Still with me?
Yesterday, I gave a potted history of Pakeha-Maori relations in NZ, organized around the Treaty of Waitangi. Today I'm going to give some thoughts on Chapter 1 as I work on this book review.
A note on the title of the post. Maori have a saying that you spend your life walking backwards because you can see the past but not the future
Byrnes is nothing if not clear up front about her argument:
The book has two main arguments. The first is that the Tribunal is not engaged in writing objective history, but one that is deeply political and overwhelmingly focused on the present .... The second argument is that the historical narratives produced by the Waitangi Tribunal have strong postcolonial tendencies.
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Tribunal history, as with the efforts of many other commissions and judicial bodies to rewrite history, is a noble but ultimately flawed experiment.
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the published reports of the Waitangi Tribunal have fundamental problems if viewed as scholarly academic history .... the flaws and weaknesses of these reports are a direct result of the Tribunal's statutory jurisdiction ...
Byrnes makes a distinction early on between the history of the Treaty developed by the Tribunal, and the way the Tribunal uses history.
She also says that for some tribes the process of presenting claims to the government has punctuated the experience of all generations since the 1880s. In that sense, the elongation of the claims resolution process is of no great question to some Maori as they see it as part of the partnership with the Crown. Be that as it may, public opinion polls in NZ show that the majority of the population would be comfortable with some form of fixed end date for the claims process. Governments, National or Labour, tread carefully round this for they must balance respecting a contractual agreement (the Treaty) with popular support. Not for the last time, the Treaty claims process pits two liberal principles against each other, with no easy resolution of the dilemma.
A strength of the first chapter is that it presents a clear definition of "postcolonialism," but also makes the argument for why people outside the academy should care about the concept.
In Byrnes' words postcolonialism is "a critical engagement with the aftermath of colonisation ....an attitude, rather than an epoch. It is a perspective that ... seeks to undermine the structures, ideologies, and institutions that gave colonisation meaning ..."
Byrnes draws parallels and contrasts with other historical commissions and enquiries outside New Zealand, finding most similarity (unsurprisingly) with the processes for first nations peoples in Canada, where treaties give claimants something specific and legal to structure their grievances around (7-8)
But she points out some pretty important differences;
The Tribunal has produced a sizeable ouevre, and that in itself has probably discouraged many people from undertaking a close reading of its work. Byrnes restricts herself to the 'historical' reports produced by the new Tribunal (post-1985). In the last few years, however, historians have started to engage with the reports produced by the Tribunal.
Perhaps the most damning, coming from a long-time participant in the process, was from W.H. Oliver who argued that the Tribunal was creating a "retrospective utopian history ... a history of what the Crown should have and could have don, but did not .... Rhetorical gestures towards timeless truths--and the appeal to timelessness to disarm dissent and bypass exegesis--will not dispel the suspicion that the Crown and its agents are being short-changed, primarily by insisting that they should, in the larger issues of policy and administration, have heeded rules of which they were unaware and performed tasks which would never have occurred to them."
Oliver also points out the paradox that the Tribunal cannot condemn the state too much, as it is a creation of that state and relies upon it to implement the Tribunal's recommendations. Therefore, it resorts to the trick of condemning the consequences of colonisation, and maintaining that colonisation could have been better managed in substantial areas.
Oliver's critique is significant because he remains largely sympathetic to the political aims of ensuring that the contractual obligations of the Treaty are lived to, and the breaches restored. So, and she makes this very clear, is Giselle Byrnes. Yet both end up being deeply, and constructively, critical of the histories produced by the Tribunal.
As I mentioned in the conclusion to yesterday's discussion, the place of the Treaty in New Zealand society has become part of the present political debate. Yet the Treaty is a relatively thin document on which to base a constitutional settlement. Hence the Court mandated reference to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.
But the principles that animated the signers of the Treaty cannot be completely recovered; we are adding our own interpretations to them in the present, yet trying to give them legitimacy by grounding them in the past. This is appropriate for a nation that was not founded in a Revolution, but was instead founded by those Britons who had absorbed the lessons of the American Revolution. While F.M. Brookfield may argue that the British assumption of power in New Zealand was a revolutionary act, it can, in other ways be viewed as a rather conservative undertaking.
In any event, the dispute over the place of the Treaty in New Zealand politics seems likely to be sustained for a while, for several reasons.
The first, as I've noted above, is the rather thin foundation the Treaty provides, combined with the belief by many (both Maori and Pakeha) that the Treaty is a sufficient foundation for an enduring constitutional settlement.
No one, not even Don Brash, who's raised all those questions but won't front up with an answer, has seriously proposed some complementary constitutional document. The British legacy of a cobbled-together informal constitution persists. Moreover, the Treaty reflects the balance of power that existed between the British crown and Maori in the 1840s, when they were more equal. Maori would not get such a good deal today.
The second is that resolving some of the issues posed by the Treaty requires explicitly trading off some agreeable principles for others. That is, there are compromises all around to be made. Referring to the "principles of the Treaty of Waitangi" without actually ever saying concretely and concisely what they are is a symbol of this evasion all around.
Moreover, to give assent to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi might actually mean cutting against other principles which have become important in New Zealand society.
The main conflict is that the Treaty has been established as a valid contractual document, and adhering to agreements that have been made in good faith all around is regarded as a good idea.
But there is also the classical liberal position that people should be treated equally regardless of their race. This is a position which many people in New Zealand would agree.
In the New Zealand context there's little hope of holding both positions simultaneously, not without a lot of cognitive dissonance.
There are also the liberal, and somewhat republican, principles that
(1) political rights are not given to groups, but to individual citizens, and (2) that rights and privileges are non-hereditary, but the entitlement of every citizen in the country (unless they renounce their citizenship or commit some crime). Such universal statements of political rights animate the American constitution. While they aren't written down in New Zealand politics, their influence can be discerned.
Even if we were to admit of group rights to political representation for Maori, defining who is in and out of that group becomes a little problematic in practice. The Treaty as a contract was signed between the British Crown and independent Maori tribes. There was, it is clear, no sense in which the different Maori tribes regarded themselves as a nation in the modern sense, though some Maori 'nationalism' was inchoate in 1840.
So, you might think that you could reach some form of political and constitutional settlement that involved the tribes as corporate or political bodies. Unfortunately, many (probably most) Maori no longer identify with a single tribe, being able to trace their ancestry to multiple tribes. And Maori have not remained a distinct ethnic group -- their rate of exogamy is well over 70%, so that most people with some Maori heritage also have European heritage too.
All of these principles are, by themselves, uncontroversial in a modern democracy like New Zealand. Set alongside the Treaty they point to some uncomfortable compromises, which no-one likes making, not on a three year electoral cycle.
Posted by robe0419 at August 24, 2004 02:05 PM | TrackBack