A Book of Waitangi

Another step on the Long March

A short radio news item caught my attention the other day.

“A copy of a new book about the Treaty of Waitangi by lawyer Roimata Smail has been gifted to every secondary school in the country. An anonymous donor has paid for Understanding Te Tiriti: a handbook of basic facts about Te Tiriti o Waitangi to be sent to the schools.”

Two things immediately came to mind. (1) It’s great that every school will have a copy of what is reportedly a short - 34 pages - and easy to read publication. (2) This is written by a lawyer specialising in Treaty issues who recently created a template to help people submit their opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill. Therefore it’s pretty obvious what the editorial slant of this booklet will be and whether the “facts” presented will be factual.

Every school which receives this publication should tell its students that while this is a contribution to the debate on the Treaty, there are other works which present a different perspective. For instance Sir Apirana Ngata’s 1922 The Treaty of Waitangi: An Explanation or Ewan McQueen’s more recent One Sun in The Sky.

In today’s doctrinaire education environment we know that will not happen. Smail’s book and the views expressed in it will remain unchallenged by teachers and students. The works by Ngata and McQueen will be dismissed as irrelevant, out of touch with modern times or just plain wrong.

The long march through the institutions will continue.

As yet I haven’t read Understanding Te Tiriti but I have ordered a copy ($25 plus postage) and I’ll report on its contents in due course.

But a look at Ms Smail’s website gives me a fairly good indication of the approach she will take.

She has put together a template submission on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill which anyone can use to make a submission to the Select Committee.

The template is set out in a legal format with numbered paragraphs and covers all three principles that David Seymour included in his bill.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Principle 1 claims Crown absolute power to make laws over everyone and govern, or in other words enforce those laws. This is wrong. This is not a principle of what was agreed in 1840. It was only ever discussed that the Queen would govern non-Maori.”

So right from the off Ms Smail is actively promoting the idea that Chiefs in 1840 did not cede government of the country to the Crown. This is the quite absurd notion that the Waitangi Tribunal foisted upon us a decade ago. It is contrary to all contemporary accounts from February 1840, reports from the Kohimarama Conference of 1860 and Ngata’s book from 1922. It also flies in the face of what Sir Hugh Kawharu wrote in his 1989 back translation of the Treaty – Maori to English - which to this day remains on the Tribunal website.

“The Chiefs of the Confederation and all the Chiefs who have not joined that Confederation give absolutely to the Queen of England for ever the complete government over their land.”

More from Ms Smail’s submission template:

“Today laws control an education system where Māori children get less opportunities, a health system where Māori face substandard care, a criminal system that mostly imprisons Māori and a ‘Child Protection’ system that mostly takes Māori children from their whanau.”

Whew.

Where do Māori children get less education opportunities? Only when their useless parents don’t insist on them going to school to learn literacy and numeracy skills. What is the health system where Māori face substandard care? The one where they whinge about delays in ED or getting to a GP just like the rest of us? Why does the criminal system mostly imprison Māori? Because it would seem they commit the most crime. Just why they do that is a matter beyond the sociological cope of this essay. And why does a Child Protection system take mostly Māori children from their whanau? To stop even more deaths like those of Baby Ru and Nia Glassie and the Kahui twins.

One final quote from the template: “the Crown consistently makes and enforces laws that discriminate against and harm Māori …”

So you can see the tenor of Roimata Smail’s thinking about the Treaty of Waitangi and what she’s likely to have written in her book. I will reserve final judgement until my copy arrives in the mail.

But I find it more than disturbing that such an obviously biased and most likely non-referenced publication is being distributed around our high schools.

Teaching around the Treaty of Waitangi is highly problematical because of the lack of balance in the perspectives being taught. What the Waitangi Tribunal concludes is being taken more and more as gospel. Yet we know that body has made some absurd conclusions – the matter of sovereignty and government over these lands being the most fundamental and serious.

I asked my 14 year old grandson, coming towards the end of Year 9 at a fee-paying Wellington private school, what they did at their school around the time of the hikoi arriving in the capital. He said that in his Māori language class they were asked to make banners for the march and were given the opportunity the attend the hikoi. He declined.

While a non-state school arguably has the right to teach what it likes, young (and not-so-young) minds should always be given a balance of competing perspectives. It’s what that era called The Enlightenment was about.

It’s patently obvious that when it comes to teaching the Treaty of Waitangi in our secondary schools, that concept has flown the coop. It’s a distressing outlook for our future.

I await Roimata Smail’s book in the mail.