Waitangi Day 2019
I am scared of the Treaty. I am scared of Waitangi Day. Not because it threatens my place here in Aotearoa as a European settler. No, precisely the opposite. I am scared of Waitangi Day because it secures my place here in Aotearoa as a European settler.
The Treaty principles (1975) speak of partnership and imply biculturalism. In the past my problem with these terms is that they were under-realised, under-honoured, or even under attack by the dominant Pākehā culture. But this year my misgivings have migrated to the level of the concepts themselves. Many seem to take this as an ongoing fact: if iwi and the British crown first signed the Treaty then that makeup (European/Pākehā and Māori) is what counts today as far as biculturalism and ‘power-sharing’ is concerned. This is what I mean when I say I am scared of the Treaty. Not only does the Treaty seem to edify and entitle European settlers and their descendants to a greedy share of the power pie at all, but the Treaty also reifies one relationship and enshrines it. What about the whakapapa and manaakitanga that tangata whenua share across the mighty Pacific? What about the incredible non-Indigenous but non-European communities that have been in these islands of Aotearoa since the 19th Century? Or more recently, for that matter – what about newer migrants and refugees? The Treaty makes Euro descendants too comfortable here. Too comfortable with our assumed version of governance and culture, too comfortable with seizing a quasi-Indigenous status, too comfortable forgetting about our own wilful transplantation across the earth. There is nothing wrong with being a traveler, a relocator, or a migrant. Migration is often one of the highest acts of hope, courage, and grace. But it is graceless to arrive, transform a place to your image, and do your darnedest to erase the rich language and systems by which this land was already occupied and accounted for, not to mention the bodies and minds that did that accounting. This lack of grace is not an act of evil but a failure of imagination; an unchallenged, incurious obliviousness to worlds other than your own. Iwi, hapū, and whānau survivance is at once miraculous and obvious: of course they fought and keep fighting to secure the ways of being and knowing that best serve and make sense of this place. Not a blind fight for the sake of power, but a carefully-imagined line of knowledge. Since these ways of being and knowing have been actively suppressed, they have had to be actively imagined and reimagined. If evil is banal then imagination is the opposite. Imagination is grace.
Grace is missing in the way that those signing moments of the Treaty are overblown and allowed to disproportionately govern the way Pākehā then and now expect power – especially seeing as some iwi chose not to sign, and those that did sign never ceded sovereignty. Rather than Māori and Pākehā, biculturalism really means iwi and tauiwi: those with Indigenous ancestry here and those with ancestry from other lands. The language and the (as yet unfulfilled) practises of biculturalism and partnership might be insufficient but perhaps they are necessary – not as a positivist politics or desired end point, but as a way of being now. Waitangi Day is good for something: it forces me to be a creator rather than a consumer of meaning. To read, puzzle, question, and synthesise. And to write. I cannot passively soak up the narratives of the day. Waitangi Day is, therefore, a heuristic or learning device that pushes me off the tarmac of sealed surety. No bitumen here; no optimal way to encounter Waitangi Day. Colonisation is a structure and not just an event. This one event and this one anachronistic, poor faith, breached treaty (at least on the crown side of things) is insufficient as a way to grapple with the structure of settler-colonialism, but is necessary all the same. Waitangi Day is not the answer, but it at least gives me some hope that there may be an answer ahead: some way out of the inequities and topsy-turvy power arrangements that we Pākehā enact or, more to the point, reenact today.
My hope here and now on Waitangi Day 2019 is that I can keep that small heuristic hope as a motivator and not let the lack of an answer be a de-motivator. I want to remember that tension creates amplitude and space for possibility. So I hope for less surety, less reenactment of consumed narratives, and words that can start tiny revolutions of the imagination.
Here are my previous Waitangi Day thoughts – reading back on them I can see the tiny shifts and expansion in how and what I’ve been able to think and do: