The Treaty and other bones to chew over

by Daphna Whitmore

One of the aims of Redline is to discuss, research and understand contemporary New Zealand society. Many of the Redline writers were previously members of the Workers Party where we took the position that the Treaty of Waitangi was a document forced on Maori in the interests of expansion of the British empire. Since we left the Workers Party the view of the treaty is undergoing change as is outlined by an article by Mike Kay.

When time permits I think it would be good for Redline writers to reprint some of our earlier articles and to write more on the present situation. In the meantime there are some interesting comments by James Heartfield in response to the revised WP position.

He writes: “I think the original Workers’ Party position had some merit, and it helped me writing my book on the Aborigines’ Protection Society (Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2011; see here). There I look at the Treaty more as it pertained to the attempted reform of the British Empire coming out of the Select Committee on Aboriginal Peoples of 1837. The ‘humanitarian’ goal of ‘protecting’ Maoris was not as atypical as it at first appears. Similar edicts were introduced into instructions to the governors of the Australian colonies where there was no treaty signed. New Zealand governors (Grey in particular) could draw on their assigned role as protector of Maori interests to rise in a Bonapartist way above the sectional interests of different groups of settlers. This was as much to do with controlling settlers as it was to do with controlling natives. Politically, I am skeptical about the possibility of deriving a radical impulse from 1840.”

Scott (a visitor to the WP site) in the discussion thread argues, “The Treaty essentially enshrines the rights of the Crown over the Colony, in the name of the Maori. The Maori who signed the Treaty were not looking far into the future and making constitutional arrangements – they were pursuing short-term political and economic ends”.

Heartfield responds: “I agree. But I would like to redirect your interest to the other question, why did the Crown seek a treaty? As well as looking at the motives on the Maori side, we ought to understand the motives on the British side. After all, the treaty, ultimately, is an instrument of British rule. And while you are right to say that there was no British sovereignty in the 1840s – there was by the 1870s, and its initial basis (later dismissed as a ‘nullity’) was the Treaty. That’s what the Treaty is. It is the founding document of British rule, and the Maori agreement is essentially a fiction of the Treaty. That Maori subsequently organised around its claims is another matter.”

I think understanding the motives on the British side are essential to understanding where we are with the treaty today. Adherence to the treaty, for one, thing leaves us with the problem of the British monarch being the head of state. There is nothing liberating or progressive in this. Furthermore, equality and redress of past wrongs can and should be fought for without reference to a treaty of this sort.

In a slightly related thread, a discussion around Maori prehistory has been going on over on the Workers Party website, where Scott argues that there is massive evidence for slavery as an institutionalised part of Maori life. He claims that pre-European contact Maori society had large-scale agriculture and a surplus.

Quite what Scott thinks constitutes “large-scale” Maori agriculture he doesn’t spell out, but  in my view the archeological evidence shows that rather than large-scale agriculture there was gardening/horticulture, most importantly the kumara (not the variety we have now) and to a much lesser extent some taro, yam and a gourd, plus a few other species of cabbage tree. Growing kumara was not easy in the New Zealand climate which went through some pretty cold periods. Further, it’s an annual crop which doesn’t tolerate getting wet.

The early Polynesian arrivals of course had loads of tasty protein in the form of seals, Moa, and other large birds to eat and it wasn’t until these sources ran out or ran low that things got a lot tougher.

Gardening in some northern parts of the country at some times in prehistory contributed up to 50 percent of the diet, but gathering fish and shellfish and hunting still remained vital. Stone tools and wooden sticks for gardening make widespread, large-scale agriculture in any meaningful sense impossible.

In New Zealand it wasn’t until the arrival of the potato (and metal tools) that genuinely large-scale crop production was possible.

The first European visitors of course saw things through the distorted prism of their own society and looked for evidence of classes in Maori prehistory, and duly constructed classes in their anthropological accounts. More on this another time.

The origin of  humans and human society is fascinating. How we arose and spread across the world, finally arriving on land masses such as New Zealand continues to be thoroughly intriguing. That humans lived for most part of prehistory as hunter gatherers, with cooperative, mostly egalitarian social systems was a matter of necessity as a reliable, constant surplus product doesn’t become possible until more settled, agricultural societies developed (and even then people didn’t readily give up reliance on hunting and gathering because in many ways it was a more leisured way of life than farming).

Agricultural-based societies first emerged roughly 10,000 years ago, showing that for over 100,000 years humans were not divided by property and class. I think this offers some hope for the future of humanity, but by no means determines anything. Nor does it negate the fact that life was in many ways brutally tough or that war and bloodshed were a part of human society.