Hui-ā-Tau Conference 2021 - Te Hunga Rōia Māori o Aotearoa

Ani Mikaere, Pou Whakatupu Mātauranga, Te Wānanga o Raukawa

3 July 2021

Te Hunga Rōia Māori o Aotearoa held its annual conference from 1-3 July 2021 at the University of Canterbury. The theme of the conference, given by Moana Jackson, was 'Māori Lawyers as Agents of Mana-Based Change'. This theme encouraged presenters and conference participants to think deeply about how lawyers can contribute to social justice by pursuing change grounded in mana and tino rangatiratanga. Ani Mikaere was invited to give the closing keynote address of the conference to reflect on the conference theme and to challenge participants to pursue mana-based change.

Tīmatanga kōrero - Introduction

In keeping with the theme of honesty, I have to admit that I have struggled with preparing this kōrero. I was not certain that I could find enough to say. In truth, my thoughts on the conference theme of Māori lawyers as agents of mana-based change can be summarised in just four brief points:

1. New Zealand is a colonial state.
2. The colonial state presents Māori with a limited range of options: resist, compromise or collaborate.
3. The law of the coloniser has been key to the success of colonisation, operating to nullify mana Māori.
4. There is, then, a fundamental contradiction inherent in the idea of Māori lawyers serving as agents of mana-based change.

All of this seems so self-evident that I could probably end here. However, that would make for a rather short address! So, at risk of stating the obvious, I will expand on each of these points.

Kōrerorero - Discussion

New Zealand is a colonial state

I doubt whether any of you are surprised by my description of New Zealand as a colonial state. All of us who live here, tangata whenua and tauiwi, live and breathe colonialism 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

There are those who find such a claim unpalatable, pointing to such developments as the Treaty claims process or the resurgence of Te Reo or the record numbers of Māori MPs as promising signs that we are moving—or have moved— “beyond” colonisation.

The short answer to this was provided by activist Bobbi Sykes when she famously responded to the description of Australia as “post-colonial” with the acerbic counter: “What? Have they left?”^[1] This razor-sharp retort may almost sound flippant, but it is not. As Moana Jackson has recently pointed out, decolonisation may have been accepted eventually as a right for those Indigenous Peoples who remain the majority population in their own lands but it has always been denied to those of us who now find ourselves outnumbered by colonisers who refuse to leave:^[2]

The countries where the colonisers stayed, established a government and became the majority were redefined as ‘settler colonies’ and the Indigenous peoples were excluded from any possibility of decolonisation.

And so, for those of us who are unfortunate enough to find ourselves now entrapped within settler colonies—in what might be described as a never-ending form of home invasion—the process of colonisation continues.

Unsettled by the taint of illegitimacy that underpins their position, the psyche of the settler coloniser is marked by a compulsive need to deny their role as usurper. Albert Memmi writes that the coloniser “endeavors to falsify history, he rewrites laws, he would extinguish memories—anything to succeed in transforming his usurpation into legitimacy”.^[3] We do not have to look very far to see this type of behaviour in the settler colony of New Zealand.

Take the Tuia 250 debacle, described on the Ministry of Culture and Heritage website as “a national opportunity to hold honest conversations about the past, the present and how we navigate our shared future”.^[4] We were reassured that this was a commemoration, not a celebration; we were funded to participate by showcasing the navigational feats of our tūpuna; and some of the harm done to Māori by Cook and his crew was acknowledged.

But little, if anything, about Tuia 250 was honest. It was primarily an exercise in mythmaking, not a meaningful attempt to grapple with the implications of colonialism. The very act of singling out 1769 as a date of significance merely reinforced the idea that the “real history” of Aotearoa didn’t begin until a white man “discovered” us. As Tina Ngata was quick to point out, no amount of reassurance about the importance of our “dual heritage” could change the fact that the entire programme centred around Cook’s anniversary, our own stories about Kupe and others simply added on. “Directly or indirectly”, she said, the programme “[gave] merit to the idea that our identity is centred on Cook’s arrival”.^[5] (As an aside, why we would condone talking about Kupe in the same breath as Cook—a man famously described on national television by Haunani-Kay Trask as a “pestilential, syphilitic rapist”^[6] — is beyond me, but that is another talk for another day.)

The most problematic aspect of Tuia 250 is the way that Cook’s voyage was viewed in isolation from the colonising context within which it occurred. By 1769, after more than two centuries of watching on jealously while other European powers like Spain and Portugal amassed colonial empires, Britain was obsessed with achieving imperial dominance. By the turn of the 20^th century that aim had been well and truly realised, the British empire covering nearly one quarter of the world’s land.^[7]

It is impossible to properly understand the significance of Cook’s voyage without an appreciation of the forces that produced it. He came here for the explicit purpose of adding to Britain’s colonial spoils, confident in his understanding that any Indigenous Peoples who he came across could be treated as less than human because that is how Europe chose to characterise us. It should come as no surprise to learn that his crew quite casually shot, killed or kidnapped Māori whenever things did not go their way. Such occurrences were not aberrations: far from it, they were the bread-and-butter of colonisation. The pattern of random violence, theft or other disgraceful conduct was repeated, over and over again, as Cook went on what Tina Ngata has so aptly described as his “crime spree”^[8] around Aotearoa. Little wonder that Arama Rata dubbed Tuia 250 a re-enactment of the invasion of Māori land by a replica “death ship”^[9] or that Anahera Herbert-Graves objected to the use of euphemisms such as “encounter” or “meeting” to describe Cook’s unwelcome invasion of our world, describing him as a ‘barbarian”.^[10]

Such views were brushed aside by Tuia 250 co-chair Jenny Shipley, who disingenuously described the murder of a number of individuals during the two days that the Endeavour visited Tūranganui-a-Kiwa as “unintended but tragic consequences” of Cook’s visit. She went on to praise “both Māori and Pākehā” who had shown a willingness to “explore the emotions” evoked by Tuia 250 rather than “arguing the facts of history”. She added that “there is no single truth here”, insisting that “it’s not necessary to argue about who is right and who is wrong”.

Shipley’s response illustrates nicely the phenomenon that Memmi describes: the revision of history, the wilful mis-remembering of events as part of a conscious effort to transform usurpation into legitimacy. It is quite simply incorrect to suggest that there is more than one “truth” about the shooting and kidnap of people at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa—or elsewhere, for that matter. The facts are uncontested. Nor is it remotely difficult to figure out who was right and who was wrong, unless you believe that Cook was justified in helping himself to Māori possessions while reserving to himself the right to shoot them when they took something that belonged to him. Or unless you think it was reasonable for him to have shot them without any pretence of justification—in one instance, by his own admission, simply to impress upon them that the British were superior.^[11] Or unless you agree that, because our tūpuna were not white, he was perfectly entitled to claim Aotearoa for his imperial masters (note that if he’d found evidence that any European nation had planted its flag here before he arrived, he would have been compelled by the European colonisers’ code of conduct to respect their prior claim).

By glossing over the unsavoury details of colonial power and the criminal acts that were committed in the name of that power, Shipley conveniently allows the present-day beneficiaries of colonial greed and violence to avoid taking responsibility for the advantages that they now enjoy. She neatly avoids having to acknowledge or deal with the contemporary legacy of imperialism. It is so much easier to fall back on statements of regret about the deeds of individuals who misread a situation than it is to admit that they were quite deliberately engaged in laying the foundation of Pākehā privilege upon which the edifice of the colonial state has been erected and has thrived. It is so much more comfortable to pretend that colonialism belongs to a safely distant past.

Cook’s visit served as a brief but portentous introduction to the brutality of colonial ambition, opening the way to the onslaught that would inevitably follow. Tuia 250 served as a timely reminder that the colonial onslaught is far from over.

Resist, compromise, collaborate

The fact is that being Māori in a colonial state means that we can never simply “be”—consciously or otherwise, we are all compelled every day (and sometimes every hour of every day) to position ourselves in relation to colonial power. There may be the odd purist in our midst who claims to be in a perpetual state of resistance but the truth is that, unless they are superhuman, they are either delusional or they are being dishonest.

In my experience, daily existence in the colonial state of New Zealand is a constant trade-off between the things we can tolerate and those we cannot live with. We resist whenever possible. We compromise when we must, typically promising ourselves that we will do better next time or performing mental gymnastics in order to justify our actions. We collaborate when we lack the imagination or the energy to do otherwise and either wallow in guilt or try not to think about it. Sometimes we practice the time-honoured tactic of denial. Sometimes we go on the offensive, accusing others of doing nothing, of doing worse or of having no appreciation of how complicated our lives are.

It is sobering to realise that I have been engaged in this process, one way or another, for my entire life: as a child attending a predominantly Pākehā primary school in a small, highly conservative country town; as a quietly rebellious teenager at a church boarding school; as a law student who started out highly motivated but subsequently became disillusioned and disinterested; as an initially enthusiastic but then increasingly frustrated legal academic; and even now. If you are Māori, this process is inescapable. It is relentless. It wears you down.

But with age and experience comes perspective. Looking back over a lifetime you can begin to discern patterns. I have realised that the amount of time we spend engaged in one of these options as opposed to another varies, depending upon where we are and what we are doing. If we are lucky, we can exercise a degree of control over the situations we place ourselves into and the people we surround ourselves with.

For instance, as a young child I spent most of my time striving to be a model student. I was, in essence, a collaborator. I do not blame myself for this: I was just a kid and looking back on it, it seemed like the most obvious option. But I cannot pretend that I knew nothing about the consequences of resistance. I have the Māori classmate who threw his chair across the classroom, frustrated at hearing his name being uncaringly butchered by the teacher for the hundredth time in a day, to thank for that lesson. I knew the teacher was in the wrong. But if I am honest, I was also quietly relieved that I did not have a “complicated” Māori name for her to mispronounce.

My years as a student, both at college and at law school, were largely spent collaborating and compromising—punctuated, I like now to imagine, by small acts of resistance along the way. By the time I got to university I was regularly finding myself trying to rationalise compromise and collaboration by telling myself that they were merely part of a short-term strategy that would see me better-equipped for resistance in the long term.

But an ends-justifying-the-means kind of argument can only take you so far. Once I had become a legal academic, I found it increasingly difficult to justify pragmatism over principle. This is not to suggest that I never compromised or collaborated: I very soon found it was impossible to exist in that environment without doing plenty of both. But I spent an increasing amount of time feeling guilty about it. I also spent a lot more time trying to resist—and learning first-hand about the consequences of doing so.

The other thing I learned is that relentless self-reflection is exhausting. And exhaustion can impact on your ability to think clearly. It is surprisingly easy to lose focus on what you are doing and why.

I feel incredibly silly admitting it now, but when I took up a position at Waikato Law School in 1991, I was naïvely invested in its proclaimed vision of biculturalism. I mistook the rhetoric for commitment, and I expended a ridiculous amount of energy trying to help realise the goal of creating a bicultural law school. It took a few characteristically blunt words from Graham Smith to wake me up. One day when I was whining at him about how difficult my job was, he stopped me short by reminding me that the university was a Western institution and that it was foolish to imagine that I could change it. The most I could hope to achieve was to create a safe space for Māori within it.

It was such a devastatingly obvious point and it really helped. Prioritising the creation and defence of a safe space for Māori meant I could narrow my focus when applying the “resist-compromise-collaborate” lens to my decision-making. If something had minimal impact on the immediate needs of Māori students, I let it slide. I reserved my energy for those battles that made the most difference to the day-to-day experience of Māori students and staff within the law school.

While this helped with the allocation of time and energy, however, it in no way altered the fact that much more of my time was spent compromising—and sometimes collaborating—than resisting. And, given my idealistic high hopes when I started at Waikato, merely carving out and then battling to defend a zone of relative safety within an overwhelmingly racist institution was never going to bring much satisfaction in the long term. So, inevitably, I moved on.

For the past 20 years I have been at Te Wānanga o Raukawa. I would love to say that this means I have spent the last two decades not having to think about these matters—but, of course, life is never that simple.

Some of you will know that Te Wānanga o Raukawa is a product of Whakatupuranga Rua Mano, a 25-year iwi development plan initiated by Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira and Ngāti Raukawa in 1975. The plan was instigated in response to the imminent threat of cultural extinction and Te Wānanga o Raukawa was established in 1981. It was initially very small^[12] and it was heavily reliant on the voluntary labour of people from iwi throughout Aotearoa who lent their support to the initiative. Throughout its first twelve years of existence, the Wānanga ran on the proverbial smell of an oily rag but it was entirely self-determining. And not by accident: one of the four underpinning principles of Whakatupuranga Rua Mano is Tino Rangatiratanga.

In 1989 wānanga were established as a new category of tertiary education institution (TEI) within the Education Act^[13] and in 1993 Te Wānanga o Raukawa received statutory approval as a “wānanga” within the terms of the Act. At around this time, the decision was made to open the doors to students from around Aotearoa and a period of rapid expansion followed. We are still a small player in the field of tertiary education, with approximately 1800 equivalent full time students (EFTS).

The decision to become a TEI within the terms of the Education Act was not an easy one. As you can imagine, resourcing was a constant and pressing need but there was concern about the potential loss of rangatiratanga. And experience to date confirms that our people were right to have been concerned. The line between state assistance and state interference has proven to be a fine one.

It has been undeniably helpful for our students to have access to financial support through student loans and so forth. And being funded as a TEI has enabled the Wānanga to employ staff, to upgrade its facilities and to increase the number of students and programmes. Nevertheless, funding has proven to be an ongoing bone of contention. In 1999, for example, we joined with the other two wānanga to bring a Waitangi Tribunal claim because the Crown had paid out a capital establishment grant to all categories of TEIs except wānanga. The Tribunal agreed that this was inequitable,^[14] but it was a further nine years before Te Wānanga o Raukawa settled its claim. In 2017 we lodged a further claim,^[15] citing inadequate support for our whakatupu mātauranga activity and our course provision. Negotiation of this claim is currently underway.

At the heart of our current claim is the relationship between tino rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga. In our view, the Crown does not understand the limits of kāwanatanga, and this has made for a difficult Wānanga-Crown relationship. The price we have paid for the “privilege” of nearly three decades of chronic underfunding has been the requirement to engage in a never-ending, energy-sapping and largely pointless compliance dance. You would not believe the time and money that is expended jumping through often nonsensical Crown hoops. We resist as much as possible, but resisting is labour-intensive and sometimes it is just too hard or too exhausting.

There is nothing unique about our experience. The obstruction of revolutionary Māori initiatives by Crown meddling, posing as support, has been an all too familiar phenomenon during our recent history: other examples that could readily be cited include other Māori education initiatives such as kōhanga reo and kura kaupapa Māori.

So at the top of our claim negotiations agenda is the need to re-set the Wānanga-Crown relationship. We have made it clear that we no longer wish to be a TEI pursuant to the Education Act and we are committed to establishing new arrangements that will better reflect the balance between tino rangatatiratanga and kāwanatanga that was foreshadowed in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The Crown appears to have accepted our argument in principle—so now the really difficult (but exciting) work begins.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that at Te Wānanga o Raukawa we are still faced with choices about which things to resist, which things we can compromise on and whether it is ever in our interest to collaborate. Working at a Wānanga does not make these dilemmas magically disappear because, like everybody else in this settler colony, we are still forced to live and breathe colonialism every day.

However, there are some important differences between working at the Wānanga and working in the university environment. To begin with, we strategise collectively. Rather than finding myself in the situation where one or two Māori staff are pitted against the institution, all staff at the Wānanga work together to figure out how the institution can most effectively challenge the Crown. Moreover, it is generally understood that collaboration is a dirty word and compromise a last resort—it is accepted without question that we should do everything possible to avoid finding ourselves in a situation where either of these is the only option. And finally, resistance is our bottom line, but it is not our target.  We do not want to be defined by Crown expectations—which is what happens if we limit ourselves to resisting. We are actively seeking to move beyond resistance, to proactively imagining and designing our future relationship with kāwanatanga. This is challenging but invigorating work, made possible only by our resolve to make resistance our starting point rather than our end goal.

Coloniser law and mana Māori

I hardly need to tell any of you that when it comes to identifying examples of Crown law that have facilitated the colonial project while undermining mana Māori, we are spoilt for choice. In the nineteenth century we have the endless succession of Native Land Acts, the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863 and the West Coast Peace Preservation Act 1882, to name but a few. During the twentieth century we have the various reiterations of Public Works Acts and yet more Māori land laws, including the infamous 1967 Māori Affairs Amendment Act. More recently we have such measures as the Resource Management Act 1991, which has given rise to the current, ham-fisted attempts to implement Significant Natural Areas under the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity. As recently as 2004 we have the confiscatory Foreshore and Seabed Act and its cynical 2011 successor, the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act.

These examples are quite stark, so it is easy to appreciate how they chip away at mana Māori by explicitly reinforcing colonial power. But it is just as important—probably more so, in fact—to consider examples where the erosion of mana Māori is less obvious. What about the raft of legislation which, like the Resource Management Act, refers explicitly to Māori concepts or to phrases such as the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi? Surely, such laws are seeking to uphold, rather than to diminish, mana Māori? The short answer is a resounding “no”. In the same way that Waikato Law School’s bicultural rhetoric could not change the monocultural nature of the institution, incorporation of Māori words and concepts into pieces of legislation cannot magically disconnect the state legal system from its colonial foundations.

We need look no further than the example of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi to illustrate my point. This phrase was originally included in the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 as part of a misguided but well-intentioned bid to enable the Waitangi Tribunal to perform a miracle by reconciling the differences between Te Tiriti and the Treaty. But the principles of the Treaty have been utilised as a tool of colonialism. They have been rendered into a cluster of nauseatingly mealy-mouthed slogans (such as “the three Ps”) which may seem innocuous at first glance, but which have had the effect of elevating the Treaty while erasing Te Tiriti.

By the Treaty, I mean the English-language document which almost nobody signed but which, crucially for the Crown, cedes sovereignty. By Te Tiriti, of course, I am referring to the Māori-language document which was signed by the overwhelming majority of signatories and which—as the Tribunal itself found in the Paparahi o te Raki report—very clearly did not grant the Crown sovereignty but rather, a carefully curtailed authority (kāwanatanga) to manage its own unruly citizens.^[16] According to Te Tiriti, Māori explicitly retained complete political authority (te tino rangatiratanga) with respect to our own people and indeed to everything in our world, other than those things that we chose to relinquish to the Crown.

The way the principles of the Treaty have been interpreted and applied to inflate kāwanatanga at the expense of tino rangatiratanga cannot be characterised as an unfortunate development that could not have been predicted over forty-five years ago. Far from it. It is a salutary lesson in what happens when you incorporate a phrase like this into colonial law. Rather like inserting a concept such as kaitiakitanga into the Resource Management Act, it results in the appropriation of our concepts by agents of Pākehā law—judges, lawyers and even politicians—who unerringly define or redefine those concepts in accordance with their own assumptions about the natural order of things. And at the heart of those assumptions is the immutability of Crown sovereignty.

Ultimately, of course, distinguishing between law that explicitly undermines mana Māori and law that does so more subtly is to split hairs. Because once you understand that Te Tiriti o Waitangi granted the Crown no more than kāwanatanga—authority to regulate the conduct of British citizens—it becomes clear that all law that emanates from the colonial legal system exceeds the limits of that authority. The very existence of the colonial legal system is a contradiction of mana Māori.

How can Māori lawyers serve as agents of mana-based change?

It probably feels as though I have done nothing but set out a plethora of seemingly intractable problems. Anyone can do that. Finding solutions presents more of a challenge.

So what are the implications of all that I have said for the conference theme of Māori lawyers as agents of mana-based change? Is it even possible for Māori lawyers to fulfil such a role? And if it is, where might you begin?

I wondered initially about suggesting, as a starting point, a kind of lawyerly equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm. But, given that the legal system in which you are working—by the mere fact of its existence—is harmful to mana Māori, such advice would be unachievable and therefore pointless. I certainly do not claim to have all the answers. In the end, the answer I came up with for myself was to leave the law school. But I am not suggesting that leaving is necessarily the solution for everyone. So, for those of you who want to remain, I offer the following thoughts and observations.

The first thing I want to stress is that nothing I have said is intended to come across as judgmental. As I have tried to explain, one of the most soul-destroying features of colonialism is the way it makes all of us complicit in its maintenance, one way or another. None of us are immune from that.

By the same token, lawyers bear a particularly intimate kind of complicity when it comes to sustaining the colonial legal system. It is important to acknowledge this. There is no point trying to deceive ourselves into believing that it is otherwise.

For Māori lawyers, this means that the pros and cons of your every action must be carefully considered, the benefits weighed against the costs. I acknowledge that this is not for the faint-hearted. But there is just no escaping the fact that relentless self-reflection, while exhausting, is necessary. Without it, the potential to do more harm than good is significant. It is the price to be paid if you want to practice with integrity. If nothing else, it encourages humility—a trait not typically associated with the legal profession but one which we would all do well to embrace.

Rather than setting ourselves up to fail by adopting a “do no harm” mantra, some might decide to settle for minimising the harm. Because there is no denying the extraordinary damage done to Māori, collectively and individually, by the state legal system. I know that some of you are both skilled and fearless in your efforts to defend our own from harm at the hands of colonial law. This is important work which can make a huge difference to the lives of Māori individuals, whānau, hapū and iwi.

This approach is a bit like creating zones of safety within a fundamentally unsafe system (like a law school). It is not implausible to argue that anything that creates a better outcome for Māori is worth doing. But if that is the full extent of what we are doing, we need to be honest about that. We should not try to dress it up as anything more than it is.

We must also acknowledge the cost of what we are doing. Because working in this way does nothing to undermine the system as a whole. On the contrary, it makes the system stronger. As Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change”.^[17] So, while it might fairly be regarded as curmudgeonly to disparage our longing to celebrate a “win” from time to time (goodness knows, we could all do with a win once in a while) we must always remain conscious of what the occasional taste of “success” may be costing us in the long run.

If this all sounds rather oppressive and joyless, it is. But, as I am sure many of you have already realised, you are not necessarily constrained to acting according to the internal logic of the colonial legal system. There is nothing stopping you from encouraging your Māori clients to resolve their problems without turning to Pākehā law. There is nothing stopping you from supporting them to regain confidence in and to utilise our own law instead.  I would encourage you to do this whenever you can.

I must add that I say this knowing very well that our own law has been denigrated, neglected and distorted by the agents of colonial law for a long time now. This means that it is not necessarily as simple as telling our people to “go home” or “ask the kaumatua” and then shrug our shoulders when things become too hard, returning to our colonised default setting of assuming that colonial law provides the only realistic answer. We should be willing to go further: what will it take to restore Māori faith in our own law? What role might you play in achieving that outcome?  Are you able to leave your Western legal training and assumptions at the door?

If not, that is not the end of the world. It is not as though you have to play a central role. There are plenty of other ways for you to support the process. A law degree gives you a set of pretty useful skills that you can utilise in whichever way you choose. And of course, it is not as though your law degree represents the sum total of your skills and talents. You have all sorts of other abilities that you can bring to bear on whatever you do.

Which leads me to my final point. A law degree should neither define nor limit you. It does not condemn you to a life sentence of working within the confines of colonial law. But it does give you an intimate knowledge of that law—the kind of intimate knowledge that makes you ideally suited to unravelling it. Take a look around the room and imagine what could happen if we all committed to a collective goal of dismantling the colonial legal system.

Ngā kupu āpiti - Notes

[1] Smith, L Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London & Dunedin: Zed Books & University of Otago Press, 1999) p 24.

[2] Jackson, M “Where to Next? Decolonisation and the Stories in the Land” in Elkington, B et al Imagining Decolonisation (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2020) p 135.

[3] Memmi, A The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan Publications, 2003) p 96.

[4] http://mch.govt.nz, accessed 24/06/2021.

[5] https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/116374482/tuia-250-the-return-of-the-death-ship , accessed 25/06/2021.

[6] This statement was made during an interview with Paul Holmes and broadcast in New Zealand on the Holmes Show. Coincidentally, Haunani-Kay Trask died on the day this address was given: E te rangatira, e te wahine toa, moe mai rā.

[7] St James Gazette, quoted in Paxman, J Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2012), p 215.

[8] Ngata, T Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions (Wellington: Tina Ngata, 2019) pp 58-59.

[9] https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/116374482/tuia-250-the-return-of-the-death-ship , accessed 25/06/2021.

[10] https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/116374482/tuia-250-the-return-of-the-death-ship

[11] Tina Ngata quotes from Cook’s journal where he confesses to having shot and killed a number of unarmed people who were fishing, not because they posed any threat but because “when we was once a long side of them we must either have stud to be knockd on the head or else retire and let them gone off in triumph and this last they would of course have attributed to their own bravery and our timouressness”. She goes on to conclude that “Cook’s decision to carry out this mass murder was not at all an act of self-defence—but merely one to exercise their superiority, so that the victims were not to think that they were in any way superior”: Ngata, T Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions (Wellington: Rebel Press, 2019) p 66.

[12] By 1991 it had just 40 students.

[13] Education Act 1989, section 162(2) and section 162(4)(b)(iv).

[14] Waitangi Tribunal, The Wananga Capital Establishment Report (Wai 718) (Wellington, 1999).

[15] The Te Wānanga o Raukawa Whakatupu Mātauranga claim (Wai 2698), lodged December 2017.

[16] Waitangi Tribunal, Te Paparahi o Te Raki Report (Wai 1040) 2014, p 528.

[17] Lorde, A The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf: accessed 9/9/2021

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