The year we stood up

2024 has been a particularly tumultuous year for Māori, writes Jamie Tahana, but it’s also a year where Māori stood up in the most powerful of ways.

 

It was a year of duelling emotions. Pride and fear jostled uneasily, as the strength of kotahitanga stirred with the exhausting frustration that Māori had to march for our rights yet again, dragged once more into that same tired debate about rights, place and privilege.

There was the grief that saturated the motu at the death of a kiingi, and the pride that was summoned with a few words only weeks before. “Just be Māori. All day. Every day.”

Anger at a deluge of law changes designed to redefine Te Tiriti manifested in an astoundingly staunch — yet jovial — display of unity and rangatiratanga that coursed its way down the country and through the narrow streets of Wellington, where the grey and glass of Lambton Quay and parliament were swallowed by a sea of red, black and white.

Exactly one year ago, as the dust was settling from an election that saw Labour turfed out and a new coalition government assembled after weeks of delicate negotiations, I wrote here that the new prime minister, Christopher Luxon, confronted “a generation of Māori strong in their identity, who won’t let progress slip without a fight.”

And a fight there has been.

As is typical with this country’s uncomfortable reckoning and reconciliation with its past, the Crown has once again learned that Māori and the Treaty cannot be written out or wished away. A slate of policies that have lazily played on this country’s insecurities and set a fire beneath the nation’s founding document have been met with a resistance not seen for generations.

On a sweltering morning in January, Turangawaewae marae was bursting at the seams as more than 10,000 people — far more than anyone expected — descended on Ngāruawāhia to heed a rare call from the Kiingitanga for a hui-aa-motu, to throw down the gauntlet to a new government over its policies for Māori, which had been developed without the Treaty partner. In the searing sunshine, iwi and hapū who rarely see eye to eye united for a year of defiance, in defence of Te Tiriti.

“There’s no principles, the Treaty is written, that’s it,” Tuheitia said to those sweating away beneath marquees. “It gives tauiwi their right and confirms that we’re already here.”

But the coalition pushed on. The year has seen a blitz of policy based on the assumption that the governing coalition overrides the Crown’s obligations to Te Tiriti. To disestablish the Māori Health Authority, relegate the reo in the public service, redefine the Marine and Coastal Area, limit Māori wards in local government, remove the provision for tamariki Māori in state care to be kept with their whakapapa, and to rejig the history curriculum away from one that finally acknowledges our shared past. These are just a few of the policies that, taken together, have been seen as a particularly pointed and petty attack against Māori rights.

Then there’s the Treaty principles bill (now renamed the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill). A unilateral attempt to redefine and extinguish the rights promised under Te Tiriti of Waitangi. A bill imposed after no consultation with the Treaty partner, but which grants the Crown full power over Māori, completely redrawing the parchment the rangatira of 1840 put their names and mana to. A bill that the Waitangi Tribunal said would, if enacted, amount to “the worst, most comprehensive breach of the Treaty/te Tiriti in modern times. If the Bill remained on the statute book for a considerable time or was never repealed, it could mean the end of the Treaty/te Tiriti.” That only prompted digs about the Tribunal and the judiciary that could be read as retributive.

Sadly, there is nothing puzzling or new in any of this. Everything has a whakapapa, and the colonisation of Indigenous Peoples has always involved defining them as the “other,” the ones who counted “less” in the establishment and protection of power.

From the very establishment of the colony of New Zealand, successive governments have tried to ignore or abandon the Treaty. Most famously when Chief Justice Prendergast dismissed the Treaty as a “simple nullity”, signed “between a civilised nation and a group of savages” who weren’t capable of signing a Treaty.

The words may be more tempered now, but that base attitude towards the Treaty has continued to permeate our society and successive governments. There is a continuing history of Māori people trying to address grievances politely and being continually fobbed off.

But when the politician Isaac Featherson, for whom a North Island town is named, wrote in 1856 that the duty of the European was to “smooth down [the] dying pillow of the Māori race”, or when the scientist Alfred Newman wrote that “the disappearance of the [Māori] race is scarcely subject for much regret . . . and are being supplanted by a superior race,” they could scarcely have imagined that, in the 21st century, half of all New Zealanders under the age of 25 would be Māori.

Our tūpuna did, though. In the late 19th century, as colonisation wrought its most violent and ugly acts, when war, homelessness and disease saw our population fall to a low of 42,000, our songs, laments and stories of our great seafaring ancestors, and the mountains we could no longer touch, were held closely in the quiet of our marae.

Generations petitioned and wrote letters for the Treaty to be honoured, and then they marched and fought. Even after being forced into the shadows, and prepared for extinction, they kept our language and culture alive. The fact that we as a people have survived such egregious acts with our culture intact, albeit significantly altered, fuels incredible pride. And a drive for “never again”.

Little surprise then that some of the most defining images of the year have been of the prime minister looking uncomfortable. First, with a fraught yet peaceful reception at Rātana and then at Waitangi, where whaikōrero yet again gave the Crown a history lesson and warned Māori of the need to be always vigilant — warnings that were repeated at the various hui-aa-motu across the year.

But then, in August, a particularly wretched blow came as Māori once again united, this time in mourning at the sudden death of Kiingi Tuheitia. In his 18th year on the throne, he had been at the vanguard of Māori reaction to the government’s policies. But, after a massive tangi, an epochal generational shift came when his daughter, Nga wai hono i te po, 27, succeeded him.

That shift has been so stark this year. Just as the young warriors of Ngā Tamatoa defined a taking over from the old guard in the 1970s, when polite appeal shifted to in-your-face protest, the mokopuna of Ngā Tamatoa have now come into their own.

In parliament, in the media, on the streets, and in the courts, a new generation of rangatahi, backed by an inexorable demographic change, and strong in their reo, whakapapa and identity, have been visible leaders in much of the pushback. Nowhere was that more visible than Eru Kapa-Kingi at the head of what has been described as the largest protest to ever arrive at parliament’s doorstep.

It’s the middle of December now when the country shuts down and starts to descend into that lazy summer slumber. Diving into crystal waters and rolling surf. Indulging in large, languid lunches before long swims in tepid bush-lined lakes.

And reflecting on what has been a particularly tumultuous year — yet one in which Māori stood up in the most powerful of ways, regrouping ahead of what is certain to be an equally tumultuous 2025.

See you at Waitangi.

 

Jamie Tahana (Ngāti Pikiao/Ngāti Makino/Tapuika) is a journalist and broadcaster who has worked in both Aotearoa and the Pacific. He grew up between his Dutch mother in the Hutt, Wellington, and his Te Arawa dad in Rotorua, going on to qualify with a master’s degree at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University. He was Māori News Editor at RNZ until May 2023, and is now working in London

E-Tangata, 2024