ANALYSIS: The crowd was smaller, the Prime Minister was absent and, one year after the jubilation of 2024, the mood at Waitangi felt strikingly different.
Words and photographs: John Campbell
Yesterday morning, Waitangi Day, just after the dawn ceremony, I was walking across the famous lawn at the Treaty Grounds, wondering how to tell the story of this year’s Waitangi in its complexity and its desperate need of the c word, context, when I met Pou and Donna Te Rongomau.
We started talking. And after a minute or two, I asked them if I could record what they were saying.
Donna was shy about being recorded, but Pou didn’t mind.
We’d been discussing the political pōwhiri, on Wednesday, and what was for some (many?) at Waitangi the confusing and challenging business of welcoming David Seymour, when his Treaty Principles Bill has been described by the Prime Minister as “divisive”, and in that division many of the people I spoke to at Waitangi vehemently oppose the Bill, as if, as one woman told me after watching David Seymour walk past her on Wednesday afternoon, “it’s a slap in the face of generations of us. Past, present and future.”
This is what Pou Te Rongomau said, as we stood on the hill looking out to the Bay of Islands and the Pacific.
“As I look across the ocean, we see people coming and we gotta manaaki them… lead them in, guide them. You know, when you see lights bringing people in from the ocean, that’s Manaaki… And I think that’s what we need to do. Even in support of ideas we don’t like. That’s really significant at a place like this, Waitangi… No matter if we don’t like them, you know, we gotta pray for them. We gotta love them.”
In the hour or two that followed, before I started writing this, I précised Pou to as many people as I could, asking them whether that’s what they thought manaakitanga required of them.
And the answers, which spanned an entirely human continuum, made me realise the pressure some (many?) Māori must feel under. Not only to respond to David Seymour, but to do so consistent with manaakitanga and the immense scrutiny Māori protest is always placed under.
Love in the time of the Treaty Principles Bill
It was, to misquote a phrase much loved by rugby commentators, a Waitangi of two halves.
Wednesday felt like the morning (mourning?) after.
Following last year’s often joyful energy, declaratory purpose, and proud kotahitanga, this February 5th felt strikingly different, and saw significantly fewer people attend – including the Prime Minister, who chose instead to be in the Canterbury township of Akaroa, once the centre of unrealised French dreams of some form of colonial beachhead.
After the huge crowds of February 5th last year, after Tame Iti’s Haki Ātea, with its white flags advancing up the hill and across the lawn like giant albatross searching for lost land, after the “be Māori” exhortations of Kingi Tūheitia in January, which had carried into Waitangi and made people feel airborne, on this February 5th, the day on which the politicians came to Waitangi, the absence of people was so striking that someone asked me, “where the hell is everyone, John?”
I asked other people the same thing. The general conclusion, expressed in terms that ranged from ennui, to exhaustion, to sadness, to anger, was that everybody was “over it”.
It?
“It should never have come to this,” Hōne Sadler told me. By “this”, he meant the Treaty Principles Bill going to Select Committee.
We sat together under the canopy that protects people from the intense northern sun as they listen to speakers outside Waitangi’s beautifully carved meeting house, Te Whare Rūnanga.
It was Wednesday afternoon. The pōwhiri for politicians was over. Almost everyone else had left. There were empty bottles everywhere – water, but they suited the morning after vibe.
Hōne Pereki Sadler (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Moerewa), author, academic, teacher, has such a deep understanding of this place and its history that when he tells you the people here “strategised” their response to the politicians arriving, you wish you’d been a fly on the wall.
I almost had been. On Tuesday evening, as a high-powered group huddled on tightly configured chairs outside the meeting house, their voices rising and falling as voices do when ideas are being tested and scored, it was apparent something was being planned.
“We had to get some strategies together to ensure that we were ready for the game,” Hōne Sadler told me. “And what we did today was what we had strategised. And I think we played the game really well.”
The game?
The game, of course, was politics.
The game was what my TVNZ colleague Maiki Sherman was alluding to, when she pointed out that when the microphone was removed from Seymour as he spoke on Wednesday, he still had a mic of his own attached to his lapel – for Act Party social media videos.
The game was Christopher Luxon in Akaroa.
The game was Shane Jones seemingly wanting to prescribe the acceptable limits of protest, and appearing to suggest funding might be contingent upon it.
The game was Labour leader Chris Hipkins stating, “Responsible political leaders light the path forward, they don’t exploit division and fear that comes from the fear that uncertainty creates,” two decades after Labour Prime Minister, Helen Clark, had called the foreshore and seabed hikoi leaders, “haters and wreckers”.
The game, the game, the game. And how to respond to it.
‘More light than heat’
I raised this, on Wednesday morning, with Pita Tipene, Chair of the Waitangi National Trust. It was four hours before the political pōwhiri. Before Seymour and Jones arrived.
Pita Tipene was there early, to appear on Breakfast. Afterwards, he warmly greeted the Māori Wardens who’d arrived similarly early, their manaakitanga such a shining feature of being at Waitangi that each year’s reunion is one of the highlights of my visits there.
I asked him about the balancing act.
On the one hand, Seymour is a guest, and manaakitanga (hospitality, kindness, respect) is central to how the people who oversee Waitangi believe it should engage with the world. On the other hand, he’s the author of the Treaty Principles Bill.
How do you get that right? Manaakitanga and tikanga (customary behaviour) preserved and applied, alongside a widespread desire to reject the Bill in unequivocal terms?
“Waitangi National Trust, working with Ngāti Rāhiri, the local hapū, the people of Ngāpuhi, we have a responsibility to manaaki people. That’s really stretched at the moment”, Tipene told me. “So we want to uphold our tikanga, our customs, and we want to encourage debate. That’s why we’re here. Te Tiriti of Waitangi and the promise. We want much more light than heat, though.”
Light? Heat?
“I’m confident that the people of Ngāpuhi, we’re all of one mind, and that we’re going to express ourselves appropriately.”
Were they of one mind?
Not completely, perhaps. As Aperahama Edwards removing Seymour’s microphone, twice, and Waihoroi Shortland returning it, twice, suggested.
“We’d made our point”, Waihoroi Shortland told me, immediately afterwards. “And in doing so, we’d won.”
The game.
In the unleashed heat of Wednesday afternoon, I met Awhina, Shaia, Whero and Tukua. They’re waiata tautoko, kapa haka and pōwhiri performers at the Treaty Grounds, whose skills and energy are much in demand during Waitangi week.
How were they going?
“Exhausted!” Awhina replied.
And then Awhina added, “Happy to see my Māori come together again. One more time.”
They talked about their pride in being strongly connected to Māoritanga and te reo Māori. That they were “fortunate enough” to grow up in an environment where those things were available to them.
“We’re building a path for the next generation to come.”
I asked them to tell people who’ve never been to Waitangi, what you get when you come here for the first time.
“Heatstroke,” Whero said. And they laughed again.
And then she told me the best thing about coming to Waitangi was that it helped you understand Te Titiri.
“When you’re here and you learn about it, it really makes sense.”
I asked them about the Treaty Principles Bill and Seymour.
“I think it’s just in the Māori nature to manaaki.”
As we spoke, it struck me, as it has many times in recent years, that those so often repeated lines from the Allen Curnow poem, eight decades old now, really do apply, strikingly, to the generation being called the “kura kids”.
“Not I, some child born in a marvellous year / Will learn the trick of standing upright here.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Ngā wai hono i te po was welcomed on to Waitangi, for the first time as Māori queen.
She’s 27. Māori is her first language. She has a Masters degree in Tikanga Māori. She is so acclaimed at kapa haka, she teaches it.
Hana Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke was there with the Kīngitanga party. She of the Parliamentary protest haka that has now been viewed, globally, somewhere in the region of a billion times.
I walked with her for a while, but she can’t go further than a metre without being stopped for a selfie.
She is 22.
In her maiden speech to Parliament, she addressed young people: “Never fit in. You are perfect. You are the perfect fit. To our tamariki, your reo is whispering for you. To the tamariki Māori who have been sitting in the back of their classroom their whole life, whakamā, waiting generations, longing to learn their native tongue, to the tamariki who haven’t been to their pepeha yet, it is waiting for you with open arms.”
Much has been made of Seymour’s microphone being removed at Waitangi, but slightly less of the fact that when he arrived for the pōwhiri, a group of mostly younger people who were gathered on the Treaty Grounds, turned their backs on him and walked off down the hill.
Many were from the Toitū Te Tiriti movement. The people behind last year’s hikoi – the largest march on Parliament in this country’s history.
Which brings us to the second half of this Waitangi of two halves. The way, on the day itself, February 6th, free, largely, from the weight of establishment politics, very many more people arrived, and the day blossomed into a kind of celebration.
After the politicians had left on Wednesday, I spoke to Tipene, again, Chair of the Waitangi National Trust. I wanted to know how he thought it had gone.
“All in all a great pōwhiri… I was inspired by some of the speeches”, he told me.
I asked him who, in particular? He named Hipkins.
I asked him what he thought of Seymour’s speech.
“I didn’t really hear it,” he said. Deadpan. “I think David Seymour said some things that taunted the people, and hence the reaction… The removal of the microphone… People turning their backs… People singing a waiata. I tried to listen, but I really couldn’t hear him.”
Of course, Seymour, wearing his own microphone, being filmed by his own social media team, was heard by some people, largely outside Waitangi. People who voted for him. People who support the Treaty Principles Bill. People who watch his videos.
And there it is, posted to Act New Zealand’s YouTube page, receiving more than 40,000 viewings in its first 24 hours, and with more than 1000 comments, overwhelmingly positive.
The game.
It was all very “intentional”, my TVNZ colleague, Mariana Whareaitu, a Te Ao Māori digital producer, said to me, as we looked back on the pōwhiri on Wednesday afternoon.
And it had been.
The strategising Hōne Sadler told me about. The backs turned. The people exiting as Seymour arrived.
Seymour, himself, speaking at the occasion, yes, but beyond it, too, To a YouTube audience whose comments suggest they may never attend Waitangi in person.
The striking of poses. The taking of sides.
The change in mood
But on Waitangi Day itself, something else became apparent. A kindness.
Everywhere you went on the Treaty Grounds, and below them, down amongst the hustle and bustle of the Forum Tent meetings, and the food stalls, and the people swimming from the beach, and the first-time-at-Waitangi families having picnics, and the Waitangi veterans sagely comparing this to other years, everywhere, people were smiling.
“The wairua from the hikoi has carried through,” Tipene told me.
Or perhaps it was the manaakitanga Pou Te Rongomau insists we must shine like a beacon from our shore.
Wandering, again, I met Renata van der Wal, aged 25, and Hana Wood, aged 18.
They were, they told me, two of 120 people who’d come to Waitangi with the Karuwhā Trust, a registered charity, set up in 2005, with the purpose of getting young New Zealanders to Waitangi during Treaty commemorations, so they can learn more about the country’s history.
“We are serving at the marae”, van der Wal told me. “We’ve been cleaning the wharepaku down there and helping out in the kitchen, doing those kind of things.”
It was Hana’s first time at Waitangi.
“I’m absolutely in awe, and just soaking everything in. Just being here. I’ve been speechless. It’s been an incredible gift.”
They told me the trust’s name was a reference to a man called Henry Williams, a missionary, who’d arrived in the country in 1823, three years before his brother, William, joined him.
Keen observers of our history will know that among the things the Williams brothers translated into te reo Māori were the Bible, in William’s case, and the Treaty of Waitangi, in Henry’s case.
Yes, the actual Treaty of Waitangi, as signed on February 6th 1840, at Waitangi, only in Māori not in English by all the rangatira there that day, with its guarantee of “tino rangatiratanga”.
(The Trust’s name, Karuwhā, was after the handle Māori had bestowed upon Henry Williams, who wore spectacles – it translates as “four eyes”.)
And here’s where things get rather wonderfully strange.
Because the people in the photo below are Nigel Williams, and his daughter Emma Williams and his son Martin Williams. And Karuwhā’s brother, William, was Nigel’s great-great-grandfather, and Emma and Martin’s great-great-great grandfather.
And they were at Waitangi, too.
Buyer’s remorse
I asked Nigel, Emma and Martin what they think Henry Williams might have made of the Treaty Principles Bill and its impact on the status of the Treaty that he translated.
And Emma Williams told me that it wasn’t just the translation itself, it was that Henry explained to the chiefs at Waitangi what he’d translated, what they were signing, and what he believed it meant.
Watch John Campbell’s interview with Nigel, Emma and Martin on TVNZ+
And then William joined him, and the fluent te reo Māori speaking brothers travelled the country explaining to rangatira what they were putting their signature to.
And they believed the Treaty would be honoured. And they told Māori that.
“And we’re really here today,” Martin told me, “to stand up for Henry and William, to ensure that the bargain, as explained and promised to Māori in that way, at that time, is honoured today. And we’re really concerned that it isn’t being (honoured), through what’s happening right now through the Treaty Principles Bill.”
“We just believe a contract was made”, Emma Williams added. A contract about “partnership”.
So concerned are they, that 160 members of the Williams family have signed a submission against the Treaty Principles Bill.
“We can’t stand by and have liars made of the missionaries and the promises that were made at that time,” Martin Williams said.
“The Treaty Principles Bill is like this giant act of buyer’s remorse, let’s renegotiate the deal, we don’t like it anymore.
“You can’t do that.”
Can you?
David Seymour would probably say emphatically that that’s not what he’s doing.
But beyond the “game”, Waitangi gives history flesh.
You arrive at Waitangi for the dawn service in darkness so complete that you sometimes can’t see where you’re going as you walk the last stretch to the Treaty Grounds.
And as you drive from Paihia, along beside the ocean, looking up to where the Treaty was signed on February 6th 1840, you can see the headlights of the even earlier cars, as they head down from the top of the hill.
They’re strikingly bright against the darkness. Pointing out, out, as if to somewhere not yet charted.
Like Pou Te Rongomau’s sense of manaakitanga.
The light we shine to bring people home and keep people safe.
Even in the future.
