n 1838 and 1839, as part of an Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee people called this journey the “Trail of Tears,” because of its devastating effects. This picture, The Trail of Tears, was painted by Robert Lindneux in 1942. (Image Credit: The Granger Collection, New York)

Treaties with Indigenous nations were a fashion of the 19th century as empires sought rapid expansion. Despite the promises made on parchment, most became tools of permanent dispossession. Here, Shane Te Pou considers this history and why the treaty signed here endured.

The 19th century was thick with treaties between empires and Indigenous nations. From Canada to West Africa, the Pacific to the Great Plains, treaties were the preferred instrument for turning conquest into consent. Even amid that century of parchment, the 1840s stand out.

It was during that decade that the United States pressed through its final removals, driving Native nations west under a stream of coerced treaties. Britain, having abolished the slave trade it had once profited from, sent warships to West Africa to compel local rulers into abolition compacts. France expanded across Polynesia, turning protectorates into possessions. The Hawaiian Kingdom sought to protect itself by signing treaties of recognition, only to be smothered by colonial appetites.

And in New Zealand, of course, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed.

Just a year before the Miami chiefs gathered at the Forks of the Wabash in 1840, the Cherokee Nation had been driven from their lands in Georgia and the Carolinas. Forced to march to vacant reservations in what is now Oklahoma, stalked by hunger, cold and disease, 4,000 men, women and children perished on the road — and in the decade that followed, their population fell by nearly a quarter.

Families had left behind fields newly planted, orchards heavy with fruit, rivers they had fished for centuries. On the road west, blankets were thin, food scarce. Children shivered themselves to death at night, the sick were buried in shallow graves by the roadside. It was called removal. In truth it was ruin.

As that tragedy, known ever since as the Trail of Tears, unfolded, another was set in motion. In November 1840, Miami chiefs were called to the Forks of the Wabash in Indiana. Federal officials read out terms few could refuse: land cessions in return for annuities, schooling, protection.

The chiefs, some still holding treaty medals from earlier compacts, knew well enough what those promises meant. On paper, the treaty delivered payments, mills, teachers. In practice, it delivered the permanent dispossession of their rivers and valleys. Families were uprooted, herded west toward Kansas. What was left behind was not just land, but the entire means of being: hunting grounds, sacred places, the geography of memory itself.

Two years earlier, on the frozen edge of Lake Erie in upstate New York, at Buffalo Creek, US officials and private speculators convinced the Seneca to sign away what little remained of their homeland. The treaty, drafted by agents of the Ogden Land Company and fronted by Commissioner Ransom Gillet, promised fertile acres in Kansas in exchange for New York’s last Iroquois soil. Spirits were poured, interpreters spoke half-truths, and, amid confusion and fatigue, the signatures were gathered.

One young Seneca lawyer, Maris Bryant Pierce, refused to accept the bargain. Trained at Dartmouth and steeped in both Haudenosaunee and American law, he spent years petitioning in Washington, denouncing the treaty as a fraud born of whisky and deceit. The Senate wavered, appending a hollow safeguard that assent must be “free and voluntary”. President Martin Van Buren concluded that it had been — against all evidence — and signed it into law with his proclamation on April 4, 1840.

Pierce’s defiance forced a token retreat: a revised treaty in 1842 restored fragments of Seneca land along the Cattaraugus and Allegany. But by the time he died in 1874, still fierce in advocacy for his beleaguered people, his nation held only a fraction of its territory and a shadow of its sovereign past.

In 1840, British warships anchored off the Gallinas coast of Sierra Leone, their cannon trained inland. The Gallinas had long been a hub of the Atlantic trade: chiefs and traders kept captives in wooden barracoons until slavers arrived to ferry them across the ocean. Britain, which had enriched itself for centuries on that traffic, now styled itself the enforcer of abolition.

Captain Joseph Denman led the assault. His men stormed the stockades, released hundreds of captives, and set the timber pens ablaze. The smoke hung over the beaches as chiefs were summoned aboard the ship. There, under the shadow of the guns, they signed treaties ending the trade.

In London, these documents were celebrated as proof of Britain’s moral mission — the empire turned humanitarian. Newspapers praised Denman. Parliament cited the treaties as evidence of progress. But for the Gallinas rulers, the moment marked something else: humiliation and coercion, their political economy dismantled at bayonet point, their authority compromised. The barracoons burned, the treaties signed, Britain’s foothold deepened. Abolition was real enough, but it came dressed in empire’s uniform.

In 1842, Queen Pomare IV of Tahiti received the French delegation under a sky thick with gunpowder. Frigates lay offshore, their decks lined with marines. A treaty of protectorate was laid before her. France promised defence, recognition, friendship under the tricolour.

Pomare signed, perhaps hoping her kingdom might endure. But the ink was barely dry before the balance shifted. French troops paraded in the capital, missionaries pressed their influence, and officials drew new lines of authority. Within two years, war broke out as Pomare resisted, but the French flag was raised and the kingdom reduced. What had been offered as protection became possession. Tahitian sovereignty shrank until it was sovereignty in name only.

In Honolulu, the Hawaiian Kingdom placed its hopes in parchment. In 1843, Britain and France jointly declared recognition, and American signatures followed. Church bells rang, cannon fire echoed across the harbour. For a moment, the monarchy seemed secure.

But merchants, missionaries and marines soon tightened their grip, translating trade and faith into law. The treaties did not protect it. In 1893, American planters overthrew the Hawaiian crown. Five years later, the US annexed the islands outright.

At the Bay of Islands, the summer of 1840 was alive with rumour. At Kororāreka, the rough whaling port soon to be called Russell, British settlers were pouring in, disorder spreading. Māori power was still decisive — in numbers, in trade, in war. Māori were not supplicants. With population, arms, and control of trade still overwhelmingly in their favour, they entered the discussions as autonomous powers — wary, divided, but far from conquered. The Crown could not impose its will outright. It needed signatures.

There were wider anxieties too. With Britain and France locked in an uneasy truce, and French ships roaming the Pacific on an acquisition spree — even landing a party of settlers at Akaroa — Britain’s hand was forced.

On February 5, under a large marquee on the lawn at Waitangi, chiefs debated a treaty translated into Māori by Henry and Edward Williams. The English draft spoke of sovereignty. The Māori text — Te Tiriti o Waitangi — spoke of kāwanatanga, a governorship of limited scope. On February 6, more than 40 rangatira signed. In the months that followed, copies travelled the country and about 540 Māori signed across nine sheets, most on the Māori text. Some refused.

Like the chiefs on the Gallinas coast, they signed in the shadow of empire. Like Pomare IV in Tahiti, they signed with an eye to preserving what they could. In this sense, the Treaty of Waitangi was far from alone.

Yet Waitangi’s fate was different, although it didn’t always seem that way. The Crown’s promises were soon broken. Wars and confiscations followed. The Treaty was often ignored in practice. For decades, it looked like one more document filed away as settlers took the land. But it was never annulled. It lived on in archives and memory, revived in protest and in law. Dishonoured, it endured.

The difference lay not in the benevolence of the Crown — its ambitions were as self-interested as any — but in the determination of Māori across generations to insist the Treaty still bound the nation. Born of imperial domination, it has been remade into something else: a platform for redress, a language for partnership, a promise not yet fulfilled but still alive.

The treaties of the 1840s shared a common foundation. They were instruments of imperial domination, signed under pressure, often not worth the parchment they were written on.

The Treaty of Waitangi belongs in that company — yet where others withered, it lived on.

Today, it is belittled by those who would prefer it forgotten — politicians like David Seymour, and campaigns like Hobson’s Pledge, who trade in disparagement and distortion. They misrepresent its history, diminish its currency, deny its relevance.

And yet, so dishonoured, still it endures.

Shane Te Pou (Tūhoe, Ngāti Raka hapū) is one of eight children, born and raised in the mill town of Kawerau. As a 1966 baby, he counts himself lucky to have grown up at a time when there was virtually no unemployment and everyone had a house. Shane joined the Labour Party when he was 14, and was a trade union official for 10 years. He is no longer a member of any political party but has supported candidates and issues across the political spectrum.

E-Tangata, 2025