Law, Sovereignty and History in a Divided
Culture: The Case of New Zealand and the
Treaty of Waitangi
J.G.A. Pocock
This article examines the politics in New Zealand
arising from the revivification of the Treaty of Waitangi.
It considers the legal and historiographical conse-
quences that follow the redefinition of a nation’s sover-
eignty, and treaty relations between differing concepts
of sovereignty and history.
The author examines the perceptions of history
that are generated by the Common Law, jus gentium,
and the understandings of land occupancy and ancestral
identity existing among “first nations” in the modem
and post-modem world, through a consideration of the
Maori people. The author also questions what the roles
of the lawyer and historian may be in these circum-
stances.
Cet article examine les enjeux politiques lies A la
revivification du Traitj de Waitangi en Nouvelle-
Zlande. 11 consid~re les cons6quences l6gales et histo-
riographiques qui drcoulent de la reddfinition de la
souverainet6 de l’Etat et de la prdsence de diverses d6-
finitions de la souverainet6 et de l’histoire.
En considdrant le peuple Maori, l’auteur examine
les perceptions de l’histoire qui rdsultent de la common
law, dujus gentium, et de la notion d’occupation du ter-
ritoire et d’identit6 ancestrale chez les premieres na-
tions dans le monde modeme et post-modeme. L’auteur
s’interroge aussi sur le rrle du juriste et de l’historien
dans ces circonstances.
. Professor Emeritus of History at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A., and
formerly Professor of Political Science at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He is the
author, inter alia, of The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, 2d ed. (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1987) and Virtue, Commerce and History (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1985), and is contemplating a book entitled History and Sovereignty: An Enquiry into the Politics of
Historiography. This paper was originally delivered to and previously printed by the University of
Lancaster as the Iredell Memorial Lecture in 1992.
McGill Law Journal 1998
Revue de droit de McGill
To be cited as: (1998) 43 McGill L.J. 481
Mode de rfdrence: (1998) 43 R.D. McGill 481
482
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
[Vol. 43
Introduction
I.
II.
Ill.
Generalisations
The Historical Circumstances
A Conflict of Sovereignties
IV.
A Conflict in History
Conclusion
Aotearoa: New Zealand
GLOSSARY
hapr subtribe
iw. tribe
kawanatanga: government
mana: prestige, authority, charisma
manawhenua: traditional authority over land
marae: a meeting ground
pakeha: New Zealander of European descent
rangatiratanga: chieftanship, lordship
tangata whenua: people of the land, indigenous, aboriginal
turangawaewae: a place to stand
waka: canoe, ship; lineage tracing descent from a given canoe
1998]
J.G.A. POCOCK- NEW ZEALAND AND THETREATY OF WAITANGI
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Introduction
The aim of this paper is to introduce a series of explorations of the relations be-
tween law and history, considered as activities of the human mind in various states of
society. Viewed in such a perspective, “history” is perhaps better renamed “historiog-
raphy”: the writing of history and the consciousness of it as a thing made by human
activity, and in the end the making of history and the suffering of it as the conse-
quences of human actions and the processes they have set in motion and cannot al-
ways control. Law, I think, can very often be seen in the same way: as the making of
judgements, coupled with the attempt to determine how far we can live with the
judgements we have made in the past; and this is one reason why law has been so
powerful a contributor to the formation of the historical consciousness which charac-
terises our civilisation.’ Historiography has been, on the one hand, the narrative of
human actions, and on the other, the archaeology of human practices seen as consti-
tuting the contexts in which the actions have been performed. The codes of law and
the records of courts have constituted perhaps the greatest series of archives in which
these practices have been conserved, while the practice of jurisprudence itself has fur-
nished a great part of the methods and mentality with which we interpret the actions
of the past and connect them with the conditions of the present. There can be no doubt
of the intimate connections between jurisprudence and historiography since the two
began to assume their modem forms about five hundred years ago.
Yet there are differences between the lawyer and historian in their reasons for ap-
proaching the past and in their practices when dealing with it, and among these differ-
ences is one which separates the relations between practice and theory in the two dis-
ciplines. Lawyers go to the past in search of authority more or less directly applicable
in present actions; historians in search of information which they know full well can
be converted into authority and which may well be applied to present actions, but
which they are capable of treating in alternative manners –
such as the study of the
past for its own sake. It is a consequence that lawyers regularly study jurisprudence
and even the philosophy of law, whereas historians seldom engage in the study of
historiography, less still the philosophy of history.
The difference is that lawyers well know that their activity is a practical one, with
immediate and drastic effects on the human beings who appear in the courts for
judgement, and that there are strong practical reasons why they should use theory to
heighten their awareness of what they are doing and allow the consequences of theory
to flow back into practice and affect it. But historians are engaged in no such immedi-
ate practice, and do not have the same practical reasons for engaging in theory. It is
therefore easier for them to believe that the way to write history is to practise the ac-
tivity, and that no theory of historiography and no philosophy of history exist which
can be applied to that activity as theory to practice. They are clearly right for the most
part in believing this, not because they are immediate practical actors but because they
‘D.R. Kelley, The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1990).
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are not. The importance of the history of historiography and the philosophy of history
is to be sought elsewhere. What historians write has consequences for other human
beings because it helps to shape the assumptions and structures, the ideologies, men-
talities and discourses, by which social groups define themselves, others and the
world, and act in the relations between the entities so defined; who they think they are
and what they think has been going on can easily have consequences for themselves
and others, and these consequences can easily be disastrous. Thus there are very
strong practical reasons for exhorting historians to heighten their consciousness of
what they are doing in the world, and what assumptions about the world they are put-
ting into effect; but the relations between reflection and action to which we are ex-
horting them will be relations less of theory to practice than of criticism to ideology.
This is why there are so many situations in which juristic and historiographic ac-
tivity are intermingled and imperfectly distinct; in which lawyers are making history
and historians contributing to the making of law; and why it is both philosophically
interesting and humanly important to study these situations and note in what a variety
of ways history is being made in them. I have a case of the kind to examine: one in
which the affairs of my own country of New Zealand have become interesting to the
lawyer and the historian, the political philosopher and the historian of political
thought in ways which, I have to confess, in my younger days I never thought they
would be. New Zealanders, somewhat against their inclinations, have come upon in-
teresting times; it is to be hoped they will survive them.
I. Generalisations
In a number of societies created by British and European settlement in the seven-
teenth through twentieth centuries – New Zealand and Australia, Canada and the
United States –
there is a political resurgence of the peoples called indigenous be-
cause their ancestors lived there before European settlement began, and usually be-
cause these ancestors remain of immediate importance to them. In the societies I have
mentioned, where language, law and values are in significant measure English in their
derivation, these resurgent peoples state their claims in the language and law of the
majority culture. They claim right, justice and compensation; they rely on principles
of Common Law and jus gentium (a term I shall prefer to “intemational law”); but at
the same time they allege their aboriginality, their status as cultures with an existence
antedating European settlement, both as entitling them to make claims which the ma-
jority law is bound by its own rules to respect, and as a source of cultural values and
usages which must continue to guide them and which the majority law must acknowl-
edge as authoritative even when these are not contained within its structure or its
spirit. In a sense, then, they claim to be living by a law of their own, which is separate
from the majority law and to which the latter must accommodate itself. However, they
commonly do not refer to their own cultural codes by the name of “law”; sometimes
because they look on “law” itself as the instrument by which the majority has been
dispossessing them of their land, culture and identity; sometimes because the codes,
assumptions and vocabulary of Anglo-European jurisprudence are too culturally and
economically specific to be appropriate to the aboriginal codes which they recall, re-
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J. G.A. POCOCK – NEWZEALAND AND THETREATY OF WAITANGI
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discover, or re-invent; sometimes because they are making use of the vocabulary of
Western radical dissent, which suits their needs because it presents law itself as an in-
strument of hegemony in the hands of some race, class, gender or mode of production.
On the one hand, then, a vocabulary which is not that of the majority’s law is ad-
dressing itself to the courts and legislatures of the majority in search of legal redress,
and in some measure accepting the discourse and procedure of majority law by doing
so. On the other hand, that vocabulary is being used to claim autonomy from that law
and offering itself as an alternative cultural code with the same authority as law,
whether it styles itself by that name or not. In the language of European jurisprudence
– which our cultural conditioning obliges most of us to accept –
the problem which
the claims of indigenous peoples present moves between the theaters of Common
Law andjus gentium. Those peoples are claiming the status of gentes or nations –
in
the early-modem or pre-modem sense in which jus gentium uses the latter term –
and thereby raising the question of what degree of sovereignty –
modem sense known to the classics of jus gentium –
European settlement and may be said to possess now.
again in the pre-
they possessed at the time of
This is not merely a question framed by the needs of late twentieth-century de-
bate: it can be found, asked and answered –
and has served as the foundation of legal
and political arrangements –
in the past history of European settlement; so that to ask
it is not to re-invent the history of that settlement so much as to review and re-state it
as it was constructed by the actors themselves. From the time of the Spanish con-
quests in the Caribbean, European settlement was conducted by agents living in a uni-
verse of jus gentium and endeavouring to avail themselves of its rules.’ It can of
course be said that this branch of law took shape largely in response to the needs im-
posed by the encounter with non-European peoples, and it must be said with great
frequency that the ways in which it took shape were often skewed in favour of the in-
vading settlers and directed towards the dispossession of the indigenous peoples. Even
that language is suspiciously mild when applied to many of the stories which this
history contains. But the invading Europeans did make use of a code of jus gentium,
even if it was only to legitimate their own behaviour. Their use of that code ensured
that in a great many cases treaties were entered into with indigenous peoples, who
were therefore treated as competent actors, and indeed capable as possessors of sover-
eignty, to enter into such treaties as the kind of contracting parties whom that law en-
visaged. In many instances, these treaties were subsequently disregarded; in many
more, they were interpreted as a kind of legal self-annihilation or suicide on the part
of the indigenous contractor, so that to enter into a treaty was to lose the right to en-
force it and consequently all rights under it. But enough of these treaties have sur-
2 There is an extensive literature on the Spanish debate. See most recently A. Pagden, The Fall of
Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1982) and Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and
France, c. 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); R.A. Williams, The American In-
dian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990); J. Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the
Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
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in the sense that there are still peoples defined by them and living under
vived –
to make it a common strategy in the politics of indigenous resurgence to ap-
them –
peal to them, claiming not only rights under them but the measure of sovereignty
which their status as treaties affirms to have existed then and to be claimable now.
Such appeals and claims necessarily generate debates in the interpretation of his-
tory, occasioned in the first instance by the decision to treat an action in the past as
possessing authority in the present; a decision taken by lawyers or persons acting as
lawyers, which raises questions to be answered by historians or persons acting as
historians, but over which lawyer and historian must in the end diverge and go sepa-
rate ways. The history of how a treaty was drawn up and entered into must be re-
hearsed in the light of the always contestable question of how they were intended and
understood by the original parties, of whom it may be presumed that one was and the
other was not European and already familiar with the language of European law. An
attempt must be made to reconstruct the mentality of an indigenous society already
distant in time; but it must be added that persons in the present, affirming themselves
the descendants, representatives or continuators of that society, will be interpreting the
acts and intentions of their supposed ancestors, imposing pattern on the past, authority
on the present, and interpretation of history on the events and processes between. The
heirs of the original European signatories will be doing the same, and their situation
will be complicated by the circumstance that they possessed then and probably pos-
sess now the upper hand in imposing the categories of European jurisprudence, but
now consent to have their position questioned and evaluated, both by the categories of
their own law and by the injection into the argument of cultural codes which are not
European, but must be reconstructed in a largely (but challengeable) Europeanised
present. Two points must sooner or later be reached. At one it will be recognised that
alternative histories are contesting for authority; not simply alternative accounts of the
same events, but alternative cultural codes which give conflicting accounts of what
authority is, how it is generated in and transmitted through time, and how time and
history are themselves structured by the authoritative systems set up by humans ex-
isting in them. At the other, the historian will have made an appearance, declaring that
the enterprise of reconstituting events and processes, mentalities and authority struc-
tures, existing or ongoing in the past, has developed beyond the point at which it
serves the jurist’s need to find authority there which is applicable in the present. This
historian will be operating in bihistorical and bicultural terms, recognising that all
parties to the debate are trying to live in two histories simultaneously penetrating one
another.
During the establishment of European settlement, many treaties were entered into
if that is the appropriate term3 for societies operating a complex kinship
with tribes –
structure rather than a state, identifying themselves by means of shared genealogies
and mythologies, and living by hunting and gathering and planting rather than by ar-
able cultivation. These tribes were recognised by treaty and jus gentium as “nations”
3 In New Zealand it has been found appropriate to use the Maori word iwi, and leave its meanings to
emerge through bicultural discourse.
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487
or gentes, and endowed with the capacity to exert rights and hold property – often, of
course, to no other end than that they should be deemed capable of parting with it or
selling it. Many fictions were thereby imposed on peoples who did not always under-
stand them, but had their own ways of understanding themselves and what they were
doing when they entered into what the Europeans called treaties –
hence of course
the European conviction that all men by nature possessed the legal capacity for pos-
session and alienation, compact and confederation.
But it is evident to our historic sensibility that any such treaty was a compact be-
tween two discourses, two means of understanding and operating what it was, and the
modem indigenous nation has access both to European means of interpreting a treaty
and to the modemised form (whatever it may be) of the indigenous discourse by
which the treaty may have been understood then and is understood now. If the domi-
nant European culture has remained ethnocentric to the point where it does not under-
stand the indigenous discourse and cannot operate it, that culture does not have access
to the bilingual resources open to the otherwise repressed indigenous culture. The
latter can therefore (1) claim to be the “nation”, sovereign to the point of ceding some
things and retaining others, which the original treaty presumed it to be; (2) operate its
indigenous discourse to affirm its customary, traditional, genealogical and mythic
identity, and employ this identity in affirming its legal personality under the treaty and
claiming rights, or compensation for lost rights, in both treaty and traditional terms. If
the dominant culture does not have access to the indigenous discourse – what in
New Zealand is called te reo Maori –
it must choose between allowing that discourse
to be used against it, and facing the charge that it is seeking to annihilate the indige-
nous discourse and the nation that employs it. Often, of course, the dominant culture
has been seeking to do exactly that; but we have reached the point of encountering the
politics of bilingualism and biculturalism, and of recognising how an indigenously af-
firmed identity may be both the grounds and the means of conducting a claim simul-
taneously in the discourse of European law and against that discourse and law. The
appellant comes before the court partly to indict its jurisdiction, and in so doing al-
leges indigenous history against the history of the law and the treaty. Yet there re-
mains the paradox – which operated for Europeans at the time of settlement –
that
it is hard in law to indict an opposed authority without at the same time legitimating it.
Treaties atjus gentium are entered into by nations, and nations possess both sov-
ereignty at the time of making the treaty and a self-defining history antecedent to its
making. This provides the double force behind such words as “indigenous”, “aborigi-
nal”, the Maori tangata whenua, and so on. It is crucial to the indigenous group that it
should be able to define itself as a “nation”, possessed of both history and legal or
rights-bearing personality both before and since the making of the treaty; and in so
doing it lays claim to sovereignty –
if that term be used to denote the possession of
rights and the capacity to alienate and resume them –
in both the pre-treaty past and
the post-treaty past and present. To the extent that the indigenous group is part of a
larger sovereign state, it has now reached the point of affirming that the state’s sover-
eignty is based on the treaty and is shared among sovereign contracting partners. State
and sovereignty rest on the exercise of what Locke called the federative power, the
power to form treaties, whether or not the state in question is a confederation. It is
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evident to our minds that this is an extremely risky assertion; it is less evident that it
entails both pre-modem and post-modem thinking.
Australia is largely an exception to the pattern I have begun to describe, since
there it was not typical to enter into treaties with aboriginal groups, which were often
too small and mobile to render treaties of much use and could easily be dismissed as
in a “savage” condition that rendered them incapable of treaty-making. The United
States and Canada are perhaps the most typical, in that they possess political struc-
tures which are federal or confederal for reasons of their own, and were not formed by
processes in which treaties with indigenous nations played a central part. They can
thus recognise the forming of federal covenants with such nations and not feel the ex-
ercise of their own federal structure to be threatened. The Sioux or the Mohawk can
claim to be sovereign nations in a special treaty relation with the United States; but as
the Canadian confederal structure has been laid open to redefinition, there has
emerged a “Conference of First Nations” whose adherents claim “inherent rights” –
i.e., rights inherent in their structure as nations and antecedent to any Canadian na-
tionality or sovereignty – which entitle them to be consulted and give their consent
before any new relations between provinces reconstituting Canada assume a final
form.
New Zealand is exceptional for the reason that it is not a confederation but a uni-
tary and sovereign state, whose sovereignty seems to rest upon a treaty –
the Treaty
or te 7iriti of Waitangi – which preceded and can be said to condition the declaration
of the Crown’s sovereignty in 1840. Alone among the cases I have been considering,
then, the political sovereignty which affirms and defines the national identity can be
considered contingent or dependent on the performance or non-performance of a
treaty between two cultures or discourses, whose meaning and history can be debated
in two languages entailing two understandings of law, culture, sovereignty, and their
existence in time. It is potentially a very exciting debate and a very dangerous one; the
more so as it comes at a time when New Zealand’s identity, sovereignty and national
continuity are deeply threatened by the forces of the globalized market. The fact that I
am already using the term “sovereignty” on more than one level of meaning lends
complexity, both political and historical, to the issues to be discussed.
II. The Historical Circumstances
As part of the process of establishing the Crown’s sovereignty over New Zealand
in 1840, a treaty was drawn up and signed by the Crown’s representative Captain
Hobson and the chiefs of a number of independent iwi (tribes) at Waitangi in the north
of the North Island. It was subsequently proffered to the chiefs of other iwi, and ac-
cepted by most, if not all of them, in both islands. It was not a treaty with the Maori
people as a whole, and that people did not then or subsequently form a single unit or
confederation for purposes of legal or political action; the word “Maori” was only just
coming into general use to distinguish the indigenous Polynesians from the European
settlers, and the tribe or iwi remains for most the group of identification. However,
since nearly all iwi have entered into the Treaty relationship, it is reasonable to see its
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J. G.A. POCOCK – NEW ZEALAND AND THETREATY OF WAITANGI
489
provisions as underlying the relations of Maori to the Crown wherever they can be
found.
It can be debated just what role the Treaty has in the establishment of Crown sov-
ereignty in New Zealand. A claim could be made on the grounds of prior discovery,
which gave Britain a right not shared with any European nation to pre-empt land from
the indigenous inhabitants, and this right of pre-emption has been exercised, in ways
often hard to reconcile with the language of the Treaty, to purchase and sometimes
confiscate land or dispose of it by legislative or executive action. The Crown’s sover-
eignty can be defined as an exclusive right to acquire and to dispose of the title to it by
sale or grant, and this right is claimed exclusively of other nations on the grounds of
discovery. But a series of proclamations, instructions to royal officials, and private
memoranda belonging to the period make it quite clear that the Crown had no inten-
tion of proclaiming sovereignty without the consent of the inhabitants, and give us a
number of clues as to how this consent was to be granted. In written statements by
Prime Minister Lord John Russell and Colonial Secretary Lord Glenelg it is con-
firmed that the inhabitants of New Zealand are not “savages living by the chase” (i.e.,
not hunter-gatherers with no relation to the soil which is to assign them a fairly ad-
vanced place in the scheme of history worked out in the recent Enlightenment), but
that they are capable of occupying the land and apportioning it between them. It
would be interesting to know whether Russell and Glenelg had been informed, by
missionaries or others, that the Maori were turning to agriculture and beginning to
plant and harvest cereals, as some of them were; whether they recognised in them
some other capacity for occupation and apportionment, such as is claimed and con-
ceded today; or whether the Crown’s intent was to attribute to them a capacity for
property as a preliminary to a capacity for alienation. This intention was shared by the
agents of several commercial enterprises, including the New Zealand Company, who
were making land purchases from Maori and desired to legitimate them.
These documents further state that though the tribes or iwi do not constitute a
sovereign state, in the sense that there is no supreme authority which rules them all
and can speak on their behalf, they nevertheless possess a “sovereignty” (the word
used) which cannot be subordinated to another without their consent; and this appears
to state the juridical basis on which the meetings occurred at Waitangi and the Treaty
was drawn up and signed. A good deal could certainly be said about the motives of
the British ministers in using this language. They were trying to establish a negotiat-
ing position in advance of the French (always a prudent thing to do); and if we take
that of
the view that their intention already was –
investing the Crown with a title to New Zealand land which it might dispose of in par-
cels to settlers, we can add with much plausibility that their purpose in attributing
sovereignty to the iwi was to invest them with the capacity to transfer it to the Crown.
Nevertheless their language did attribute to the indigenous people a capacity to enter
as it soon afterwards became –
” Charles Grant, Lord Glenelg, memorandum, 15 December 1837; CO 209/21409; I.H. Kawharu,
ed., Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi (Auckland: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1989) at 31 [hereinafter Kawharu].
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into treaties and to possess land and rights before they began to negotiate it; and we
must add that this attributed to them a history, a previous and inherent existence, a
past, a present and a future. The language of European jurisprudence had that effect,
and it further attributed to the Treaty itself the status of a historical document, a
document performing an authoritative act in history, to which reference could be
made in the future by actors who saw it as exerting authority in their present arising
from their past. Much of the subsequent history of the Treaty recounts the attempts of
pakeha jurisprudence to deprive it of that status, and the counter-attempts of contem-
porary bicultural jurisprudence to restore it.
as was certainly their practice at the time –
It would be reasonable to give a Lockean reading to the language used by Russell
and Glenelg. A dispersed sovereignty is being attributed to the iwi; having occupied
their lands, they possess a right in them, and this right extends to the authority to do,
by the law of nature, what is necessary in virtue of their occupancy. They may, for ex-
ample, make war upon one another –
in
defence or furtherance of their claims. What is missing from the discourse is the fur-
ther Lockean principle that one acquires property in land only by mixing one’s labour
with it; the iwi are distinguished from hunter-gatherers by their capacity for occu-
pancy, but how far that capacity depends upon one for labour in the form of cultiva-
tion is not made clear, and this was to be a source of philosophical difficulty when a
Maori perception of occupancy which did not depend upon cultivation and exploita-
tion collided with a pakeha perception which did. However, that was not the issue in
the approach to Waitangi. Russell and Glenelg were saying that the iwi possessed sov-
ereignty dispersed among themselves, but had not yet found it necessary –
and they
may have silently added, had not yet developed the capacity –
to transfer that sover-
eignty to a civil government capable of exercising authority over and on behalf of
them all. The language of the British ministers made it plain that this transfer should
not occur without the consent of the iwi freely given; but at Waitangi they invited the
chiefs there assembled to give that consent, and the necessity for a sovereign civil
government did not arise from within Maori history. There was, as it happened, in the
islands composing New Zealand, no one like Kamehameha in Hawaii, Cakombau in
Fiji, or Tubou in Tonga, capable of conquering and establishing a territorial hegemony
which Europeans might consider a kingdom, doing so from within indigenous history
and using it to act in the new history imposed by European contact. The program of
establishing a central sovereign authority arose out of the activities of the British and
French governments, missionary and settler enterprises; and this origin rendered more
problematic the business of explaining the program at Waitangi in inter-cultural terms
–
that is, of speaking out of a European discourse to a Polynesian discourse when the
two were framed in discontinuous cultural worlds and had different immediate
agenda. The chiefs were not to know the whole of the British reasons for wanting a
sovereign government in New Zealand; they had not evolved, or expressed in their
own discourse, reasons of their own for conceptualising or wanting one. Nor would
the British officers, missionaries, speculators and settlers have been able to see far into
the Maori mental world, if they had desired to do so.
Where the minds of the two cultures came close enough to meeting at Waitangi to
divergent interpretations of the same events or utter-
engender misunderstandings –
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J.G.A. PococK- NEW ZEALAND AND THETREATY OF WAITANGI
491
ances – was over the conceptualisation of title to land. The British desired sover-
eignty not just in the form of a protectorate defending control over New Zealand
against external or foreign competitors, but in the form of a civil government with
authority to effect and regulate the transfer of lands from indigenous occupants to
immigrant or settler owners. The iwi so far involved in this process knew that they
were effecting such transfers, but did not expect to be dispossessed as a result of do-
ing so; and such language is inadequate in so far as it is too European to express the
Maori perception of what the occupancy of land was. The iwi for their part had diffi-
culty in grasping that the Crown was proposing to acquire a pre-emptive sovereignty,
a sovereign role for itself in acquiring title to land from indigenous occupants and
transferring it to settler owners.
What was at issue was not merely the creation of a Lockean sovereignty with
authority to regulate the transfer of lands, but that of a pre-emptive sovereignty with
authority to make itself the source of legal title to land. The nature of both possession
and sovereignty was being developed along lines well known to the civil law; transi-
tions from usus to dominium and from dominium to imperium were being invoked
and brought into the process. The Maori participants were not to know this, since it
was not their language; but they had a highly developed language of their own for
talking about the occupation of land, the claiming of land, and the passage of land
from one control to another. Whether means of translation from one discourse to an-
other were found, whether they could have been found in good faith, and whether
they were indeed pursued in good faith, are issues in the historical interpretation of
the Treaty of Waitangi.
The Treaty (or te 7iriti) was bilingually conducted and texts were drawn up for
signature in both English and Maori. Literacy was developing among Maori and the
texts had been orally debated; the issue is not therefore that the chiefs did not know
what they were signing, but that no satisfactorily final text existed or ever did. The re-
dactors of the Maori text were themselves pakeha –
a term I shall use from now on
when speaking of Europeans in the New Zealand bicultural setting – missionaries,
with interests of their own not identical with those of the Maori or necessarily of the
Crown. They employed what is known as “missionary Maori”, a vocabulary which
contains Maori terms adapted or created to express pakeha legal, political and relig-
ious concepts. More than one Maori text of te 7iriti exists, and was presented to vari-
ous iwi for signature after the gathering of Waitangi; these texts are not identical with
one another, and philologically exact English translations of them do not always rein-
force the official English text recorded by the officers of the Crown. It is therefore
possible to understand both the Maori view that te 7iriti is a fraudulent document, and
the extreme pakeha view that the Treaty has no binding or legal force. In circum-
stances I shall presently describe, however, it has attained the status of a fundamental
text, possessing authority and open to interpretation; and both the lawyer and historian
will recognise the problems in reconstituting a past and assessing its authority in the
present which must next arise. Law is being made in a context of disputed authority
and disputed interpretation; that is how law is made and history is written. It is less
common, though not unknown, for this to happen in a context of bilingual documents
and bicultural interpretation.
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at least to European minds –
The crucial area in the several texts has come to be one in which something is
ceded to the Crown, which in Maori is termed kawanatanga and in English “sover-
eignty”, and something is retained by the chiefs and iwi, which in Maori is termed
rangatiratanga and in English “full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their
lands and estates.” The passage obviously –
raises the
classic issue of the relation of sovereignty to property, but behind that lies the funda-
mental issue of the Crown’s adoption of a pre-emptive title. What looked like a guar-
antee of possession to the iwi has in practice meant to them the imposition of a greater
capacity for alienation than they desired. The Crown has in the past used its kawana-
tanga to determine who the possessors of rangatiratanga in fact are, to individualise
tribal tenure in order to facilitate the sale of land, and to take into possession and dis-
pose of lands which the iwi understood to be theirs by the kind of title which rangati-
ratanga connotes and which, though undefined in 1840, the Crown implicitly recog-
nised them as capable of exercising. Now that the Crown’s title to have done these
things is being disputed in terms of a retrospective and retroactive reading on the
Treaty, it is important to discuss what was, and what has been, conceded under the
name kawanatanga and retained under the name rangatiratanga.
Kawanatanga is missionary Maori, an attempt at a rendering of the English word
“government”; similarly, and rather potently, the Treaty itself is sometimes called a
kawanata or covenant. The English text renders kawanatanga as “sovereignty”, by
which the Maori signatories may have understood in the first instance something like
a “protectorate”, though they would also have understood that the Crown intended,
and was being empowered, to maintain this exclusively of other Europeans or Ameri-
cans who might seek it. What is less clear is how far they understood the extensions of
the English word “sovereignty” into the powers of civil government: Was it under-
stood as keeping the peace among the iwi and hapu (tribes and sub-tribes) or as adju-
dicating disputes over land between them? It is perfectly clear, however, that they did
not think they were conceding to the Crown any ultimate authority over or title to the
lands of the two major islands; it is the question of Crown title which has in the end
become crucial. On the other hand, the distinction between kawanatanga and rangati-
ratanga itself makes quite clear that they were intent on retaining some ultimate
authority over land, and were aware of the dichotomy between something which they
were retaining and something which they were conceding. One of them is on record
as saying “the shadow goes to the Queen, the substance stays with us’ but later de-
claring that he had been wrong and the saying should be reversed; I regret that I am
unable to comment on the Maori words he used or their significances.
The crucial term in Maori understanding of te 7iriti both was and has become
rangatiratanga; in full te tino rangatiratanga This is much nearer being an authentic
Dr. Clive Barlow, an anthropologist of Ngapuhi descent (most of the original signatories of the
Treaty at Waitangi were of the Ngapuhi iw) has asserted that tino rangatiratanga is not Ngapuhi, is
probably a colonists’ invention, and should be replaced by arikitanga. See C. Barlow, 7ikanga Wha-
kaaro: Key concepts in Maori Culture (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991) at 130. I hope the
meanings I have assigned to rangatiratanga would survive the alteration, which as of 1998, has not
occurred.
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Maori term, though it was already capable of missionary usage; significantly, it was
being employed as a Christian sacred term, in translating the words “thy kingdom
come” in the Lord’s Prayer. Rangatira was the word for a chief, and the suffix tanga
gives to English-speakers the word “chieftainship”, which by no means inappropri-
ately suggests that the signatories intended to retain authority as well as possession,
dominium as well as usus. Rangatiratanga connotes not only “possession of the land”
but “possession according to Maori ways, according to the structures of authority and
value inherent in iwi society” The chiefs had no intention that they or their peoples
should become mere subjects of the Crown, whose possession of the land was pro-
tected by Crown law indeed, but only by the kind of law the Crown was accustomed
to administer. Rangatiratanga connoted their own authority as rangatira, and at least
one of them announced that he would never sign the Treaty for fear of finding himself
subject to a power not his own. For these reasons, modem Maori interpretation reads
into rangatiratanga the Treaty’s recognition of a right to possession, not of lands, for-
ests and fisheries alone, but of the norms and values, the social structure and culture,
inherent in the occupancy of land as the iwi then recognised themselves as occupying
it; in other words, the possession of themselves, their identity as people. They claim to
have been dispossessed’of this identity, contrary to the provisions of te 7iriti; and they
claim that the dispossession was unjust, and that the Treaty entitles them to reposses-
sion of both land and cultural identity (which are inseparable) where repossession is
possible, and to compensation and resources to use in building a new identity where it
is not. A new problem instantly arises. Claims under a treaty, or under a Common
Law, are in principle negotiable; claims to a unique and all-inclusive cultural or spiri-
tual identity easily become non-negotiable. In the terms being used in this paper, the
question becomes whether the Maori and the pakeha occupy a single history of inter-
action, or two histories incompatible with one another; and this problem is occasioned
by the fact that kawanatanga and rangatiratanga are each translatable as “sover-
eignty”, when the word is used on its two levels of Lockean meaning. “Sovereignty”
begins to denote the power to constitute one’s own history, on the level of conceptu-
alisation and possession and on that of authority and action. Even to write history may
entail a claim to make it; but to what or whom can that claim be addressed?
We encounter here the crucial significance of the term whenua. Its primary
meaning is land or an area of land, inhabited by tangata, or people, constituting a
hapu or iwi; but it further and simultaneously means placenta, and alludes to the cus-
tom of burying the afterbirth in the land as a symbol or a vehicle of unity with the an-
cestors. Consequently, tangata whenua –
a term by which modem Maori distinguish
themselves – means both “people of the land” and “people of the birthplace”; it as-
serts both priority of occupation and a physico-spiritual unity with ancestors and with
the land, through one another, which constitutes the identity of the iwi; and the last
word now denotes both particular tribes and the Maori people or nation –
te iwi
as a whole. These are modem usages, and I do not know how far the phrase
Maori –
tangata whenua was used in the debates at Waitangi in 1840; but the word whenua
was certainly present, and carried with it the load of meanings I have been describing,
which would pervade the meaning of the treaty term rangatiratanga to an extent
which the missionary draughtsmen may not have understood and which would over-
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flow the distinctions between sovereignty and property present in the minds of the
Crown’s representatives. The Crown was already in the position of having the chiefs
transfer sovereignty in one sense to it, while having the chiefs retain sovereignty in
another for themselves. This verbal ambiguity mattered only in English, but the trans-
action was vastly complicated by the unacknowledged circumstance that rangati-
ratanga –
carried with it the psychic and mythic
loads of the term whenua.
sovereignty in the second sense –
There was a Maori term –
there is little reason to consider it a post-contact in-
vention –
for the authority with which an iwi could claim occupancy of an area, thus
exercising that capacity for appropriation which in European eyes distinguished
Maori from savages. This term was and is manawhenua, an extension of the word
mana, with which we are somewhat familiar as denoting prestige, authority, tradi-
tional and charismatic force of personality; we have many words of our own for it. An
iwi in the person of its chief or rangatira –
though chief and people were not so far
distinguished from one another as to require a conscious fiction of representation –
might extend its mana over a given whenua; but to say so falls short of acknowledg-
ing that it drew its mana from the whenua, and –
to the extent that the ancestors were
in the whenua as placenta –
that the iwi derived its physical and spiritual identity (of
which mana was the dynamism) from the whenua as land. When one iwi subjugated
another and appropriated its mana and whenua, it absorbed the defeated into its own
substance, occasionally and for specific reasons by methods too direct to be de-
scribed. The ancient community of a people with its lands and ancestors was not al-
ways an idyll; the point is that it all stood, and to some degree still stands, in Maori
eyes as the mode by which they possess not merely land but themselves, and are what
they are. The mystifying thing about Western capitalist society is that we believe
property to be an extension of the self, yet believe that it can constantly be in a state of
transference from one self to another; and it was this mystery that the Crown was
about to impose on the iwi at Waitangi. It is a large part of what we mean by the term
“history”.
It has been suggested by more than one modem Maori author that if it was the
Crown’s intention to acquire sovereign authority in the sense of a title to land, a sov-
ereign capacity to act in all transfers of property in land from one possessor to an-
other, the term kawanatanga as used in the Treaty concealed the reality that what the
chiefs were being induced to concede to the Crown was manawhenua. Moreover, this
reality had to be concealed, not merely because they would never have agreed to the
proposal, but because it would have been an unthinkably deep affront even to ask it of
them. The chief who exploded into rage saying he would never sign the Treaty and the
chief who hoped for the moment that they were giving up the shadow and retaining
the substance may have sensed that something of the kind was afoot. But to suppose
that they were being deliberately deceived, we must suppose that the British officers
and missionaries knew what manawhenua was, and knew that they dared not ask the
rangatira and the iwi to give the Crown not merely control over transactions, but
mana over the physical and spiritual substance of themselves. They may not have un-
derstood this, and the guarantee of rangatiratanga may have meant in good faith that
the iwi would be able to sell land and accept the Crown’s jurisdiction over sales, with-
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J.G.A. POCOCK- NEWZEALAND AND THETREATY OF WAITANGI
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out giving up the essential dominium over it; but the implicit concession that the
Maori were not savages does not necessarily mean that the pakeha recognised in them
any kind of sovereignty they were going to keep. Extinctions of title, it was believed,
could be justly arranged under the kawanatanga-rangatiratanga relationship.
The modem Maori claim is twofold, or rather is being made on two levels. On the
one hand, it is being asserted that many dispossessions of Maori have occurred which
must be judged unjust in terms of the agreed meanings of the language used in “the
treaty. On the other, it is being asserted that the surface meaning of that language is it-
self inadequate, and can be rendered just only when we recognise the implication that
the rangatiratanga reserved to the iwi both conceals and contains all that is meant by
a multitude of Maori terms from which I have selected manawhenua as the most in-
formative. The Treaty and te 7iriti are therefore unsatisfactory and even fraudulent on
one level, justifiable only by interpretation on another, and this judicial procedure is a
means of recognising and rectifying much that has passed in New Zealand history
since 1840.
We are to recognise here a judicial and historiographical situation of a familiar
type. A document from the past which exercises authority in the present is being in-
terpreted and the thrust of its authority re-assessed, in the light of perceptions exer-
cised in the present. At the same time it is being asserted that these are perceptions of
the historic reality of what occurred in the past and has gone on occurring into the
present, and we are not yet at the point where lawyer and historian must go separate
ways and arrive at positions adopted for separate reasons. It is worth noting also that
historical criticisms which reveal shortcomings, and perhaps dishonesties in the lan-
guage and conduct of the Treaty are not being used to subvert it and dismiss its
authority, but rather to reinforce it. By this blend of historical criticism and judicial
interpretation, we offer to render the treaty a better instrument for assessing what has
happened in the past and rectifying the past’s consequences in the present. The histo-
rian will add –
that this is
both a way of heightening our understanding of history and a means of enhancing our
capacity to act in it.
and the lawyer need not withhold from the addition –
III. A Conflict of Sovereignties
To say these things is to utter a series of relatively reassuring statements in the
familiar discourse of the ancient constitution; that is to say, English legal reasoning,
which has long understood the similarities and differences, the complex but not an-
tagonistic relations between judicial interpretation and historical criticism. The situa-
tion becomes much more complex, and perhaps a good deal less reassuring, when we
recognise that the claim made on behalf of the tangata whenua entails the statement
that te 7iriti both conceals and fails to recognise, and implicitly contains and does rec-
ognise, a complex system of property, sovereignty and culture – of whenua, mana
and tangata – which is discontinuous with that system built into the historical struc-
ture of English Common Law and European jus gentium. It means among other
things that those inhabiting the system inhabit a history which is differently conceptu-
alised, differently based and maintained by different modes of action, from the history
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presupposed by English and European jurisprudence. This recognition is thrust upon
us once we acknowledge that the claims of manawhenua entail, or once did entail, or
may be said to have once entailed, the occupancy of the earth by ancestral communi-
ties, linked with their ancestors through the earth, and maintaining their identity, sov-
ereignty and mana through this continuity. To live in such a continuity is to live in a
different history from that of the pakeha. The claim that the Treaty guarantees ran-
gatiratanga now becomes the claim that te iwi Maori possess a treaty light to their
own history, have been unjustly dispossessed of their history, and may now justly re-
possess it or make claims to compensation where this is not possible. Bicultural is bi-
historical; the language thus stated implicitly concedes that the Maori have been
partly forced out of their history into pakeha history, but at the same time calls on the
pakeha to recognise and restore Maori history, living in relation to it where they can-
not live within it themselves. Bicultural jurisprudence becomes a mediation between
radically dissimilar perceptions and experiences of history.
It is a premise of this paper that sovereignty, legislative and political, is among
other things a mode by which a human community seeks to command its own history:
to take actions which shape its policies in the present, and even –
since a great deal
of history has in fact been written in this way –
to declare the shape of the historic
past and process out of which it deems itself to be issuing. Neither of these modes of
self-determination ever has been or will be in the absolute power of any sovereign
community; but this does not prevent us asking what may become of a community’s
capacity either to make or to write its own history if its political sovereignty should be
surrendered to forces from without or radically challenged by forces from within.
With respect to the latter possibility, what has happened in recent New Zealand poli-
tics may be described as follows. Maori people in part if paradoxically because they
were becoming increasingly urbanised, found it proper to emphasize their status as
tangata whenua in claiming either restitution of their relation to the land or compen-
sation for its loss. Though now a moderate-sized minority of the population, they
were able to get attention for their claims, and adopted the strategy of making these
claims under the Treaty of Waitangi. There has come into being the Waitangi Tribunal,
a body judicial in character and even authority, empowered to hear claims by Maori
arising out of performance or non-performance of the Treaty’s provisions. Though its
proceedings are judicial in character and distinguished judges –
several of the Maori
learned in the law –
have sat on and presided over it, its findings are not binding at
law, but rather take the form of recommendations of such authority –
one might say
that courts and parliament do well to give them attention. This authority de-
inana –
rives from the circumstance that the Treaty which the Tribunal interprets states the
preconditions under which the sovereignty of the Crown, and therefore of courts and
parliament, came to be established and New Zealand came into existence and later be-
came a sovereign nation. The Tribunal therefore does more than hear cases against the
Crown; it investigates whether the Crown has or has not been discharging conditional
obligations subject to which sovereignty was transferred to it in the first place. This is
why its recommendations cannot be binding at law, but are such that the law is well
advised to give them attention; it has, in the last analysis, a real if limited capacity to
query the legitimacy of the sovereign’s jurisdiction. Clearly, this is a capacity to be
1998]
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exercised at discretion. In demanding restitution from a sovereign, it is a poor strategy
to suggest that the sovereign lacks the authority to make such restitution. This was one
route by which the kingdom of England fell into civil war and dissolution of govern-
ment in the seventeenth century.
Issues brought before the Tribunal may in principle turn upon the relations of ka-
wanatanga to rangatiratanga in the language of the Treaty; that is, upon the questions
of how sovereignty was conveyed to the Crown, of whether the Crown has been dis-
charging the conditions under which sovereignty was conveyed to it, and of whether
sovereignty, while conveyed to the Crown in one sense (kawanatanga), was retained
by the iwi in another sense (rangatiratanga), thus constituting a fundamental condi-
tion under which the Crown legitimately exercises its sovereignty. To anyone with an
elementary knowledge of English and European history, these are momentous and
rather frightening questions. The Treaty of Waitangi has become New Zealand’s an-
cient constitution, its Magna Carta, its fundamental law, its original contract; and all
these historical analogies should serve as reminders of how easily a challenge to sov-
ereignty in the name of any of them can become a dissolution of government, an ap-
peal to heaven, and a lapse into civil war and the state of nature. Moreover, not even
the Magna Carta and the original contract were presented in the form of treaties be-
tween equal sovereign partners, between whom, jus gentium informs us, there must be
either the state of treaty or the state of war; and the fundamental law of New Zealand
was being presented in the form of a treaty. Finally, the effect of the Treaty was, how-
ever you look at it, to transfer title to land into the jurisdiction of the Crown, and all
real property in New Zealand, pakeha and for the most part Maori, is now held under
a title conferred by the Crown. To press contractual doctrine so far that the Crown’s
sovereignty ceased to be legitimate would mean that no proprietor was certain of the
title under which he held; and what the pakeha of 1628 and 1688 did in the like cir-
cumstances is a warning against letting them recur. During 1988 I found myself re-
minding New Zealand students that all classical pakeha political philosophy was
about land rights and sovereignty, and all of it was a remedy for civil war. In 1998, the
prospect of New Zealand’s following Australia into repudiating the Crown and estab-
lishing a republic appears more remote than that of Australia’s completing the proc-
ess.
Happily, in the view of most of us, none of these dire consequences ever looked
likely to recur. The Treaty was not represented as a negotiation between equal sover-
eigns, but as a Lockean process whereby sovereignty in its dispersed form was condi-
tionally converted into sovereignty in a centralised form; so that to remind sovereignty
of the conditions under which it has been granted remained a claim against it, and did
not become the “appeal to heaven” which is issued when sovereignty is declared for-
feit or delegitimised. Nevertheless, the original contract remained as a treaty between
two nations, with the difference that one was then possessed of sovereignty only in its
dispersed form, while the other possessed it in its centralised form. The Maori were
able to contend that their treaty was with the Crown direct, with the consequence that
only Maori may bring complaints before the Tribunal, and individual pakeha are de-
barred from doing so on the grounds that their relations with the sovereign are con-
ducted through other channels. There has also occurred a significant retreat from the
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position laid down in 1877 by Chief Justice Prendergast in Wi Parata v. Bishop of
Wellington,” to the effect that the Treaty was of no legal force because only nations al-
ready possessed of legislative sovereignty possessed the federative capacity to enter
into binding treaties. What is noteworthy here is that Prendergast’s judgement is now
seen as resting upon a strongly positivist jurisprudence, which made so much of full
political sovereignty as to relegate to the condition of savagery any social form not
possessed of it. New Zealand’s newly bicultural jurisprudence is now withdrawing
from these nineteenth-century presuppositions towards those of the more naturalist jus
gentium of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, which conceived of the acqui-
sition of property, rights and sovereignty as taking place by stages in the process of
history as then conceived. It has to do so if it is to make sense of the Treaty at all; we
have seen that this Act was specifically based on the presumption that the Maori were
not savages and were sufficiently possessed of sovereignty to be capable of transfer-
ring it to the Crown. Whether this means that the Treaty can check the sovereign par-
liament in its legislative course is a question it may be wise to leave unanswered.
The jurisprudence of the Waitangi Tribunal – which is prudentiajuris even more
than ratio legis –
thus enjoins the pakeha to explore the history of their law retro-
spectively, moving back in time in search of a perspective in which they can under-
stand the tangata whenua and their own attitudes towards them. The pakeha may thus
discover how deeply rooted in their history is their perception of property and sover-
eignty, with the self-propelled activity of the individual at its centre. However far back
one goes in the past of feudal and Roman jurisprudence, one never comes upon the
community linked with its ancestors in the whenua as the primary tenant of land; that
was left behind in an antiquity so remote that no Western myth declares it plainly.
Travelling back through the past of the Common Law, one may indeed come upon a
time when statute was rooted in custom and second nature, which may assist in un-
derstanding what the tangata whenua have to say about themselves; but one may end
convinced that since their Hebraic and Hellenic beginnings, the pakeha have been
travelling away from the whenua towards the individualisation of tenure and the con-
version of land into commodity and commodity into information, which governs our
history today even if Karl Marx said it was going to. In the history of that process, the
full and absolute sovereignty which the laterjus gentium predicted and the positivists
like Chief Justice Prendergast imposed upon history seems to have become an inci-
dent. In reverting to a pre-positivist jurisprudence, one reverts to a phase before the
absolutism of sovereignty; it is necessary to do so in order to cope with a situation in
which sovereignty rests on a treaty and may be contingent upon its fulfilment. But we
all live in a world in which it is becoming rapidly contingent upon many more things
than that, and is everywhere being subjected to the requirements of the international
market; even when confederations break up and sovereignty is claimed by their con-
stituent republics or tribes, that is the effect aimed at or achieved. It is an ideological
consequence that the individual finds an identity less and less in membership of any
sovereign community, state, nation or iwi; more and more, the individual is com-
manded by a convergence of forces to think of it as contingent in itself, to be negoti-
6 Kawharu, supra note 4 at 110-13.
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499
ated on an allegedly free market of interacting possibilities. Since modem indigenous
peoples do not live on reservations which shield them from these constant displace-
ments of personality, one must ask what they are achieving by their characteristic
strategies. In what history will they find themselves living, when they claim to be liv-
ing in the whenua?
IV. A Conflict in History
We have simplified (and perhaps radicalised) the Maori claim to rights under te
7iriti by saying that they claim the guarantee of rangatiratanga to have been a guar-
antee of manawhenua; that is, a tribe’s occupancy of the land furnishes it with a
spiritual substance or continuity (mana), which in turn is extended as power over that
land (whenua) and becomes a mode of appropriating it and constituting personality on
its foundation (the Maori term for this is turangawaewae, the place where one stands).
The personality thus constituted is that of a group whose communion with the ances-
tors and the land is constantly being renewed, and there is notoriously little room in
this image for those creative conflicts between revolutionary groups and individuals
which furnish history as the pakeha understand it. There are potent ancestor figures,
but one must go back to the demigod Maui to find the-Polynesian Prometheus. In the
nineteenth century it used to be held that only the European masters of the planet pos-
sessed history in the sense of autonomy, self-determination, progress and revolution,
and that this was one reason why they were its destined masters. Today the whenua in
one form or another is being used to challenge this view of history, and is finding
much favourable response from a post-industrial civilisation increasingly tired of its
own history. Perhaps conservation is better than revolution; it may not be conserva-
tism to say so. But if jurisprudence is a main source of our sense of history, the use of
the whenua in jurisprudence brings up the problem that the whenua’s extension in
time may be not history but the dreamtime –
to use the invaluable Australian term
for the communion with ancestors that may be experienced but is not to be narrated or
criticised. What is to happen when the dreamtime is used as a basis for claims at law?
The term tangata whenua, like its homonyms “indigenous” and “aboriginal”, im-
plies two kinds of claim. One is simply a claim to priority of occupation, and need not
entail more than a linear sense of time; the other is a claim to the kind of occupancy of
space and time implicit in the concept whenua, and entails a relationship with the
cosmos so close and exclusive as to contain both space and time within itself. The iwi,
the ancestors and the whenua are all, as it were, contained within one another in the
self-repetitive scheme whose items reduplicate one another; Adam has not stepped out
of paradise into a world he must make and change by his own labour. The dreamtime
may thus be contrasted with history, and may contrast itself to its own advantage with
the latter’s universe of ends and means, effort and frustration, self-realisation and self-
rejection.
The tribunal and the courtroom, whether ethnocentrically Western like Prender-
gast’s or conscientiously bicultural like the Waitangi Tribunal, are necessarily acting
in the world of history; they may respect the dreamtime but cannot submit to it. Their
business is with the contestable, and there is no contesting with the dreamtime; this is
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painfully apparent when the latter is appealed to, not simply to discomfit the world of
the pakeha in the name of the tangata whenua, but to assert contestable claims dis-
puted among the tangata whenua themselves. Sir Tipene O’Regan, a Ngai Tahu ac-
tivist from the South Island who shrewdly understands both law and history, has dis-
tinguished two types of situations in which iwi contest for primacy.! In one, both con-
testants allege genealogy and tradition, surviving in both oral and written forms; dis-
pute is possible between them, each attaches truth-status to the statements it puts for-
ward as history, and the courts are free to decide what kinds of evidence outweigh
others. Courts of Common Law have of course been dealing with this type of situa-
tion since time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, and in most
cases of this kind they are required to determine only what complainant has last been
unjustly dispossessed in a plea of novel disseisin. However the professional historian
may evaluate the claims of oral history, the courts are in search only of rules of evi-
dence and testimony acceptable to both parties, and there are times when the historian
is out of place in the courtroom: O’Regan warns him how easily the expert witness
becomes a hired advocate without knowing it. The prudentia juris governs the situa-
tion; nevertheless it is important to remember that the contestant iwi may be not
merely staking out claims but affirming their deepest sense of identity. The whenua is
not just the tribe’s lawful possession; it is the tribe itself.
This is where the second type of situation may arise out of the first. Litigants may
appear claiming to represent, or constitute, an iwi more ancient than any other, tan-
gata whenua in the literally aboriginal sense. When asked to substantiate their claims
with evidence, they may reply that they have no need to; the voices of their ancestors
speak to them in the rocks and trees, and speak to them as they speak to no others. I
do not have to remind a readership including lawyers how any court or tribunal is
likely to respond to that. It is entirely possible that such claims are fraudulent and put
forward in no good faith. Any tribunal will be strongly inclined to think so, since the
representation of evidence which cannot be assessed will look like an attempt to mis-
lead the court or derail its jurisdiction. Yet the evidence presented by litigants in the
first and more manageable type of situation will contain accounts of times when the
ancestors spoke directly to the occupants of the whenua, and the second set of liti-
gants is only expanding and exploiting the kind of testimony offered by the first. The
world of indigenous jurisdiction is full of West Banks – O’Regan has described the
north of the North Island as “the Lebanon of the Maori world.” Courts may be obliged
to deconstruct whenua and dreamtimes in order to render them justiciable (in a sense,
that is what has been happening ever since 1840), but the Waitangi Tribunal has been
charged with rectifying if not reversing this process. In the universe of jurisdiction
statements may be either true or false; it is not so in dreamtime, which is the universe
of myth. History, the breakdown of the dreamtime, may be the precondition of
judgement, and a dreamtime which comes to court for judgement may destroy itself,
win or lose.
7 T. O’Regan, “Old Myths and New Politics –
Some Contemporary Uses of Traditional History”
(1992) New Zealand Hist. J.
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J.G.A. POCOCK – NEW ZEALAND AND THETREATY OF WAITANGI
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The problem before such courts is to treat dreamtimes with respect while regard-
ing them as incidents in contingent reality; the law has faced such problems before,
encountering or inventing a “time beyond memory”. Here the tangata whenua of New
Zealand present a problem less daunting to the pakeha philosopher than that of the
aboriginals of Australia. The latter, an inconceivably ancient people, arrived so long
ago that no mythic or historic record preserves the memory of the journey from the
there to the here; all aboriginal myth is cosmic myth and the only time known to it is
the dreamtime. This may well be connected with the fact that at the time of British
settlement they were the hunter-gatherers whom Lord Glenelg described as “savages
living by the chase” and unable to apportion land as did the iwi of New Zealand.8
They moved long distances across a land surface they did not much cultivate, relating
themselves to it as whenua by dreams and songs and sand paintings. Myth or not –
and there is now a myth of the aborigine in the Australian imagination –
they present
the image of a dreamtime so perfectly realised that there was nothing else; and how
this is converted into a legal claim to rights must be a fascinating and complex story,
perhaps yet to take place.
But Aotearoa –
a modem Maori and pakeha term extended to the whole of New
is a very young whenua in terms of human occupancy, settled between
Zealand –
one and two thousand years ago, in comparison with the minimally forty thousand of
Australia. The iwi and hapu can name the waka or canoes in which their ancestors ar-
rived, and locate in genealogical and chronological time the names of ancestors who
came from other islands to Aotearoa, or from one part of Aotearoa to another. The
ability to do so is part of the affirmation of manawhenua; one’s name, one’s moun-
tain, one’s river, one’s ancestor and one’s tribe –
and so establishes one’s turanga-
waewae. The individuals named may be mythical; yet there is an important sense in
which those who can name them are living in history rather than myth, and can take
their manawhenua with them to court with less fear of losing it. Those who have re-
sorted to the ineffable voices of their ancestors are justly suspect if they cannot name
them. How the ancient Australians set about the process of naming is another story,
and I would not even dream of suggesting that they did not do it; but I am suggesting
that those they named were located in a different sort of time.
some of them Polynesian and Asian –
From this point it is possible to re-inspect the discourse which divides the inhabi-
tants of New Zealand-Aotearoa into tangata whenua and pakeha, indigenous minority
and settler majority. For one thing, the latter is becoming diversified by new waves of
immigration –
to the point where the old
term pakeha, with its British and Irish connotations, may cease to be comprehensive,
and may be replaced (none too satisfactorily) by the new tau iwi for immigrants in
general. But to confine ourselves to the two older terms, it is possible in the perspec-
tive I have presented to suggest that Maori and pakeha are not simply indigenous and
immigrant, but that both may be characterised as tangata waka – peoples of the ship,
who have ocean voyages and the discovery of islands in their memory, their language
and their history. This argument may well be mistrusted as tending to deprive the tan-
‘ See supra note 4.
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gata whenua of their priority and aboriginality, but I do not see that it would do that. It
would firmly assert that their ancestors were the first human settlers, with a right of
priority in that sense unequivocal. As for the wider and more intimate connotations of
whenua, mana and rangatiratanga, it would affirm the extraordinary achievements of
the ancient tangata waka, who arrived from beyond seas in islands very unlike those
they had previously known and set about establishing, by myth, dream, genealogy and
all their practices of occupancy and culture, the sort of relations with the environment
that made them tangata whenua. The whenua and the dreamtime would thus be situ-
ated in history, made the achievements of human beings acting in human time to in-
vent mythic time; it would be like the reduction of custom to statute, of the ancient
constitution to historic changes in the patterns of land tenure, proposed to the Com-
mon Law in the increasing historical sophistication of the seventeenth century. Whe-
nua and dreamtime would indeed be deprivileged to the extent that they lost any
status so sacred that it could not even be discussed, and instead became contestable
and negotiable before the tribunals and the courts; but contests for manalhenua be-
tween separate iwi, or groups replacing iwi, have ensured that result already, and both
Maori marae (or meeting-places) and pakeha law courts are already equipped with
complex speech-patterns designed to assign priority between claims to ancient stand-
ing. The court can respect the dreamtime, though it cannot abdicate before it.
There seems to be no reason in principle –
though there are plenty of alarming
difficulties in practice – why the procedures being set up should not be capable of
dealing with disputes arising since the Treaty, under the Treaty, and even before the
Treaty. The parameters of common law are capable of being expanded to the point
where they can recognise and decide to respect the parameters of manawhenua. I see
this process as having begun and, if it can be continued, as one of the things being
done well and going well in contemporary New Zealand. Even the debate over the ul-
timate location of sovereignty, implicit and explicit in the appeal to the Treaty, can
lead to the definition and renegotiation of sovereignty. But these are propositions
about law, constitutional law and jus gentium; and this paper is concerned with the
interrelations of law and history. It should not be difficult, and I hope I have not made
it more difficult, to see how legal argument, conceived as appeal to past practices and
the preconditions of authority, leads to reconstruction and reconstitution of history,
conceived as the history of practice and authority, and even to juridical debate be-
tween such reconstitutions. To this point we are in the world of the lawyer, guided by
the purposes of jurisprudence. But once we begin to debate questions of human iden-
tity and selfhood, questions of property and personality, whenua and mana, the scene
changes; both lawyer and litigant find themselves faced with the preconditions of le-
gal behaviour, the preconditions of who and what they are, and with history as the
process of creation and change in those preconditions. If this sounds like an idealist
conception of history, I shall reply that we are sometimes necessitated to conceive of
history in that way.
I have tried to show that the differences between Anglo-European law and Maori-
Polynesian manawhenua are such as to lead to very different conceptions of how hu-
man beings live in society and social time, and to that extent in history. By expanding
–
somewhat beyond the practical necessities of the contemporary New Zealand
1998]
J.G.A. PococK – NEWZEALAND AND 7-HETREATY OF WAITANGI
503
situation –
the mythic and cosmic implications of the term whenua, I have tried to
show how the concept of history itself can become the antithesis of another way of
conceptualising the continuity of human existence, for which I have used the term
dreamtime. It can of course follow that the concept of history is itself a tool of cultural
imperialism, and my proposal that there should be two tangata waka is quite frankly a
programme for bringing the whenua and the dreamtime into the domain of human
history and subjecting them to contingency, contestability and the sovereignty of hu-
man judgement.
I see the entire Treaty debate as a negotiation of the term under which that sover-
eignty is to be exercised. If it is said that this is to give the pakeha the advantage, by
subjecting the tangata whenua to history which is a pakeha construct, I shall reply
that the pakeha has, since his first beginnings as he remembers them, been necessi-
tated to live in history and not in paradise or the dreamtime; Adam, Cain and Nimrod,
Agamemnon, Odysseus and Orestes, saw to that at the beginnings of our mythology.
Second, I shall reply that the modem tangata whenua are living in history when they
remind us of what we so much want to hear, that there is an alternative to history.
They are not so much living in the time of the ancestors, as reminding us that they
were recently and unjustly expelled from it by history, and using the law’s capacity to
recognize injustice as a mode of making claims against history and those who have
profited by it. They both submit manawhenua to the courts, and use manawhenua as a
challenge to the courts. This is unsurprising to the traditions of Common Law, as well
as to the tradition of the Maori marae, a meeting ground where challenge and accep-
tance are very closely related. It is therefore possible to take a sanguine view, and
speak of a contestation with law within the law, and with history within history.
the whenua into the cash flow –
But such sanguine views can themselves be challenged; denounced, for example,
as “liberal” by those to the left of liberalism who use “liberal” as a term of oppro-
brium. The root of this criticism is undeniabfy strong and deep It reduces to the as-
sertion that the pakeha history which both Common Law and jus gentium help define
has been from the beginning, and still is, irreversibly set towards individualisation of
tenure, towards the conveyance and commodification of lands, towards the dissolution
of property into credit –
and towards history as the
pakeha have conceived it into that unchecked reign of the world market in which
some have rather prematurely (but still not imperceptively) discerned “the end of his-
tory.” Such criticism urgently wams the Maori against having anything to do with the
law of the pakeha, on the grounds that it is an instrument designed to dissolve any
claim to manawhenua the iwi might make, and would even dissolve such a claim in
the act of seeming to concede it. This, it is said, is precisely what the Treaty of Wai-
tangi itself was designed to achieve, and what New Zealand history has been achiev-
ing ever since. The issue raised in reply by the whole story I have been discussing is
whether the current Maori resurgence is capable of exploiting the law in the name of
9 J. Kelsey, “Judicialisation of the Treaty of Waitangi: A Subtle Cultural Repositioning” (1994) 10
Aust. J. L. & Soci. 131.
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manawhenua and persuading it to certain reversals of the course its history has been
taking.
if the nation survives to have one –
The criticism here outlined has a good deal of substance; it is put forward by sur-
viving Marxists among others. As Marxism recedes into the past as either a system or
a programme, we may pick its bones and find there some important critical percep-
tions. Let me conclude by examining some of its predictions as they may affect the
pakeha, rather than the tangata whenua, in the historical context shared by both. We
are living in a time when sovereignty is being devolved, debated, deprivileged and
consolidated. It is being claimed by some who have not had it before, as political con-
federations break up, and it is being given away by others whose history has been
shaped by it, as new economic communities are formed and acquire governing
authority. As a New Zealander, I find it significant that the debate over the Treaty of
Waitangi, an investigation and redefinition of the foundations of national sovereignty,
was initiated under the fourth Labour government of 1984-1990, which will be re-
membered in the national history –
as a unique
blend of the creative and the radically destructive. I use the adverb to give emphasis to
the latter adjective because the other policies initiated by that government are reduci-
ble to the rapid and often the forced sale of national assets –
those owned by the state
to begin with, and then more and more of those which might constitute a national
economy –
into hands so widely dispersed that their sale amounted to a radical (and
not yet a profitable) abdication by the state to a market international or extra-national
in character. It is no accident that the Waitangi Tribunal owes much of its authority to
an appeal to the Treaty against a decision to transfer lands acquired by the Crown to
state-owned enterprises over which the market was to have an authority which the
Crown has abdicated; or that it could be asked what meaning there would be to Maori
reacquisition of ancestral mana over off-shore fishing grounds if all that could be
done with it was to negotiate the sale of fishing rights to operations based in Korea
and Taiwan.” The iwi found themselves in a world where sovereignty might mean
mostly the right to dispose of sovereignty, the reacquisition of rangatiratanga and the
renewed abdication of kawanatanga; precisely where they had been one hundred and
fifty years before. This time the pakeha –
shared the
same predicament.
or quite a number of them –
Conclusion
I would like to conclude by emphasising the concepts of property and sovereignty
in relation to history, as they have stood since they were first formulated in European
and English thinking. Property –
de-
noted the link between personal and social identity and the material world; sover-
eignty denoted the capacity to employ membership in a self-goveming community to
affirm personal and communal self-determination in the taking of political acts which
the capacity to call something one’s own –
‘0 New Zealand Maori Council v. Solicitor-General [1987] 1 N.Z.L.R. 641; Muriwhenua Fishing
Report (1988); A. Sharp, Justice and the Maori. Maori Claims in New Zealand Political Argunient in
the 1980s, 2d ed. (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1997) at 80-85.
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J.G.A. POCOCK – NEWZEALAND AND THETREATY OF WAITANGI
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determined national and international history. Hence, of course, the disastrous Ger-
man idealist conviction that the state (even the state at war) was the highest expression
of freedom of the personality. The link between property and sovereignty was long
attacked by socialists on the grounds that it led too rapidly towards the commodifica-
tion of both property and personality; it is now attacked by free-market theorists on
the opposite grounds that it impedes what looks remarkably like the same process. In-
stead of living in political communities where we were –
supposedly – members as
individuals of the sovereign which determined its role in history, we are to live in eco-
nomic communities where our role as self-enacting individuals has yet to be defined
as other than that of the consumer. And it is hard to say that consumers determine
their own destiny. We may all have to go and live where the market most has need of
us –
as consumers, by the way, more than as producers. I have heard Sir Tipene
O’Regan observe that the problem before both tangata waka is how to avoid becom-
ing boat people.
The history of New Zealand, since and including the Treaty of Waitangi, can eas-
ily enough be brought under this paradigm. I have been using terminology both Maori
and pakeha in examining an enterprise in renegotiating sovereignty, items which re-
quire both te iwi Maori and te iwi pakeha to recognize their identities as historically
contingent; to do this can stimulate one’s capacity to rethink and regroup. But nego-
tiability and contingency are dangerous grounds. It is no accident that the decay of the
sovereign state has been accompanied by a criticism which at time amounts to an as-
sault on the notion of personal identity, which we are enjoined to see as perpetually
renegotiated under conditions which can never be other than contingent. To be forever
renegotiating one’s identity, inhabiting the other’s contingent universe as well as one’s
own, is politically stimulating and morally educative, so long as one retains a self to
negotiate with and some allies in negotiation. It is an altogether destructive experience
once one lies under the imperative to surrender one’s achieved identity to the first
comer with a stronger accusation of guilt or greater purchasing power. One of the
shrewdest of New Zealand political theorists, Andrew Sharp, has warned against
mistaking his conclusion about the irreducibility of Maori and pakeha conceptions of
justice for a post-modernist manifesto.” We cannot always be foxes, he says, negoti-
ating our selves all the time; we must be lions sometimes if we mean to act, hedge-
hogs sometimes if we mean to think, and the political conclusions are not always ire-
nic.
To put a similar point in my own way, I confess myself tired of being decon-
structed and in search of turangawaewae, not so much a place to stand as a means of
standing somewhere. As an expatriate from a world of vast seas and small islands, I
know about the special significance of making landfalls and setting foot ashore; and
the archetype I admire is Ulysses, that man of many wiles who has seen many cities
and been captured by none of them, not even Ithaca his home. Ulysses therefore lives
in history and not in the whenua; if he has a whenua he can leave it and return; but at
“A. Sharp, “Representing Justice and the Maori: Or Why It Ought Not to be Construed as a Post-
Modernist Text” (1992) 6 Political Theory Newsletter (Canberra) 27.
506
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the end of the story, he and his son are left remarking that as they have just killed most
of the political elite of Ithaca, it is not clear what is to happen next, and we do not
quite know what peace Athena makes for them. Political community therefore mat-
ters, and so does sovereignty. In the case I have been reviewing, Maori and pakeha
have been renegotiating sovereignty even as it is being sold out from under them, and
I can imagine conditions in which they both want their rangatiratanga and turanga-
waewae back again, and have to begin by deciding whether they are still there to de-
mand them.
