Monthly Archives: August 2024

How to win the argument that Maori ceded sovereignty

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ɴᴢ ᴍᴇᴅɪᴀ ᴡᴀᴛᴄʜ
@nz_media_watch
How to win the argument that Maori ceded sovereignty Q1. Was the main purpose of Te Tiriti o Waitangi for Maori to cede sovereignty to Queen Victoria? A1: Yes. It is clearly stated in the Maori, English and translated versions of the Treaty such as: Article 1 The chiefs of the Confederation of the United Tribes and the other chiefs who have not joined the confederation, cede to the Queen of England for ever the entire Sovereignty of their country. Article 3 In return for the cession of the Sovereignty to the Queen, the people of New Zealand shall be protected by the Queen of England and the rights and privileges of British subjects will be granted to them. Copies of the Treaty can be viewed here: nzmediawatch.com/Treaty_of_Wait Q2: Did the Maori chiefs understand the meaning of sovereignty? A2: Yes. Documented and verified historical evidence shows that Maori understood the meaning of sovereignty in the Treaty. For example, at the signing of the Treaty on February 5th, 1840 missionary William Colenso made detailed notes of the meeting. Endorsement of Colenso’s authenticity is the fact that the Māori Council in 1987 used his record of the speeches to validate their claims. Here’s some quotes affirming that Maori understood the meaning of sovereignty: Hoani Heke – chief of the Matarahurahu Tribe: “Yes, it is not for us, but for you, our fathers – you missionaries – it is for you to say, to decide, what it shall be.” Tamati Waka Nene – chief of the Ngatihao Tribe: “I, Tamati Waka say to thee, sit. Do not thou go away from us: remain for us – a father, a judge, a peacemaker” Later, in 1858, Hōne Heke’s tribe (Ngāpuhi) re-erected the flagpole at Russell, that he was famous for cutting down, and said: “We have a Queen, Queen Victoria. Which is what we agreed to in the Treaty”. At the 1860 Kohimarama conference in Auckland these Maori validated that they ceded sovereignty by stating: Wikiriwhi Matehonoa of Ngati Porou: “We are all under the sovereignty of the Queen” Horomona Toremi of Ngati Raukawa in Otaki: “You over there (the Pakehas) are the only chiefs… Let there be one word for all this land”. Tamati Waka Nene, one of the leaders who signed at Waitangi, said: “I know no sovereign but the Queen, and I never shall know any other. I am walking by the side of the Pakeha”. More info here: bassettbrashandhide.com/post/dr-lawrie Q3: There were over 80,000 Maori and only around 2,000 settlers. Why would Maori cede sovereignty? A3: There are many reasons such as: 1. Northern Maori were afraid that the Southern tribes would come and slaughter them for Utu – because the Northern tribes had previously slaughtered the Southern tribes. 2. Maori were afraid of the French: “We have heard that the tribe of Marian [the French] is at hand, coming to take away our land”. 3. With the advent of whalers, traders, sailors and settlers disease was decimating Maori at around 4,000 deaths a year. There was a strong possibility that Maori could become extinct if something wasn’t done. New Zealand had no law and had become very dangerous. Maori wanted the English to bring their technology and governance to fix it. View our video about it here: x.com/nz_media_watch Finally, though some might say that the 2014 Waitangi Tribunal findings that “in February 1840 the rangatira who signed te Tiriti did not cede their sovereignty”, that is just opinion and not based on verifiable historic evidence. Only the Maori version of the Treaty should be used to determine its meaning because Captain Hobson, as requested by Queen Victoria, stated that the Maori Tiriti o Waitangi was the true agreement and that all other copies “… and all signatures that are subsequently obtained are merely testimonials of adherence to the terms of that original document” which is Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Reference: McQueen, Ewen (2020). One Sun in the Sky: The untold story of sovereignty and the Treaty of Waitangi. First Edition. New Zealand: Benefitz Ltd.

The Musket Wars: A History of Inter-Iwi Conflict 1806 – 1845 Part 2

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“In contrast to the pre-(European) contact days, when casualties might be measured in dozens and there were always survivors among the vanquished, now those same casualties might number hundreds, or, in a few dramatic instances, thousands.” In a nutshell, the introduction of muskets by Europeans led to an imbalance of power in 19th Century New Zealand: the Maori’s hand-held weapons were no match for the gun’s ability to kill quickly, from a long distance and at inflicting a far higher number of killed and wounded. Iwi (tribes) in Te Tai Tokerau (Northland) were the first to get their hands on the new weapons and conduct wide-sweeping taua (raids), which eventually led to iwi across the nation desperately trading flax and other resources in order to upgrade their ammunition. The resulting warfare claimed tens of thousands of lives, estimates vary between 20–60,000, killing, wounding or displacing up to half the Maori population as refugees; it exceeded the casualty figures of the later New Zealand Wars; it disrupted mana, land ownership and resources. The Musket Wars also had far-reaching consequences: desirable tracts of land that had been vacated because of the wars became the first locations to be purchased by the New Zealand Company and occupied by the early British settlers. The Musket Wars took place between 1807-1845 resulting in the most turbulent period of war in New Zealand’s history. These weapons were introduced by whalers and sealers, missionaries and timber traders and traders in flax. The first iwi to acquire muskets were those in Northland, predominately the Ngapuhi. Between 1818 and 1825 they and their cohorts swept aside the top half of the North Island. Much of the surface mythology soon gets swiftly dispatched and moves on to chronicle the stories of slaughter and slavery from the many warring tribes. Tales of women and children being tied to the back of waka (large scale war canoes) until drowned, as well as stories of children being murdered then eaten in front of their parents, none of this makes for easy reading. The sheer extent of savagery, torture and cruelty that Maori of one tribe inflicted on another, along with the sadism of occasional grave and corpse desecration to take the humiliation of vanquished enemies to the maximum is a full-on exposé of the fact that Maori never were an innocent race. No race ever has been. During the Musket Wars they continued to make slaves of the conquered in the tens of thousands. Identity political Marxist Maori today, the par-Maori descendants of these islands first Polynesian colonisers, base their never-ending grievance politics on the premise it is Critical Social Justice to hold alleged race-based hate crimes of the civilising British 200 years ago against the white New Zealanders of today, who include, but are not exclusively the descendants of the British. Given this is their standard viewpoint, it is reasonable that the par-Maori of today should also be held accountable for their ancestors’ many crimes against humanity, including slavery. It was part of Maori culture, no less despicable than most other cultures. And of course the reasonable moral standard to hold historical figures to is the best moral standard available to them in their time. Not contemporary standards. The details of the many atrocities that occurred during the Musket wars is very confronting stuff and reveals that the fiercely tribal Maori of pre first European contact times were a warlike people most definitely far more relentlessly violent, inhumane and unforgiving to each other, their feudalistic vendetta based justice and bloodthirsty cannibal feasts was far more brutal than anything the British newcomers of the 1800s ever inflicted on them. But the true significance of the Musket Wars goes well beyond the terrible inhumanities, death and destruction they caused. By the time the treaty was signed in 1840, Maori society had been turned on its head; […]

The Musket Wars: A History of Inter-Iwi Conflict 1806 – 1845

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The Musket Wars: A History of Inter-Iwi Conflict 1806 – 1845  Ron Crosby First published by Reed in 1999, with an introduction by Michael King, The Musket Wars established Ron Crosby’s reputation as a daring, original chronicler of New Zealand history. This best-selling history provides the first comprehensive account of the wars that ravaged the country in the early 1800s, when iwi with newly acquired muskets unleashed terrible utu (revenge) on foes, helped by other introductions like potatoes that fuelled long-range taua (war parties). Ron Crosby weaves the strands of this conflict into an immensely readable narrative, guiding the reader through its complexities with lists of protagonists, a chronology, indexes and above all, superb maps and illustrations. New Zealand history writing in recent years has been obsessed with the Treaty of Waitangi and the Maori grievances that followed. It has been dominated by Europeans offloading their guilt about the real or alleged wrongs of colonialism. The tenor of the writings has been:  (1) Maori society was peaceful and unified until the arrival of British sovereignty; (2) Maori were hoodwinked into signing the treaty; and  (3) everything that happened after the treaty was to the detriment of Maoridom. The pre-treaty period has barely rated a mention, especially the period from 1806 when muskets first fell into Maori hands and became the currency of tribal power. James Belich’s wide-ranging book, Making Peoples, mentions the musket wars in passing in an otherwise revisionist look at New Zealand history. Most historians haven’t bothered. It has been up to Ron Crosby, an Auckland-born lawyer practising in Marlbor-ough, to put this great historiographic oversight right and he has done so in splendid style. The Musket Wars is not simply an account of the bloodiest period of New Zealand inter-tribal warfare but an historical indulgence well written and superbly illustrated – a book on par with The New Zealand Wars: A History of Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period, James Cowan’s two-volume classic published in the 1920s (dealing with the European-Maori wars). The introduction of the musket changed Maori society forever. Warfare, a traditional feature of Maori life, was transformed literally at the barrel of the musket. Those tribes fortunate enough to trade with Europeans and acquire guns achieved a military advantage well beyond anything traditional weapons could offer. Not only could the musket take lives at a distance and more quickly than in the past but the cost was many times higher. No one knows exactly how many Maori were victims of the Musket Wars but as many as 60,000 are thought to have been killed, enslaved or become refugees forced to migrate. The Maori population of New Zealand in 1810 has been estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000 so the impact of the wars in terms of straight casualties, depopulation and iwi cleansing was far worse than the fate suffered by Kosovar Albanians at the hands of Serbia. Torture, brutality, slavery and cannibalism were features of Maori warfare before the arrival of the musket; the white men’s guns simply lifted the scale and ferocity several notches. It is legitimate to talk about genocide and the Musket Wars in the same breath because the new weapons created a military imbalance that had never before been a part of Polynesian warfare. The North Taranaki invasion of the Chatham Islands in 1835 and the destruction of the peaceful Moriori inhabitants is but one of numerous examples of musket-led genocide. Historian Michael King, an expert on the Chathams, notes in The Musket Wars’ introduction: “The disproportionately lethal effect [of muskets] on opponents who lacked them upset the balance of pre-European tribal life and took a terrible toll. […]