Waitangi 2025 – Sovereignty and Settlements

Every rohe seems to have a Waitangi. There’s one at the end of town here in Opotiki. There’s a Waitangi village just before Te Puke. I think there’s one in between Gisborne and Wairoa. Even the Chathams have one. Quite fitting the Treaty is named for such a ubiquitous, Maori – in the sense of occurring naturally everywhere – placename.

Opotiki’s Waitangi Day – for Te Whakatohea – is 27 and 28 of May.  No-one but a handful of people at the Hapu level have ever commemorated this. The Whakatohea Maori Trust Board and their kupapa gang only ever commemorated it once in my memory – when they used it as the date to sign a settlement deal with the government. A cynical coup de grace for the mercenaries and the fulfilment of a barely secret secret commission.

The kupapa have only the most shallow idea about the Treaty – and they signed all those rights away. If they appreciated what the Treaty means maybe they would not have agreed to let the NZ government abrogate it to the Iwi’s now permanent disadvantage. They do however appreciate what money means to themselves. They never commemorated it before and they never commemorated it after – the Treaty means nothing to them except the raw understanding that it is primarily a tool by lawyers to squeeze out some government funding. ‘Land back’ only counts to them if it is land going to the Iwi entity itself – not Hapu or whanau. If there is no government money coming their way for it they are not interested – they wouldn’t dream of funding anything from or for Hapu unless the government somehow was paying for it. Paying and controlling.

Nothing customary in a true sense has ever been supported; indeed the corporate sees any support of Hapu as a dimunition if its own mana. The government is paying the Iwi corporate – like the trust board before it – to usurp the mana of the Hapu.  It is a simple thing to understand and yet is hidden as not to upset the government’s self-serving settlement mythology whereby the Iwi negotiators are heros and the Pakeha government is generous – neither is true, it is actually the opposite.

The dependency and parasitism is just like the old Maori Trust Board scenario, but with a bigger budget and no future Treaty settlement to placate the critics. The Treaty isn’t a fraud the Treaty settlements are.

The job of those post-settlement nepopalities is to suppress the relatively radical Hapu. The result of the “Treaty” settlement deal is a hollow sham.

This anniversary doesn’t seem worth commemorating now the NZ government have paid the kupapa for the violation of it over the top of everyone else’s objections. And especially since the UK-NZ Free Trade Agreement has come into force which states that the NZ government has the exclusive relationship with Maori under the Treaty and not the UK.

The Treaty has been completely violated by both the UK and NZ by displacing the UK without Maori consent. The small MFAT group of hand-picked Maori mercenaries is not the consent of the sovereign tribes who signed the Treaty. An MFAT contact group that met only once and was never consulted thereafter is not the consent of the Treaty signatories.

So, when I think of Waitangi Day I’m thinking of how the Treaty applies to my own tribe in our territory and how badly, brutally, bastardised the thing is. Abused all round.

And I haven’t got to the Treaty Principles Bill.

This Waitangi Day my neighbour had an Independence/United Tribes flag flying – first time they’ve ever had any flag up.

There it was: a decent breeze, it’s at full stretch and it’s brand new. It stands out. Why choose that one? Why not the Tino one? Ambled over with an offering of semi-ripe peaches. One of them had on a Tino sarong and explained they did – in fact – display both. Respect. I used to fly an Independence flag too – it ended up in the tree, a long story – so it’s sort of still up there in a sense.

The 1834 flag is the most popular around here by far. It is the popular choice. Ask the Koreans. Just go to the dollar shop to find out the real popularity of something – the Independence outsells the Tino about 3-1. Love the Tino flag of 1990, but it is the Confederated flag of the United Tribes that has an assertion of national sovereign mana that most people in the Eastern Bay prefer. It is about mana motuhake – independence. I strongly suspect that the reason the Tino flag seems more prevalent is because it is preferred by the NZ government entities as the “official” Maori flag and by corporate Iwi for the same reason. Can’t handle the mana of the 1834, it’s a bit too top shelf for the people with government funding.

What does that alert you to? It is the pre-Treaty sovereignty that is being invoked by Maori. The importance of the Treaty rests with the acknowledgement it makes if that earlier sovereignty.

The neighbours and I didn’t really talk about Waitangi at all per se. The rapacious land-thieving white man came in for some mumbled discourteous language, but no discussion with anything happening at Waitangi.  How Te Kooti was never captured and retired when he wanted to, how he had the best horse in the world who would go through thick and thin with him not like the horses nowadays that would probably have thrown him that time on the cliff. But we didn’t discuss Waitangi. It’s why we were discussing it, but we weren’t talking about the Treaty or what was happening in Waitangi up North. Waitangi is now internalised.