Colonisation restyled as ‘grand adventure’

Essay examines how British and Ma¯ ori viewed interdependence

An excerpt from an essay by Treaty and constitutional law expert Dr Moana Jackson, taken from “Imagining Decolonisation”, the latest in the BWB Text series from Bridget Williams Books:

“James Cook’s belief that he could take this country for England in 1769 because he had ‘discovered’ it, and the whole discourse in the 1830s about how the Crown should ‘annex’ and treat with us, were based on their assumed right to take over the homes of any indigenous peoples whom one writer would later call ‘your newcaught sullen peoples — Half devil and half child.’

“Initially iwi and hapū were not aware that the different ones would believe such stories, and looked to the marae to decide what kind of relationship might be possible.

“Thus the 1835 Declaration of Independence, or He Whakaputanga, stressed the self-determination of iwi and hapū but allowed the kind of interdependence with newcomers that is recognised on the marae.

“Five years later, when iwi and hapū first discussed whether to treat with the Crown, it was on the basis that the stories in the land could be translated into Te Tiriti as a way to bring people together — mahi tū hono. Like the kawa on the marae, the kawa of Te Tiriti envisaged the cementing of relationships that recognised the facts of iwi independence and the hopes for an inherent interdependence.

“The words in the reo in Te Tiriti were an expression of that tikangabased recognition, and were signed by the rangatira on that basis. They reaffirmed that while interdependence was an honourable aim, it was always dependent upon the continuing independence of iwi and hapū . To contemplate forfeiting that independence would have been legally impossible, politically untenable and culturally incomprehensible.

“Colonisation had no time for the niceties of tikanga. It fractured the hoped-for interdependence and denied the possibility of continuing Mā ori independence.

“The colonisers’ need to impose their laws and institutions on people who already had their own allowed no room for an honourable relationship with iwi and hapū . Instead colonisation fomented injustice: a systemic privileging of the Crown and a relationship in which it assumed it would be the sole and supreme authority.

“As they set about ensuring their supremacy through war and all the other brutality of dispossession, the colonisers wrote new stories that deliberately misremembered and obscured the injustice of what they were doing. History became a kind of rebranding in which colonisation was not seen as a violent home invasion but a grand if sometimes flawed adventure that was somehow ‘better’ here than anywhere else because of the proclaimed honour of the Crown in treaty-making.

“There is a stark contradiction in terms in the belief that there can be honour in the dishonour of dispossession, and so the new stories never found an easy place in this land. Rather, they sat uneasily upon it like the new place names and fences that were being strung across the new private properties. They were intruder stories on a land that needed no such embellishment.

“These colonial stories may have helped explain the taking of power, but they could not give the colonisers the comfort of a place to stand. It was hard to feel at home when the descendants of those who had been killed were never far away and the smoke of the battlefield still lingered in the smoke of the forests that were being burned. In island stories, the intimacy of distance never lets memory entirely fade away.”

To contemplate forfeiting that independence would have been legally impossible, politically untenable and culturally incomprehensible.