“This is not a time for bickering over words and principles. Rather, it is a time to reaffirm the Treaty as an act of grace that says to all New …
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Kennedy Warne reviews a new book that calls for a renewed understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi as not just a founding document but a defining covenant.
There were three parties involved in the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Only the two most important — Māori and the Crown — are given much attention. But the third participant — the Church of England missionaries who decided the wording of Te Tiriti and explained the document to the assembled rangatira — are historically significant, and their comments and contributions shed light on the Treaty compact.
This is the contention of theologian, historian and Bay of Plenty farmer Alistair Reese in He Tatau Pounamu: The Treaty of Waitangi, a Covenant of Reconciliation. This thoughtful and engagingly written small book (124 pages, divided equally between English and te reo text) is published by the Venn Foundation, a Christian educational institution, and Karuwhā, an organisation that helps New Zealanders explore history and identity in Aotearoa.
The title is well chosen. A tatau pounamu, greenstone door, embodies the concept of a covenantal relationship, and, for Reese, the kawanata — the bond of grace — is the heart of the Treaty.
Today, that relationship is in jeopardy, and the Treaty in danger of becoming either a “historical artefact or a legalistic charter of rights,” writes Reese in his foreword. “Neither of these extremes will bring back the life that was hoped for at Waitangi in 1840.”
Seeing the Treaty as a tatau pounamu is not a new concept. Lord Bledisloe, the governor-general who bought and gifted the Waitangi Treaty Grounds to the nation in 1934, used those exact words during the ceremony of dedication for the land. He was seeing the Treaty as a doorway to reconciliation.
Bledisloe had been given an actual pounamu by Marlborough iwi Te Ātiawa o Te Waka-a-Māui a few days before the dedication, along with a carved chair. The greenstone was the rare and beautiful tangiwai, from Piopiotahi/Milford Sound. “A fitting juxtaposition,” Reese notes. “Pounamu for a tatau pounamu; a tangiwai for Waitangi, a tangi that calls out ‘Let Waitangi reconcile us all.’”
Bledisloe’s own gift of the Treaty Grounds marked a turning, Reese writes, “the gradual re-emergence of the Treaty into the public narrative.” For almost a century, the Treaty had faced rejection and dismissal — a “simple nullity” in Chief Justice Prendergast’s famous pronouncement. Now, as the 200th anniversary of Te Tiriti approaches, we face another turning, with the coalition government’s attempts to redefine and suppress the Treaty, stripping it of contemporary influence.
At the original signing, the church played a significant role as mediator and witness to the covenant being forged. Thereafter, the voice of the church fell largely silent on Treaty matters. Today, that voice needs to be heard again, says Reese. Why? Because the whakapapa of the Treaty includes many participants, Māori as well as Pākehā, who operated within a Christian paradigm, and whose vision shaped the Treaty compact.
Many of the rangatira were deeply knowledgeable about the Christian scriptures and filled their kōrero with biblical allusions. They had amalgamated Christian truths and values into their own ethos. The Crown’s God was also theirs, and they entered the Treaty negotiations with that understanding.
“Without the gospel mission, there would be no Treaty,” Reese writes. For that reason, the Treaty needs to be viewed as a political document with theological roots — roots that stretch back to Britain and the brief flowering of a humanitarian spirit within the Colonial Office.
Reese doesn’t tease out these roots to any great extent — that history has been thoroughly traversed by Ned Fletcher in his book The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi. What he focuses on is some examples of how a theological understanding can shed light on what was written and agreed on February 6, 1840, and beyond.
For example, concerning the ongoing tension between kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga in the first and second articles of the Treaty, he notes that in the Bible the rule of Caesar is referred to as rangatiratanga while the governorship of Pontius Pilate is translated as kāwanatanga. Many rangatira would have been familiar with the terms and their differing meanings.
Reese draws attention to the contribution of Nōpera Panakareao to the Treaty discussions. Panakareao was a baptised Te Rarawa chief who signed Te Tiriti in Kaitaia and influenced 45 other northern chiefs to sign. It was Panakareao who uttered the famous whakatauāki that the shadow of the land would go to the Queen while the substance remained with Māori.
This comment is usually thought of as referring to whenua alone, but Reese points to a second meaning. “Nōpera’s understanding of the Treaty was that his authority as a chief was the substantial authority in the land, while the Crown sovereignty, as a shadow of this authority, was to reflect the mana of the former. In other words, the ‘sovereignty’ of the Crown would not usurp his ‘chieftainship’.”
Panakareao may well have derived his shadow/substance saying from Scripture, writes Reese. In the Letter to the Hebrews, the earth is described as a shadow of heaven. “Heaven is the place where ultimate sovereignty is exercised, and earth is a shadow of that, the place of human governorship or stewardship,” he writes.
Other New Testament passages repeat the shadow/substance metaphor. The implication is that the sovereignty of the Treaty’s first article was understood by rangatira to be less substantive than the rangatiratanga they themselves exercised, and which was guaranteed in the second article.
The Crown’s persistent claim, to this day, is that the opposite is the case: the Crown’s sovereignty trumps the chiefs’ chieftainship.
Panakareao, in fact, revised his expression once he perceived that the chiefs had been misled. The Crown had usurped the chiefs’ authority. Kāwanatanga had become the substance, and rangatiratanga the shadow.
As Pākehā of integrity witnessed that reversal, many spoke out against it. Sir William Martin, an advisor to the Church Missionary Society and Prendergast’s predecessor as chief justice, was one. He appealed to the Crown to honour the Treaty on moral as well as legal grounds. “He called the Treaty ‘irrevocably binding’ because ‘we have covenanted with these people’,” writes Reese.
That covenantal understanding is urgently needed today. But we seem a long way from it, caught up as we are in the dominance of markets and the politics of power — a contractual view of life. Reese quotes from an insightful address by the late UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on the differences between covenants and contracts:
“A covenant is not a contract. A contract is made for a limited period, for a specific purpose, between two or more parties, each seeking their own benefit. A covenant is made open-endedly by two or more parties who come together in a bond of loyalty and trust to achieve together what none can achieve alone. A contract is like a deal; a covenant is like a marriage. Contracts belong to the market and to the state, to economics and politics, both of which are arenas of competition. Covenants belong to families, communities, charities, which are arenas of cooperation. A contract is between me and you — separate selves — but a covenant is about us — collective belonging. A contract is about interests; a covenant is about identity. And hence the vital distinction . . . a social contract creates a state; a social covenant creates a society.”
If rangatira at Waitangi understood the Treaty in terms of a covenant, how does that shed light on what was written, signed and said? Reese comments on Hobson’s phrase “He iwi tahi tātou“ (We are one people), which has been seized on by anti-Treaty advocates to suggest that Māori autonomy ended at Waitangi and the nation became “Kiwi, not iwi.”
Not so, suggests Reese. “It is possible that Henry Williams, the probable creator of the phrase . . . drew upon a New Testament example of ‘whakakotahitanga’ — ‘two beings becoming one’,” he writes. Hobson, under Williams’ tutelage, may have been giving voice to the thought that the two entities of the Crown and hapū Māori would retain their unique identities while being unified within the Treaty space.
What was being proposed is analogous to a marriage. “There, two people who retain their autonomy and identity are brought together in an interdependent union,” writes Reese. Co-governance, no less!
Comparing the Treaty to the covenant of marriage implies that it should be seen as a “commitment to a relationship of mutual love for the good of the other party” writes Reese.
“If the Treaty is Victoria’s expression of love to Māori [which is what the preamble to the Treaty says it is], then, by extension, the Government’s application of the commitments of the Treaty needs to be an outworking of love to Māori.”
What transpired for the Indigenous signers was not love but betrayal. The government, to extend the marriage metaphor, became a “violent spouse”, Reese writes, trampling mana, stealing land.
And where was the church, the third party at the Treaty table, as this abusive relationship unfolded? Largely silent, and by its silence complicit. The church became the ally of the coloniser rather than the defender of the colonised.
“The missionaries abandoned Māori, and concentrated their efforts on the later immigrants from Europe and elsewhere,” writes Reese, who calls in the final pages of the book for a “rekindling of the Church’s prophetic voice.”
Quoting a precedent from the Old Testament, Reese says the question the church should be asking Māori is: “What must we do to be reconciled?”
Support for Treaty settlements is not enough. Many iwi have concluded their settlement negotiations with the Crown “feeling bruised and disillusioned by the process,” he writes. “The current legislation does not facilitate a lasting reconciliation.”
Nor does the government’s recent decision to axe more than a quarter of the staff of Te Arawhiti, the Office for Māori Crown Relations — an action that speaks volumes about the coalition’s regard for its Treaty partner.
Reconciliation is achieved through acts of forgiveness and grace. The church is built on these foundations, and could demonstrate how they apply to the world of contemporary politics. It could recover its role as the Treaty mediator, converting the intentions of the past into pathways for the future.
This is not a time for bickering over words and principles. Rather, concludes Reese, it is a time to reaffirm the Treaty as an act of grace that says to all New Zealanders: “Welcome. Enter here through this tatau pounamu.”
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