Can a voluntary organisation be a treaty partner? The case of te Whanau o Waipareira trust.

• Author: Levine, Hal B.

Abstract

The Maori of New Zealand have become one of the world's most urbanised people. They have, in common with other urban migrants throughout the world, developed numerous voluntary associations designed to ease their adaptation to urban life. For some people -- the number is not known with precision -- the voluntary association has replaced the tribe as a focus of their social and cultural life. Yet the New Zealand government, particularly in regard to guardianship of children under the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act 1989 and the distribution of monies from fisheries settlements, bypassed these organisations in favour of iwi, more traditional units of Maori social organisation. This paper reviews the arguments for and against changing policy to allow Urban Maori Authorities to become partners to settlements in these areas. It adopts the position that the realities of social organisation provide a strong argument in favour of the Urban Maori Authorities.

INTRODUCTION

The movement of rural people to urban areas created one of the great social and cultural transformations of the 20th century. Anthropologists (specialists in, among other things, the study of what may be loosely termed "tribal people") have often followed their rural informants into towns and recorded their adaptation to these new environments. Voluntary organisations quickly emerged in the literature of urban anthropology as institutions crucial to the urbanisation process. Kenneth Little (1966) noted that these associations stand "somewhere between the primary, diffuse bonds of the kinship and village network ... and the impersonal institutions of complex society".

The raison d'etre of these organisations is to serve the particular interests of people from a specific area. Indeed, they often function as surrogate kin groups to help their members through the trials and tribulations they experience in the urban environment. However, even when engaged in activities that focus on parochial interests, the outlook of members becomes fundamentally transformed. In balance and in the long run, Little feels, voluntary associations reduce the importance of origin. Eventually, as Krause (1994) puts it, "an identity of general trustworthiness and reciprocal-giving, in other words, a civic identity can supplant the more targeted trustworthiness of an ethnic identity".

In New Zealand this path from kin-group member to civic identity, mediated by voluntary associations, appears to be doubling back on itself. Te Whanau o Waipareira Trust, an important urban Maori association, has recently claimed iwi (tribal) status. Why would a group so important to the urbanisation of Maori people in Auckland articulate an argument that apparently denies its true nature? This paper argues that Waipareira was -- and to a significant extent still is -- caught in a situation where ideology determines policy. Despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of Maori people live in urban areas, outside

iwi rohe (tribal boundaries), iwi-based organisations were selected as partnership units by both the Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission and the Department of Social Welfare. Government policy, adhering in these two cases to the ideology of biculturalism, bypassed groups that were not kin-based.

Under these circumstances, Urban Maori Authorities (1) could either claim to be iwi too, or challenge the notion that only kin-based units of Maori social organisation could function as Treaty partners. (2) In fact, Te Whanau o Waipareira Trust made both claims and made them both in the courts and before the Waitangi Tribunal. They failed in the first arena and succeeded in the second. The rest of this paper discusses the evolution of this situation and argues that the government should explicitly recognise the reality of the social transformation of Maori society and implement the recommendation of the Waitangi Tribunal that any Maori organisation capable of exercising rangatiratanga be accorded the status of Treaty partner.

THE POLICY OF BICULTURALISM

For 140 years after the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, as Maori developed into a "fourth world" (3) people in New Zealand, Te Tiriti was largely ignored by successive New Zealand administrations. Because treaties were considered to be agreements between sovereign powers, prevailing legal opinion held that, once Maori became incorporated into the Empire, Te Tiriti o Waitangi bestowed no rights to them above and beyond those of ordinary citizenship. However, in the 1980s, as a result of complex political bargaining and an actively protesting, growing and overwhelmingly urban Maori population (see Kelsey 1990, 1991), New Zealand governments began to address Maori grievances and aspirations by implementing a policy of biculturalism.

The basic tenet of biculturalism is to "implement the Treaty" (Levine 1987). That is, Maori and Pakeha were to resurrect the founding document and govern New Zealand in partnership. Despite the fact that colonial settlement, demographic change, urbanisation and proletarianisation have severely eroded pre-contact Maori social structure, biculturalism and the "Treaty process" were to operate, as mentioned above, between the government and iwi. Indeed, one of the fundamental aims of biculturalism is to make tino rangatiratanga (traditional group rights of autonomous action and management) (Waitangi Tribunal...