The Waitangi Tribunal, in a report on the Tongariro National Park claims released on Tuesday, said that Maori did not nobly gift the cluster of mountains, including Ruapehu and Tongariro, to the Crown in 1887. The tribunal renamed the transaction a “tuku” (offer) and asserted that it was actually an offer of joint guardianship of the peaks.
Such a conclusion appears to involve a blatant and self-serving reinterpretation of history resulting from applying treaty principles dreamed up in 1987 to a significant event that occurred 100 years earlier.
