This week, to mark Waitangi Day, the Guardian is publishing five pieces of commentary from Māori writers.
One reason progressives love committing to anti-racism rather than, say, decolonisation is the former requires nothing more than a state of mind. “I’m not racist” – drop the spoken or unspoken “but” – and congratulations, you can wash away the guilt.
It’s a seductive commitment, and it finds form in privilege checking, language policing, and public instructions to “listen to” diverse voices. The trouble, of course, is racism isn’t something you can escape with sufficiently virtuous thoughts or deeds. Racism is a social relation. It occurs in every society that structures itself on a founding theft – land – and operates via exploitation – labour.
This is why Waitangi Day, the national holiday marking the moment northern chiefs put their names and marks to a treaty with the British Crown, centres on land and its loss. This, not racism, is the break in time that shapes our lives as Māori, and we understand that from our earliest years. Parents and grandparents who left their homes – to Auckland, to Wellington, to Australia – for wage work. Great-grandparents who remember what their own old people did with the land. Agriculture, horticulture, canalling.
The contrast with Australia’s national day, where centrist politicians and progressive campaigners prefer corporate-funded euphemisms like “shared history”, is striking. The term is seemingly everywhere. It leads the Prime Minister’s op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald celebrating Australian heart. It’s the clincher in Indigenous minister Ken Wyatt’s call to “first and foremost celebrate the good things in life”. But what does it mean? No one, other than Indigenous activists and radical campaigners, seem willing to come right out and say it. The history Australians share is one people’s ancestors took the land, and the other people’s ancestors lost it.
This is what distinguishes Waitangi Day. That founding fact – land loss - is impossible to ignore. In New Zealandeveryone from activists to the political elite understand the country’s foundation is a treaty and its subsequent breach. Even the Queen, delivering the Crown’s apology to the Tainui tribe in 1995, told the nation its founding document was, in regal understatement, “imperfectly observed”. The plain meaning? Tainui had its land stolen in a treaty breach. And that’s the heart of every Indigenous struggle.
But well-meaning progressives often frame that struggle for land as one for recognition and rights. That makes a certain sense. In Fanon’s accounting mis-recognition or non-recognition always constitute colonial states. Think Terra Nullius. But the trouble with recognition and its attendants, like the glossy history-tellers, is it’s a cunning standard. Does recognition restore Indigenous peoples’ power to develop and protect their land or does it just reinforce existing power relations?
In the old proposal to “recognise” Indigenous people in the Australian constitution the then expert panel’s draft clauses made Indigenous people and their rights another subject of the constitution. But the relationship should run in reverse. The constitution should be subject to Indigenous power. Only a treaty can secure that.
In fact, the constitution should be subject to Indigenous power. Only a treaty can secure that.
And this is the difference between celebrating and challenging our respective national days: a treaty. In New Zealand the struggle is closing the gap between the Treaty of Waitangi’s promise and its performance. That means forcing the Crown to honour the Māori language version rather than the English language version. In the Māori language version the Treaty reaffirms “tino rangatiratanga”, the full powers the tribes were exercising in 1840, including the power to continue structuring their societies and economies. But the English language version promises the opposite, transferring “sovereignty” to the British Crown.
In this contest the question is who assimilates into whose society? In the Māori language version the signatories confer “kāwanatanga” on the British Crown. This is the power to govern their own subjects in New Zealand. That power, though, is subject to tino rangatiratanga. In this interpretation Māori take the settlers into their society, granting those newcomers a generous measure of autonomy and self-governance. But in the English language version the settlers assimilate Māori into their society, granting tribal members “all the rights and privileges” of British subjects.
Citizenship is, as Arendt put it, the right to have rights. But what’s an Indigenous citizenship? Is it a measure of autonomy within the state – which is what “anti-racism” and “recognition” politics would achieve – or is it a measure of autonomy from the state? This is what a treaty politics helps secure. Self-governance, whether it’s Whanau Ora or Maori Television. Waitangi Day, and one hopes in time Australia Day, is our yearly reminder of that.
Morgan Godfery is a writer and broadcaster. He covers politics and indigenous issues and lives and works in the North Island town of Kawerau.
