“The late Moana Jackson would often ask, in what world would rangatira simply surrender their authority to a distant monarch they had never met?” writes Morgan Godfery, as he considers what rangatiratanga means today. (Photo supplied)
Te Tiriti is best understood as an ongoing agreement about coexistence, and one that covers the economy too, writes Morgan Godfery.
In the early 1980s the Waitangi Action Committee, a movement made up of the leading activists of the day, led campaigns condemning the Treaty of Waitangi as a “fraud”. In posters, badges, and direct action — particularly at Waitangi itself — the committee sought to draw the country’s attention to the Crown’s systematic failure to honour the agreement it signed in 1840.
In the lead-up to Waitangi Day commemorations in 1983, police deployed officers in riot gear at the Treaty grounds, seemingly anticipating confrontations in the spirit of the Springbok Tour protests two years earlier. Those confrontations never happened. Instead, the events that made the headlines were the arrests of nine members of the clergy, apprehended for disturbing the peace during the dawn ecumenical service.
In the early hours of the morning of February 6, the clerics had made their way to the upper marae, positioning themselves near the podium at the foot of the meeting house. Moments before the opening address, they approached the podium offering alternative liturgies, with the Reverend Rinny Westra informing the assembled crowd: “We come here today in a spirit of repentance, remembering the history of this land.”
The government-appointed celebrant, Reverend John Sinclair, realised what was unfolding, and instructed police to remove Westra. As he was led away, another cleric stepped forward, and then another. Each offered prayers of repentance, emphasising what they described as the sinful nature of the Crown’s breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi.
The alternative clergy belonged to the Church’s Action Committee, an activist group formed in solidarity with the Waitangi Action Committee. Both movements were of the view that Waitangi Day was hardly a celebration, but rather a day of mourning.
The following year, on February 6, 1984, the Waitangi Action Committee shepherded as many as 2,000 activists on a march from Waikato to Waitangi, again seeking to draw attention to the Crown’s persistent failure to honour the Treaty.
In this sense, then, the claim that the Treaty itself was a “fraud” was never quite at the heart of the argument.
Rather, the accusation of fraud was directed at the Crown’s interpretation of the Treaty, which relied almost exclusively on the English text. The vast majority of rangatira who signed in 1840 did so according to the Māori text. As Professor Sir Hugh Kawharu confirmed in his authoritative 1975 translation, the kāwanatanga ceded in the Māori text does not equate to the transfer of “sovereignty” contemplated in the English version. This foundational divergence is one source of nearly two centuries of what Queen Elizabeth II once described, with characteristic understatement, as “imperfect observation”.
Colonisation, commerce, and the making of the Treaty
Two weeks before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in February 1840, the New Zealand Company vessel Aurora anchored in Wellington Harbour. In Britain, the company had engineered an energetic promotional campaign depicting New Zealand as a subtropical paradise, an agricultural Eden. Advertisements promised free passage to rural labourers, while posters portrayed fertile plains and an easy life.
The gap between expectation and reality confronting the early settlers on arrival — a country of high rainfall, difficult terrain and acidic soils — was stark. Within weeks, many understood they had been misled, and within a year, many had left.
The company nevertheless remained committed to proving its theory of “systematic colonisation”, as per Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Wakefield argued that if lands in the colonies were sold at a sufficient price, the proceeds could fund the necessary immigration and infrastructure, solving shortages that were a restraint on the growth of the likes of Canada.
The theory was (to varying degrees) applied elsewhere in the Empire, but in New Zealand it collided with an obvious and obviously inconvenient reality: Māori exercised authority across the entire landmass, and the British government was reluctant to intervene in what it formally regarded as a foreign country.
When William Wakefield (Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s younger brother) arrived aboard the Tory in 1839, carrying instructions to purchase land in preparation for settlement, he disembarked into a society governed by tikanga Māori.
Rights and responsibilities in relation to land were determined by hapū and rangatira, not by British law. Wakefield was only one of many land agents operating in anticipation of profit, and one of many confronting this inconvenient reality.
The British government, increasingly alarmed at the actions of a private settlement enterprise, appointed William Hobson as Consul in 1839. For decades, northern rangatira had requested British intervention to control unruly whalers, traders and settlers operating out of Kororareka.
Hobson’s formal instructions, issued under the authority of Governor Gipps in New South Wales, barred British subjects from acquiring Māori land and directed Hobson to “treat with the aborigines” to secure recognition of British authority where Māori were willing to grant it. It was in this context that the Treaty of Waitangi was drafted.
Hobson prepared an English text, which the missionary Henry Williams and his son hurriedly translated on the evening of February 4, 1840. On February 5, as many as 500 rangatira gathered at Waitangi to debate the proposed agreement. The debate unfolded according to the principles of tauutuutu, ensuring that competing views were heard. Rangatira spoke passionately both for and against signing.
The Treaty itself was brief. It affirmed that rangatira would retain their taonga unless they chose to dispose of them, that Māori would enjoy the rights and privileges of British subjects, and that rangatira would transfer kāwanatanga — governorship — to Queen Victoria, while retaining te tino rangatiratanga.
On February 6, approximately 40 rangatira signed the Māori text. While this number was possibly disappointing for Hobson, copies of the Treaty were shipped across the country, from Port Waikato to Akaroa and Otākou. In total, approximately 500 rangatira signed, although many others refused or never had the opportunity to do so.
On May 21, 1840, Hobson proclaimed British sovereignty over the North Island by cession. In common-law terms, it is often this proclamation, rather than the signing of the Treaty itself, that is treated as the decisive legal moment.
Kāwanatanga, sovereignty, and shifting interpretations
Contemporary debates sometimes portray disputes over the meaning and effect of kāwanatanga as modern inventions. Conservative activist groups often insist that the rangatira who signed the Treaty understood perfectly well that they were ceding sovereignty, and to argue otherwise implies a patronising view of the capacity of the rangatira of the time.
Of course, it is quite true that the rangatira did understand what they were agreeing to, which is the plain meaning of the Māori text: iwi and hapū retain tino rangatiratanga — sovereignty — while transferring kāwanatanga: a limited jurisdiction necessary for the Crown to control its settlers and merchants.
As early as 1860, Chief Justice William Martin described kāwanatanga as a “magisterial jurisdiction”, referring to the powers required to maintain order among settlers. This understanding was echoed by historians such as George William Rusden and, later, William Pember Reeves, who famously described the Treaty as the “Māori Magna Carta”.
Yet no settled consensus emerged. In the early 20th century, Sir Āpirana Ngata argued that the cession of kāwanatanga effectively transferred mana rangatira to the Crown, and he went so far as to characterise the New Zealand Wars as resulting from Māori breaches of the Treaty. While Ngata himself remains a rather magisterial figure, his view was contested rigorously, particularly among members of the Rātana movement.
From the mid-century, historiography took a more triumphalist turn. The Treaty was credited with producing “the best race relations in the world”, and safeguarding New Zealand from racial segregation in the vein of the Jim Crow South or Apartheid South Africa. In this telling, the Treaty became a foundation for national identity, even as its substantive promises remained largely unmet.
The decisive shift came in 1956 when Ruth Ross published her landmark essay on the Treaty texts. Ross argued that “sovereignty” is more akin to mana or kīngitanga, not the biblically derived kāwanatanga. More importantly, she insisted that te tino rangatiratanga in Article Two of the Māori text was central to understanding the agreement. Her core argument was deceptively simple: the Māori text is the Treaty. The reaction was swift and hostile, and Ross largely withdrew from public debate.
In 1972, Ross returned to the issue, arguing again for the primacy of the Māori version. This reaffirmation marked a turning point. Younger activists were beginning to reject earlier integrationist approaches and focused instead on the Crown’s failure to honour te tino rangatiratanga. This intellectual shift underpinned the protests of the 1970s and 1980s, including those at Waitangi.
Economy, land, and the substance of breach
From the vantage point of the 2020s, the clerical protest of 1983 and Ross’s interventions may appear almost quaint. This is not a criticism but a vindication. The interpretive approach Ross pioneered is now orthodox. Under Sir Eddie Taihakurei Durie, the Waitangi Tribunal built the scaffolding of its jurisprudence on the Māori text (even though it acknowledged the limitations of apparently competing texts). In 2014, the Tribunal’s Te Paparahi o te Raki Stage One report concluded that rangatira did not cede sovereignty in 1840.
The historical evidence is compelling, but perhaps there is an easier formulation to demonstrate the primacy of the Māori text: the late Moana Jackson would often ask, in what world would rangatira simply surrender their authority to a distant monarch they had never met? That simple question centres the lived realities of the time.
In the decades between Cook’s first voyage and 1840, Māori were active participants in international trade. Potatoes and other crops spread across the country at speed, transforming productivity. By the early 19th century, hapū across the country were cultivating hundreds of acres, supplying visiting ships, and undertaking substantial capital works. Kororāreka became one of the busiest whaling ports in the Southern Hemisphere. Leaders such as Wiremu Tamihana invested in flour and flax mills, schools, churches, and coastal shipping enterprises.
The Declaration of Independence of 1835 was, in part, an assertion of the economic autonomy and trade relations that Māori had established in the preceding decades. Te Tiriti can also be understood similarly: as a framework to manage settlement, trade and economic opportunity among Māori and settlers.
From the Crown’s perspective, though, the sustainability of the settler colony depended on converting Māori land into alienable property. This understanding turns Te Tiriti on its head, prioritising settler development over mutual benefit. The result was war, confiscation, and mass land loss.
For hapū and iwi, the breaches of Te Tiriti were not only moral failures — as the clerics rightly pointed out — but economic failures too. Land was the foundation of the Māori economy. Its alienation destroyed the basis for independent development.
Rangatiratanga as economic practice
In November 2024, the Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti arrived in Wellington to oppose David Seymour’s proposed Treaty Principles Bill. Though politically doomed, the bill provoked the largest protest in New Zealand history. Tens of thousands marched, signalling that the debate over Te Tiriti’s meaning had been decisively settled in favour of te tino rangatiratanga.
Rather than re-litigating textual debates, hapū and iwi are increasingly turning their attention to practice: strengthening marae-based disaster response, exercising governance over Post-Settlement Governance Entities, and forging their own international trade relationships.
Māori authorities have become significant economic actors, with the Māori economy valued at approximately $32 billion in 2023. Yet contradictions persist. Despite above-average economic growth, Māori unemployment and income disparities remain as entrenched as ever (the distributional effect of this growth, as is the tendency in developed capitalist economies, spreads upwards).
In response, iwi leaders are beginning to engage tentatively with organised labour. In 2025, the National Iwi Chairs Forum collaborated with the Council of Trade Unions for Rā Whakamana, recognising that capitalism itself constituted a foundational breach of Te Tiriti.
While Māori engaged enthusiastically in global trade, production and distribution were historically governed by tikanga, not profit maximisation. This suggests a future Treaty relationship that is not merely bipartite, or even tripartite, but potentially quadripartite: Crown, Māori, capital, and labour. Such an arrangement may come closer to the lived meaning and effect of Te Tiriti o Waitangi than any textual argument.
From text to relationships
Te Tiriti o Waitangi is, to borrow a cliché, a living document. From the moment of its signing, it has been less a settled constitutional instrument than an evolving political relationship shaped by power, interpretation, and material reality.
The long arc of its history — from 19th-century wars and land loss, through 20th-century historiographical debates, to contemporary jurisprudence and economic development — reveals a consistent pattern: disputes have rarely centred on the words alone, but on who has the authority to give those words effect.
In this sense, the central tension between kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga was never settled. Kāwanatanga was conceived as a practical jurisdiction, enabling the Crown to regulate its own settlers and facilitate orderly trade. Rangatiratanga, by contrast, encodes an enduring authority rooted in tikanga, whakapapa, land, and collective autonomy. The difficulty is not the interpretive ambiguity — of which there is little — but rather the Crown’s material acts, its persistent tendency to expand the practical acts of kāwanatanga at the expense of rangatiratanga.
In time, the meaning of Te Tiriti may shift from a legal question of contested sovereignty toward a political economy of partnership.
The work of historians such as Ruth Ross, the jurisprudence of the Waitangi Tribunal, and the resurgence of Māori political and economic institutions is reframing Te Tiriti as a living framework, governing relationships among peoples, economic resources and systems of authority. This reframing also highlights that breaches were not merely constitutional or moral, but material, undermining the economic foundations of Māori society.
Today, the most significant developments are occurring not in courts or parliaments, but in practice: in iwi governance, in marae-based social infrastructure, in labour alliances, and in global commercial engagement. These developments suggest that the future of Te Tiriti lies less in settling once and for all what was “ceded” in 1840, and more in negotiating how power, prosperity, and responsibility are shared now.
Seen in this light, Te Tiriti is best understood not as a historical relic or a constitutional problem to be solved, but as an ongoing agreement about coexistence. The enduring question, therefore, is not what the Treaty may have meant at any one moment in time, but how faithfully its promise of dual authorities and mutual social and economic obligation can be realised in each successive generation.
This essay is extracted with permission from Facing Up to Our Future: Challenges and Choices for New Zealand, a book of essays edited by Peter Davis and available for order at The Helen Clark Foundation.
Morgan Godfery (Te Pahipoto, Ngati Awa) is a writer and public servant. He lives in Kawerau with his partner and their daughter.
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