Covering Te Kerēme

Author Saige England reflects on a formative period in her life — covering the Kāi Tahu claim for settlement as a young Pākehā journalist.

 

Recently, I was one of several authors who were invited to speak at the Blackball Readers and Writers Festival about the role of the writer in a time of crisis. This led me to reflect on a turbulent yet rewarding period in my life when, in my early 20s, I was assigned to accompany Kāi Tahu to report on its claim before the Waitangi Tribunal.

I was a rookie, only a couple of years out of journalism school. I’d been reporting on youth and women’s issues, and then the paper handed me Māori issues, too. The Press, at that time, had never employed a Māori reporter. I was Pākehā.

I felt ill-equipped. Te Kerēme, the Kāi Tahu claim, was important, bigger than me. I would have to leave my ego behind and learn, but I was nervous about making mistakes and failing to grasp issues I had never been taught.

From 1987 to 1989, I spent thousands of hours summarising documents, transcribing tapes, and attending hearings before the Waitangi Tribunal. I shared kai on marae, learned waiata, snuggled beside kuia, felt the safety and aroha of community, sometimes waking to one kuia telling another to quit snoring.

Always, I felt welcomed, protected, and accepted. Sitting at the knees of kuia Kera Brown and Rima Bell, who stroked and plaited my hair, I felt as though my whole self was being unwoven and rebraided.

Before this, I’d had only fleeting encounters with Māori.

When I was six years old, my mother enrolled me in a Māori cultural immersion class. I couldn’t read the note from her that I gave to my headmaster, but I followed his instruction to wait outside after school. A taxi driver picked me up and drove me in a car full of wriggling children to a marae. I didn’t know where I was going or why, as my mother had thought she was enrolling me for the following week.

An elderly woman with hair sleek as a white swan took me by the hand. I saw fathers hugging children, being demonstratively physical in a way that was rare for fathers in my experience. I was guided to dance and let my fingers flutter like leaves.

When I saw my mother at the door, I ran. I didn’t return because I was a shy kid and didn’t know any of the children who attended from other schools.

But when I joined Kāi Tahu and covered Te Kerēme I felt a kind of community that is increasingly disappearing in our Western society. I had witnessesed racism but I did not suffer from it because I was not Māori. Poor children were picked on at school by one bully teacher and Māori children were picked on the worst.

We lived in an urban working-class street in Bishopdale, Ōtautahi. In Bainton Street, kids ran in and out of each other’s houses. My friends’ mother, Te Owaina Gerrard, gave the best parties and joined in our games, splashing through rainbows and shrieking gleefully under the sprinkler. But when her Pākehā husband came home, the spark in her seemed to fade. One night, after she led me home, she gave me a little Māori peg doll that she had made. Cradling it in my hands, I marvelled at the tiny braids.

A short while later, my friends disappeared. It would be decades before we would properly reconnect. My mother, who was their teacher, said they’d been taken away to a children’s home. It was wrong, she said, because Te Owaina was a good mother. It frightened me that children and their loving mother could be parted.

When I attended school, we built model pioneer villages and learned nothing about marae. My intermediate school was secular in practice but we had religious educators who visited to teach us “good morals”. One day, the class was talking, ignoring the religious educator. I could see his neck getting redder. At first, I felt awkward and sorry for him, then he yelled at George, a Māori boy.

“You little n*****s are all the same.”

The rowdy class fell abruptly silent. George’s mother sent a note, and after that, he stayed outside in the corridor when the religious educator came. I would lean back in my chair, longing to be with him. Later, I tracked him down and found that he had gained a scholarship and worked in the health system. I also tracked down the religious educator who had become head of communications at a religious corporate charity. I told him that I had learned a lesson from him in Christian hypocrisy.

My father died in a boating accident when I was thirteen years old, leaving my mother to support us. At that time, status in Christchurch depended on where you lived and what your father did. Women who parented alone were blamed for faults in the system. I learned that if you are not born into privilege, or you lose it while climbing the ladder, you can wind up on the scrap heap.

I left Aotearoa shortly after the Springbok Tour protests in 1981. My sister and I had been on the frontlines, ducking the tide of police batons alongside people with blood streaming down their faces.

I returned to Aotearoa and did the journalism course at Wellington Polytechnic, which included Māori studies led by Huirangi Waikerepuru. I then worked at a rural newspaper in Hawke’s Bay, where I met and was influenced by Moana Jackson, before ending up at The Press.

At that time, the media was predominantly racist and misogynist. The Press was no exception. Even though my editor assigned me to report on the Kāi Tahu claim, the job would prove to be a constant battle. The paper’s editorials often discredited the evidence I outlined in my reports.

Harry Evison, a socialist historian who spent decades researching the Kāi Tahu claim, said that a country that doesn’t know its history is like a person with amnesia.

Along with Jim McAloon and Dr Anne Parsonson, he gave evidence about the injustices the Crown inflicted on Kāi Tahu. Seven rangatira signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi in Te Waipōunamu. The Crown failed to honour its promises, repeatedly promising one thing and doing another.

Typical of settler colonialism, Kāi Tahu suffered from settlers occupying land before it was sold, threats and forced sales, a failure by the Crown to set aside reserves, or giving minuscule reserves rather than those agreed. The Crown also made sure that reserves consisted of uncultivable land.

“The loss of their lands denied them their right to develop alongside the European,” said Evison.

I recall Mrs Wharetutu Stirling telling the Waitangi Tribunal that the land losses her tīpuna suffered were a systematic takeover by the Crown, in collusion with settlers, who took land, water, and natural resources with an attitude that “natives” and “half-castes” needed to be kept “firmly in check”.

That was in Kaikōura, where I still to this day hear Pākehā denigrating Kāi Tahu. Little do they know — or want to know.

I faced other difficulties while covering the hearings. A young woman who lived over the road came to borrow my phone, and I caught her taking the phone to pieces. After that, my phone started making regular clicking noises.

The lawyer representing Kāi Tahu, David Palmer, a man constantly running and puffing and flicking papers, told me that phone tapping was a common experience among those who were perceived by the Crown to be allying with Māori.

It seemed anyone who reported fairly was perceived as the enemy of the government, or an enemy of related business interests. One day, I came home and saw someone run out of the house. The only item missing was my copy of some files on mining.

The injustices against Kāi Tahu (and so many others) are well documented by the Waitangi Tribunal. When I argue with people about the history of this settler colonialism, I refer them to those reports.

I won journalism awards for my work covering the hearings, including the Media Peace Award, ironic given that I was in a near constant state of conflict with my own employer and some of my racist colleagues during that period.

One of the deputy editors instructed me to laugh at racist jokes to prove I had a sense of humour. I received a formal letter from the editor telling me to stop putting te reo words in the paper, even though they were followed by the English translation in brackets. He said it was putting off readers who didn’t know the language. English was a superior language, he said. Interest in Māori issues was a passing fashion, and I should be careful, he said.

After covering the Kāi Tahu claim, I was left with no illusions about my country, about the injustices against Kāi Tahu, or the ways the truth was hidden. I had listened to all the evidence, and it was overwhelming.

I am grateful to Kāi Tahu for helping me grow and understand the real history. I am grateful to the people who took me through a gate gently. I am grateful to the wahine toa for teaching me how to be strong. I am grateful to the kuia Kera Brown and Rima Bell, and all the people who changed the course of my life. Besides my mentor, for my novel, Buddy Mikaere, I honour my former kaiako Huirangi Waikerepuru, and I honour Tā Tipene O’Regan, who carried a universe of knowledge in his mind.

In 2014, I had my last meeting with one of the key people from the claim, Henare “Rik” Tau, at Tuahiwi, the marae for Ngāi Tūāhuriri. I felt the old people guiding me as I drove towards the marae nestled under the mountain, Maungatere.

Looking across braided rivers sparkling in the sunlight, I thought how easy it is in Tuahiwi and other marae throughout Te Waipounamu to imagine the tīpuna spearing tuna and walking across wetlands, donning heavy multi-feathered cloaks as they walk the old trails across snow flanked peaks.

Over Tim Tams, and tuna caught and smoked by Rik, we laughed and talked, and he asked me to write a pukapuka about Te Kerēme, a task that feels like a responsibility, and which for some reason makes me feel teary. Perhaps it’s because I want to go back to that time, when we were all together working in unison.

After our kōrero, Rik drove me to Te Uruti urupā, to the gravesite of David Palmer, the lawyer for Te Kerēme. In a demonstration of manaakitanga, Rik had claimed the body of this lawyer, his dear Pākehā friend, to be buried among Kāi Tahu.

“I will be buried next to him,” said Rik. “Him on one side, my tīpuna on the other.”

A few weeks later, I attended Rik’s tangi. So many have gone and so many are older, but I will always treasure the memories of people who came together for a dream of justice, not just for themselves but for their descendants and for the lifeblood that is the earth and water.

During that time when I covered the Kerēme and ever since, I have learned from Kāi Tahu the value of community, integrity, honesty and generosity. At a formative period in my life I was embraced and welcomed. I listened to the tangata and I heard the evidence of injustice.

I know, without any doubt, that settler colonialism is a violent system, its legacy is detrimental and its continued imposition has gut-wrenching, heart-breaking consequences.

I encourage Pākehā I meet who deny the damaging history of settler colonialism to read the reports by the Waitangi Tribunal. I am indebted to Kāi Tahu for positively changing my life, in the past and present. Pākehā  have nothing to fear from tino rantatiratanga, quite the reverse. A partnership is not an equal partnership when one partner is dominant and abusive towards the other. The abusive relationship needs to stop and a different society needs to emerge.

If I could weave a miracle, I would roll back the years and peel back the tide that brought the ships from the British Empire. I would tell my ancestors to open their eyes and look at all the light — from the light rising from the trees on the foreshore to the light of the last wave on the horizon.

I would ask them to listen to the kaumātua and pay heed to the hosts of the land. I would tell them to distentangle themselves from a system of domination and deceit, to feel the breath blown into them by people who demonstrate manaakitanga. I would tell them to kneel humbly at the knees of the whaea and kuia so they can be rebraided and move forward differently.

 

Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of  The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She received a CLNZ-NZSA (Copyright Licensing New Zealand-New Zealand Society of Authors) Research Grant for her next novel, No Graves For Ghosts about the machinations of the duplicitous New Zealand Company. 

E-Tangata, 2025