This apparent explosion of numbers is of course owed to extensive interbreeding with the wicked white colonials from the very earliest days of the arrival of the whalers and sealers.[v]  Thus the many Paratas today are all descended from one Pratt, or Trapp, an American whaler from Massachusetts.

The Paratas had a farm at Puketeraki (referred to as “Pratt’s farm” in one record) and owned Karitane land.  My grandfather bought a four-acre block from them there and subdivided it, naming the access road “Parata Avenue”.  One of the Parata family has more recently purchased a house and sections in the block.  We always had good relations with such families, my grandfather also providing many of them with blankets during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

 I myself recall sitting as a boy and conversing at Karitane with old Johnny Matthews,[vi] the last of the southern fullbloods.  I recall talking with Ronga Te Tau who explained that, as half-castes, her father, Richard John Seddon Te Tau, known to all as “Dick”, had given each family member one Maori and one European name.  Her second name was “Victoria”, now sadly bastardized to “Wikitoria” on the memorial to her in the Puketeraki graveyard.  I recall getting my mother to invite her brothers, Wi, or “Top” and Rangi to my eighth birthday party.  Many years later, I danced with Ronga when we were both at the Karitane school centenary.  Mutu Ellison came to my Mother’s 80th birthday party and Tira Curtis, née Harper, to my 70th.  Old Daisy Wilson taught my daughters to crochet!  I recall amiable discussions with Rangi Ellison about the old Karitane cemetery where gravestones stretch back to 1842.

In standard five at Bluff school I shared a desk with half-caste Mick Anglem, descended from the renowned Captain Anglem after whom the highest point on Stewart Island is named. When I recalled some of these details in a moving a vote of thanks to invited speaker, Steve O’Regan, said to be of one-sixteenth Ngai Tahu descent, at a meeting of the Diamond Harbour Historical Association, he declared that I was “not all bad”!

Never once do I recall any one of these people ever complaining of anything “stolen” from them by wicked white colonials.

Was it very different in the north?  Others, not I, will have to report on that scene.  But Ngai Tahu, better Kai Tahu in the south, benefited greatly from the arrival of white settlers in many and enduring ways. The vast sums of money and other assets, since granted to them on primarily false grounds, speak plainly of a massive injustice to all other New Zealanders, the passive source of their riches today.

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This is the context in which we should look at the report in “Newsroom” for 19 June 2023 by David Williams, headlined  “Ngāi Tahu unleashes over lakes” and sub-headed: “Blistering feedback from mana whenua skewers agencies over systemic failures at Ōtūwharekai/Ashburton Lakes.”. Oh dear!

Now nobody should deny the right of members of Ngai Tahu and indeed all citizens to draw attention to what has clearly been some default in the management of this beautiful area around Lake Heron.[vii]  It is their assumed distinction as “mana whenua” –  whatever that is – of these descendants of a few miserable coastal village dwellers which rather jars on one.

We are informed that: “A cultural health report from 2010 said the area was of immense cultural significance, as an important seasonal mahinga kai (food gathering) area, and a major travelling route – on three main ‘pounamu trails’.”  “Immense cultural significance” for food-gathering by people from coastal villages with the sea at their doorstep?  An area they went through on their way to get greenstone from which they had brutally deprived earlier West Coast residents?  Really?

But, we are told, “through ‘process failures’, limited legislation, and scant mana whenua involvement, especially at a governance level, Ngāi Tahu was unable to exercise rangatiratanga (self-determination) and kaitiakitanga (guardianship).” Yeah?  There is nothing like trotting out a perverted meaning for Treaty of Waitangi wording to support ones claim!  “Rangatiratanga”, probably defined by missionaries, was an effort to compose a word in the Treaty for Hobson’s “possession” of ordinary property, an ill-developed concept in traditional Maori society and the Ngai Tahu claim otherwise is an insult to those who drafted and signed that treaty so many years ago.[viii]  As for Ngai Tahu “kaitiakitanga”, it wasn’t so hot when it came to the moa or, to my own certain knowledge, to Foveaux Strait muttonbirds.

And so, whether Maori “traditional wisdom” - matauranga – might have improved the situation hitherto, appropriate application of modern scientific knowledge is surely the best way forward today.

And again, we are told that “Ngāi Tahu rangatiratanga was undermined, the tribe said. The example given was the Ashburton zone committee, on which papatipu rūnanga representatives were outnumbered by community representatives.”  Really?  The great panjandrums of Ngai Tahu had better realize that, as noted above, their mythical  “rangatiratanga” is a gross misinterpretation of the Treaty using a word which fell out of use for considerably more that a hundred years until revived with a fake modern meaning by greedy revisionists today.  And did they want to stack zone committee meetings with their own followers in order to get their way, whatever anybody else thought?  Democracy is still the best way[ix] to manage things, whatever its faults.  An adversarial “papatipu rūnanga” versus “community representatives” approach is unlikely to produce the best solution to a common problem.  We all live in the 2020s, not the era of primitive and enduring tribal warfare, in which Ngai Tahu played a part, which so greatly damaged the Maori people until the benevolent British rescued them in 1840.

Footnotes: 

[i]A.Everton, “Ngai Tahu’s Tangled Web”, “Free Radical”, Nos 26-28, August-December 1997
[ii]M.Butler “Complaints Industry still rumbles on. “Otago Daily Times”, 7th June 2012, p.15
[iii]D.Hampton, “Ngai Tahu claim too little critical analysis”, “Evening Post”, 3rd April 1998
[iv]A few lived at Tuturau and Arowhenua some distance from the coast which they often visited.
[v]S.Natusch, “Ruapuke Visited”, ISBN 0-473-04593, 1998 and “Rugged Shores”, ISBN 0-9582140-6-9 give many details.
[vi]His name on a recent memorial being “Hoani Matiu”, never used in his lifetime!
[vii]Where my family and I have camped.  My daughter recalls that I was meticulous in ensuring that we left no litter!
[viii]As their own Tuhawaiki did at Ruapuke Island on  “Tuesday the 9th”, by Bunbury’s account.  S.Natusch, op.cit., p.44 (The island itself visited by my daughter and me on 4th February 2021
[ix]Or “least worst way” as Churchill is reputed to have said!!

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