A Separate Authority (He Mana Motuhake), Volume II

The Crown's Betrayal of the Tūhoe Māori Sanctuary in New Zealand, 1915–1926

Steven Webster

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030410452
• eBook ISBN: 9783030410469
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: Social Sciences

Following on fromVolume I on the formation of the Urewera District Native Reserve, this monograph examines the period from 1908 to 1926, during which time the Crown subverted T?hoe control of the UDNR, established a mere decade earlier. While Volume I described how the T?hoe were able to deploy kin-based power to manipulate Crown power as well as confront one another, this volume describes ways in which the same ancestral descent groups closed ranks to survive nearly two decades of predatory Crown policies determined to dismantle their sanctuary. A relentless Crown campaign to purchase individual T?hoe land shares ultimately resulted in a misleading Crown scheme to consolidate and relocate T?hoe land shares, thereby freeing up land for the settlement of non- T?hoe farmers. By the 1950s, over 200 small T?hoe blocks were scattered throughout one of the largest National Parks in New Zealand. Although greatly weakened by these policies in terms of kinship solidarity as well as land and other resources, T?hoe resistance continued until the return of the entire park in 2014—with unreserved apologies and promises of future support.

In both volumes of A Separate Authority (He Mana Motuhake), Webster takes the stance of an ethnohistorian: he not only examines the various ways control over theUrewera District Native Reserve (UDNR) was negotiated, subverted or betrayed, and renegotiated during this time period, but also focuses on the role of M?ori hap?, ancestral descent groups and their leaders, including the political economic influence of extensive marriage alliances between them. The ethnohistorical approach developed here may be useful to other studies of governance, indigenous resistance, and reform, whether in New Zealand or elsewhere.

Part IIntroduction

© The Author(s) 2020

S. WebsterA Separate Authority (He Mana Motuhake), Volume IIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41046-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Steven Webster¹

(1)

Social Anthropology, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Steven Webster

End Abstract

1 A Brief Ethnohistorical Overview

Volume I of He Mana Motuhake examined the earlier era 1896–1913, during which Ngāi Tūhoe or the Tūhoe people, an indigenous iwi (‘tribe’) of Māori, managed to consolidate their sanctuary in the Urewera mountains under their own authority—he mana motuhake, an independent dominion—protected from further incursions of colonization in New Zealand. Earlier in the 1860s New Zealand land wars, the Tūhoe had lost their best agricultural lands to Crown confiscations, and their traditional sanctuary had become their only remaining refuge. This Volume II follows their less successful struggle 1913–1925 to stem the Crown’s betrayal of the statutory Native Reserve that the government had enabled the Tūhoe to set up only a few years earlier. It is a comprehensive revision of my 2004 report to the Waitangi Tribunal of New Zealand on this era that now builds upon my subsequent research for Volume I.

Probably for the first time since British sovereignty was assumed in 1840, the 1896 Urewera District Native Reserve Act had established virtual home-rule for a Māori iwi over their ancestral lands. By 1907, under this relatively benevolent Act, the Tūhoe had established their Urewera District Native Reserve (UDNR) and self-governance over the area, but this statute began to be systematically subverted by 1908. By 1926 the huge reserve had been completely dismantled with over 70% of it taken over by the Crown. In the 1950s, most of this Crown land became the Urewera National Park. The Tūhoe efforts to recover their sanctuary persisted in various forms over the next several decades, gaining strength in the Māori cultural renaissance of the 1980s and liberal governance of the 1990s. It was through this stubborn persistence that prolonged negotiations with the Crown were finally settled, under relatively conservative governance, in 2014 in statutes returning control of the National Park to the Tūhoe people. In terms of New Zealand’s history of hostility toward what in some other nations has long been recognized as a form of ‘internal’ sovereignty or ‘home-rule’ by their indigenous peoples, this 2014 settlement was a reversal of the earlier reversal of the 1896 Urewera District Native Reserve Act.

The 2014 Tūhoe Claims Settlement and Te Urewera Acts formally settled the Tūhoe claims to the Waitangi Tribunal pursued since the 1980s, and along with the earlier Service Management Plan intend to redress the Crown’s detailed acknowledgment and apology for 40 historical wrongs it did to the Tūhoe since 1840, including the confiscation of their best lands during the 1860s land wars (Tūhoe Claims Settlement Act 2014: 23–4; Te Urewera Act 2014). The details are unsparingly abject and the apology eloquent; my abiding impression is that the Tribunal enquiry had been thorough and the government settlement sincere. In the 2004 Waitangi Tribunal hearings I had been disappointed that, unlike many of the other reports for the Tribunal, the Crown decided not to present a counter-case to mine regarding the Crown’s subversion of the UDNR 1915–1926. However, in returning virtually the whole reserve to the Tūhoe control in the 2014 Act, it went much further in redress than I had hoped.

Nevertheless, despite the laborious effort of Tūhoe leaders and government ministers, understandably given this bitter history many Tūhoe remain skeptical of the sincerity of the government’s long-term intentions. The major betrayals of the past had often been led by reversals of previous policies and even disregard of previous laws. Tūhoe research of similar settlements overseas was not encouraging. The recent repetition of Crown dishonor in the 2007 ‘anti-terrorism’ raids in the Rūātoki valley of the Urewera and imprisonment of key Tūhoe leaders on spurious charges (Sluka 2010), and the Prime Minister’s public refusal in 2010 of any such settlement involving the Urewera National Park, of course reinforced Tūhoe doubts. Perhaps it is true that Ngāi Tūhoe’s long battle to maintain their mana motuhake has in many ways just begun again.

The four figures included here will orient this introduction, but can also serve as an overview of major ethnohistorical developments through to the Te Urewera settlement in 2014.

Figure 1.1 depicts the general locality of the original Urewera District Native Reserve (UDNR) in the contemporary North Island of New Zealand, and the main details of the area between the Bay of Plenty and Hawke’s Bay. This area includes the northern coastal lands confiscated by the Crown in the 1860s land wars and Lake Waikaremoana on the southern boundary. The Urewera mountains are shown in shading rising from the Bay of Plenty coast to their southern-most crest in the Huiarau Range. The three main river valleys running from south to north out of the mountains to the Bay of Plenty coast are also shown, with the Whakatane (originally Ohinemataroa) River and Tauranga/Waimana River and their major tributaries centered in the UDNR.

Fig. 1.1

Location of Urewera District Native Reserve (1903–1922) and contemporary townships. (Source: Webster 2004: 13)

Figure 1.2 depicts about 38 blocks of the UDNR when it was officially established in 1907. This map also displays useful details of ranges, elevations, rivers, and tributaries. The investigation and provisional titles of these blocks were described in Volume I, focusing primarily on the records of the 1899–1903 commission which, I argue, was dominated by Tūhoe leaders. As was explained there, these records are far more reliable than those of the appeals commission, which did not meet until 1906–1907. The easternmost blocks Manuoha and Paharakeke were cut out of the UDNR in 1907. Some blocks were later partitioned in the Native Land Court between 1907 and 1913.

Fig. 1.2

Urewera District Native Reserve blocks 1907 with topographic details. (Source: Webster 2004: 331)

Figure 1.3 is a much simplified version of the most detailed map of the UDNR that I have discovered. The version here depicts an obscure proposal in May 1902 to amalgamate 35 blocks of the UDNR into only 10 titles, but which was aborted when hearings resumed the following October. The original blocks as approved in 1907 are outlined within each amalgamation, and can be identified by reference to Fig. 1.2. Because of its rich implications for research of Tūhoe hapū (ancestral descent group) organization and the relative mana (‘prestige’ or ‘authority’) of hapū leaders, two amalgamations (4 and 9) were analyzed in Volume I, Chap. 6, and Part II was devoted to a detailed reconstruction of the proposed Ruatāhuna-Waikaremoana amalgamation (2), an extensive marriage alliance, and related political alliances between hapū leaders 1900–1913.

Fig. 1.3

Urewera District Native Reserve showing 1902 proposal to amalgamate all blocks into 10 titles. (Source: Webster 2004: 17)

Figure 1.4 depicts the major developments between the establishment of the UDNR in 1907 through its several decades as the Urewera National Park surrounding remnant Tūhoe lands to the 2014 Te Urewera settlement acts returning control of the national park to the Tūhoe. Comprehensively, this map outlines the largely congruent boundaries of the

1. (i)
   UDNR 1907–1922; already by 1908 the Crown was circumventing the protections of the 1896 Act and by 1915 had mobilized a campaign to purchase individual shares in hopes of buying out entire blocks.
2. (ii)
   The four customary Tūhoe regions into which over 200 blocks owned by the Tūhoe refusing to sell their shares in the UDNR blocks were relocated in the Urewera Consolidation Scheme (UCS) of 1921–1926, comprising less than 30% of the lands that had been protected under the UDNR Act.
3. (iii)
   The Urewera National Park that was established in the 1950s on the Crown’s 1925 award to itself of over 70% of the UDNR obtained in its purchase campaign and 40% taken from each new block for surveying and road costs.

Fig. 1.4

Tūhoe non-sellers’ lands relocated in UDNR and Urewera National Park 1925–2014. (Source: Webster 2004: 18)

The present Volume II of He Mana Motuhake examines details of the Crown purchase campaign and the following Urewera Consolidation Scheme 1915–1926, which repealed the UDNR and its intended virtual home-rule. The promised roads were never built, resulting in continuing impoverishment, and by the 1930s pressure was again being applied to owners of the new blocks to sell to the Crown. Nevertheless, almost all of the over 200 new blocks held by the Tūhoe ‘non-sellers’ throughout the National Park remained defiantly in their descendants’ ownership for nearly another century, importantly backing up their negotiations for the return of Te Urewera in the 2014 settlement. The irony of the Tūhoe pupuri whenua (‘land withholders’) surviving in the midst of the park was doubly ironic for decades: while Pākehā (‘European’ or ‘white’) hikers, hunters, and tourists remained only vaguely aware that while in the mountain wilderness of this huge National Park they were actually on anciently held Māori land; meanwhile, the Tūhoe who had stubbornly retained this land often pretended or felt deeply that they had never lost their sanctuary. The stories of this irony are manifold (Tahi 2015).

Since the global ethnic revivals of the 1970s, and in some reports for the Waitangi Tribunal over the last two decades, a romantic assumption that the history of colonization is a history of victimization has often been led to a f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. The Tūhoe Sanctuary and the Crown Purchasing Campaign
• Part III. The Tūhoe Sanctuary and the Urewera Consolidation Scheme
• Part IV. Closing or Breaking Ranks in the Face of Crown Power
• Part V. Conclusion
• Back Matter