T. Melanie Puka Bean, an assistant professor at the University of Utah, is a New Zealand-born tagata Tokelau. (Photo supplied.)
Tokelau is New Zealand’s last and only remaining colony, and this month marks 100 years of that imperial relationship. While the relationship continues to be framed by Tokelau leaders as a “partnership”, the reality is somewhat different, writes Melanie Puka Bean, an assistant professor at the University of Utah.
Most people don’t think twice when I tell them that Tokelau is a territory of New Zealand. Having grown up with Tokelau and New Zealand’s political relationship as the context for so many of my family’s realities, neither did I for most of my life.
Both of my parents were sent to New Zealand in the 1970s, as 10-year-olds, to attend schools in the Wairarapa under a scholarship programme funded by the New Zealand government. From as early as I can remember, our lives in New Zealand were shaped by a narrative in which my parents, and Tokelau more broadly, were the beneficiaries of a benevolent colonial government seeking to improve Tokelau’s future.
It’s only after a great deal of study and conversations with others that I’ve come to realise that this political reality is a distortion of many things.
That includes how New Zealanders understand the New Zealand empire — if they even know about it at all — and its impact on the relationships between the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific, including Māori from Aotearoa and the Cook Islands, Niueans, and tagata Tokelau.
Most New Zealanders know something about the settlement of Aotearoa by Europeans and the ongoing consequences of settler colonialism. But relatively few know how or why people from Tokelau, Niue, or the Cook Islands came to live in New Zealand as part of its Realm.
February this year marks 100 years of Tokelau’s imperial relationship with New Zealand since annexation in 1926. And while the relationship continues to be framed by Tokelau leaders as a “partnership”, the reality is very different.
Melanie with her brother, Antonio, in Atafu, Tokelau, in 1999, when the Puka family lived there for a year. (Photo supplied)
How Tokelau became ‘part of New Zealand’
Tokelau historically comprises four atolls, located just south of the equator, about 500km north of Sāmoa, spanning approximately 350km of ocean.
One of those atolls, Olohega, has since been lost to us (more on that later), so Tokelau now officially comprises three atolls: Atafu, Fakaofo, and Nukunonu.
Although each atoll has its own identity and characteristics, they’ve maintained political and marital relations throughout history. This history, including the importance of Olohega (also known as Swains Island), is well-remembered by Tokelauans.
How did Tokelau become New Zealand’s last and now only colony?
Let’s go back to 1916, when the British annexed the Tokelau Islands, then known as the Union Islands, and incorporated them into the colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (now Kiribati and Tuvalu).
Ten years later, in February 1926, the UK handed the administration of Tokelau to New Zealand, which it then delegated to the High Commission of Western Sāmoa. In 1948, Tokelau became “a part of New Zealand” by way of the Tokelau Act 1948, which formally transferred sovereignty from the UK to New Zealand and granted New Zealand citizenship to Tokelauans.
At that time, Olohega was still recognised as part of Tokelau, but its status was complicated.
Politically, the island is a US territory and has been privately owned by one family since 1856. The record of how it came to be owned by Eli Hutchinson Jennings, an American whaler, is murky at best, as journalist Laray Polk sets out in this paper. Jennings was responsible for the near destruction of Tokelau when he helped Peruvian blackbirders raid the other three Tokelau atolls in 1863.
The current reality is that Olohega is inaccessible to tagata Tokelau. In 1925, it was annexed by the United States as part of American Sāmoa. Tagata Tokelau on the island became US nationals. In 1953, the island’s inhabitants were evicted by the Jennings family to American Sāmoa. Most of them, and their descendants, have since made homes elsewhere, in Hawai‘i and the continental US.
Although Olohega remains historically, geographically and culturally part of Tokelau, there’s little chance of Tokelau reclaiming it, thanks to the 1980 Treaty of Tokehega signed by New Zealand and the US, which cemented the American claim to Olohega and its tuna-rich exclusive economic zone. Many Tokelauans are still aggrieved by the treaty, which they feel was forced on them by New Zealand, under heavy diplomatic pressure from Washington.
Tagata Tokelau in New Zealand
Tagata Tokelau born in Tokelau are automatically New Zealand citizens who hold New Zealand passports. Those who meet the age eligibility requirements qualify to draw on superannuation, even if they are normally resident in Tokelau. The right to vote in New Zealand general elections doesn’t automatically follow, unless one of the additional living requirements is met. Tagata Tokelau living in Tokelau aren’t required to pay taxes to the New Zealand government on their income.
One of the lasting legacies of Tokelau’s relationship with New Zealand is its loss of population and capacity, through both the resettlement and Tokelau scholarship schemes.
Today, around 8,600 people of Tokelauan descent live in New Zealand, while only 2,500 live in Tokelau.
Both the resettlement and scholarship policies, enacted in the postwar period, resulted in hundreds of tagata Tokelau being relocated to New Zealand for work and education. From 1963-65, the New Zealand government trialled assisted migration to New Zealand for young, unmarried people to help meet the labour demand of the postwar boom. This was formalised in 1966 as the Resettlement Scheme, where the New Zealand government offered grants to families to relocate, mostly to Taupō and Rotorua so that the men could work in the forestry industry.
By 1976, when the resettlement scheme was suspended, 528 tagata Tokelau had been resettled. Many moved to urban centres, notably Porirua and Auckland. The Tokelau Scholarship Scheme, at least in its first formalised arrangement, operated from 1963 to 1982. During that time, 186 Tokelau students were sent to New Zealand on scholarships. Before this, scholarship children were sent to (Western) Sāmoa and American Sāmoa for formal education.
It seems the resettlement scheme was intended to be permanent for families, and that Tokelau understood this. As the 1966 Hansard record shows, the New Zealand government’s position was that maintaining a population on Tokelau wasn’t feasible. Its intention was to depopulate Tokelau entirely because of the administrative costs of running it as a colony, as well as concerns about cyclone activity in 1966.
The scholarship scheme, however, wasn’t so transparently an effort to relocate families. Instead, the purported purpose was to enable children to seek specialised knowledge from the outside world and then return to help improve life in their villages.
My parents were two such students, sent out at the age of 10 to schools in the Wairarapa. My father has often used the phrase “He mafua ma tamaiti” to describe his understanding of his responsibility as a scholarship recipient. The literal meaning is: “The children must be fed.” It was understood as a kind of mission instruction to the students — to go out and “catch the fish and return to the village”.
Those in the villages held high hopes that students would return as trained professionals who would uplift their people, but many were disappointed by the relatively low rate of return. This was what the villages were promised during the development of the scheme, but despite New Zealand’s willingness to facilitate the departure of Tokelau’s most promising, no effort was made to encourage their return.
While there’s no substantive data on the number of scholarship recipients who stayed in New Zealand, we know anecdotally that the majority didn’t return to serve Tokelau, either temporarily or permanently. This was certainly the case among scholarship students sent to the Wairarapa, where my parents went to school.
This isn’t a criticism of those who, for whatever reason, didn’t return to Tokelau to complete their mission. It simply reflects the broader structural inequities between Tokelau and New Zealand.
Ioane Puka, Melanie’s father, aged 12, at the Sedgley Boys’ Home in Masterton in 1976. (Photo supplied)
In the early 1980s, Tokelau stopped sending students at such a young age, and instead sent them only at secondary school age. There was a brief hiatus in the late 1980s when Tokelau stopped sending students to New Zealand altogether, instead sending them to other parts of the Pacific — Sāmoa, Niue, and Tonga. In the early 1990s, when the scholarship scheme restarted, students were sent to New Zealand only for the 5th, 6th and 7th forms.
One of the reasons the scholarship scheme in its first iteration came to a halt was that so few students passed School Certificate and University Entrance, the two major academic assessments in New Zealand. This made it impossible to access further professional training in the areas identified by the villages, including teaching and medicine.
Both exams assumed a command of English that would have been a challenge, even for first-language learners. All scholarship students were at a boarding school, and some students who were sent before they were eligible to board as secondary schoolers were placed in a residential boys’ home (as my father was). And all were completely unfamiliar with life in New Zealand. There was very little institutional support at the time to optimise the chances of Tokelau’s best and brightest to “catch the fish and return to their villages”.
Many, including other tagata Tokelau, will read this and see Tokelau and its people as lucky beneficiaries of imperialism, or argue that Tokelau is better off with New Zealand than it would otherwise have been.
This ignores the historic and continued cost to Tokelau of being “a part of New Zealand” and underscores the insidiousness of the paternalism that permeates public discourse.
Colonisation not only distorts relationships with other Indigenous peoples, but it also distorts the way tagata Tokelau understand ourselves in relation to each other, across multiple borders and the atolls from which we descend.
For instance, there’s a tendency among tagata Tokelau to catastrophise the state of the Tokelauan language based on the proportion of the global population that can speak gagana Tokelau. Yet the vitality of the language at home remains healthy. Outside Tokelau, our access to gagana Tokelau isn’t purely a measure of how much we care for, or desire to engage with, our language — it’s a reflection of the imperial logic that prioritises assimilation.
What is the future for Tokelau?
Two referendums (in 2006 and 2007) showed that most Tokelauans support self-government, but they narrowly failed to achieve the two-thirds majority required. Now a third referendum is being proposed for this year.
But we’re far from ready for another referendum. We need time to ensure tagata Tokelau are well prepared to have robust conversations about Tokelau’s future.
There are hard questions to be considered. How does our imperial relationship with New Zealand constrain our sovereignty — not just over our lands and waters, but also over our intangible treasures such as language, caretaking, and other types of knowledge? How might reframing our relationship with New Zealand empower us to bridge the rupture of the Treaty of Tokehega and the various policies that sought to depopulate Tokelau?
After 100 years, this is as good a time as any to take stock.
T. Melanie Puka Bean is a New Zealand-born tagata Tokelau who also traces ancestry to Sāleimoa and Faleāsiu in Sāmoa. Melanie has a PhD in geography from Louisiana State University and is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic, Gender and Disability Studies at the University of Utah.
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