KEY POINTS:
New Zealand's coming to independence is very different from that of the United States in 1776 or of Australia.
The post-colonial majority culture in New Zealand is increasingly influenced by the minority culture. That shows in everyday language, in ceremonial adjuncts, in kapa haka in schools, in the Maori and Pacific Islanders' dominance in hip hop and ascendancy in other popular music, in the vibrancy of Maori graphic and plastic art.
Maori are making our art and our music different and distinct and in turn non-Maori are tapping into and developing that distinctness and difference.
We are becoming Pacific: no longer a settler society stranded in the Pacific but a settling society of the Pacific. A hundred years on from Ward and his nationalist-imperialist triumphalism on Dominion Day we are a distinct society, rooted in our geography.
A symptom of this flux is that we don't have a 4th or a 14th of July or a 26th of January (Australia Day) and can't agree on one. Dominion Day doesn't qualify. Anzac Day has for some become a sort of de facto national day but commemorating defeat is hardly the statement of a confident and secure nation.
Waitangi Day won't do because it freezes the national debate an evolving society needs in a Treaty of Waitangi framework that is narrow and encumbered with fictions.
My argument is that the Treaty, while an historical, legal and moral reality (at least for now), is also a legal and political fiction. Those who argue that it is the constitution of this nation, are mistaken, for it was a treaty of cession and protection, enabling but not constituting the constitution. The Treaty having been the instrument for extinguishing the independence of iwi and hapu, cannot be, in an inextricably mixed society, the instrument by which iwi and hapu can regain independence. Another mistaken argument is that the Treaty can be the "idea" on which this nation rests, much as the United States rests on the "exceptionalist" idea of a "manifest destiny" embodying individuality, liberty and opportunity. I think that is not the case because today, while the Treaty unites, it also separates.
The Treaty unites because its signing sanctioned the inextricable intermingling of two peoples: he iwi tahi tatou, we two peoples are one nation. It separates by lending formal credence to the claim that only those with Maori ancestry are people of the land and others cannot ever be, regardless of contribution and number of generations lived here. A country cannot be a nation unless all people feel fully part of it and that requires that all are people of this land. The very word "nation" implies nativity.
As we move to generations of ex-British - and ex-Irish, ex-Chinese, ex-Danish, ex-German, ex-Indian, ex-Samoan - non-Maori will less accept exclusion from full belonging here. Can a single mixed marriage or casual liaison 10 or 100 or 200 years earlier confer tangata whenua status yet seven or eight or nine generations farming a much-loved territory not make a person of the land?
The clue lies in the emerging Pacific nature of our society. We are not an offsite new Britain. We are becoming a Pacific nation. That is changing the way we think about ourselves and the way we conduct ourselves and the way we govern ourselves. Over time that is making and will make us all the people of this land because there is no other land for us.
An optimistic forward history looking ahead 39 years - the lifespan of dominion status - would picture us combining in that people-of-the-land status both of the defining characteristics of a nation, "idea" and "folk". The "idea" - the "fiction" at the nation's base - could be that our special land-sea-forest, embedded in Maori whakapapa and celebrated in the clean-green myth, both distinguishes us from other nations and generates a national project: to make our first priority the sustenance of this land-sea-forest of ours and the songs and stories and pictures and energies that grow out of it. And if we adopt that "idea", maybe we will find to our happy surprise that 39 years from now we are a "folk" here, the "folk" of a nation - that in 39 years time in our social evolution and mentality we will have moved on from the Treaty of the 1980s, just as New Zealand moved on from dominion status in the 39 years after Dominion Day.
But there is much to be done before we get to that point. This may be not a 39-year project but a 100-year one.
First, the unsettled settler-descended society must reset the link with its ancestral society. It must do that as a distinct equal but also to learn to own and integrate its ancestral heritage. Shakespeare and the 1688 Bill of Rights and Newton and Wellington and Watt are part of us. For much of the past 25 years leading Maoris' confidence in their heritage has been stronger than that of non-Maori. The pre-1980s cultural cringe towards Britain was substituted in liberal circles in the 1980s with a cultural cringe towards Maori.
Te Papa severed history at the time of arrival. But there is and always has been and always will be a "before". That is so for Maori now reconnecting with the ancestral Polynesian societies who have come here eight centuries or so after they did. And it is so for the English and Scots and Irish and Welsh and Dutch and Chinese and Indians and all the other more recent arrivals. If there is no "before" there can be no solid "now" and certainly no confidence about the "next".
Only then might the cultural attachment to this place and society become so deep that it subsists through emigration and is embedded in the emigrants' descendants' subconscious. Now the children of our emigrants do not link back here, as, for example, do those of the Irish. They are the children of another culture.
Second, we lack strong symbols. Symbols don't define us. But what are outsiders to make of a society which has no symbolic day to celebrate itself and its heritages, of which the titular head of state is in London, the flag features another country's flag and the national anthem enjoins it to leave everything to God?
That risks consigning us to the margins of sensible world society, truly an outlier, not just in the inescapabilities of geography and demography but in our conception and projection of ourselves. A fully settled society needs symbols that tell a confident story. That points us to the third challenge for the century ahead: to ensure that we remain independent in the world, not independent from the world - that we are outward-looking in an increasingly connected, globalised world, not inward-looking, self-obsessed and insular.
Ward's settler society asserted autonomy within a global empire. That way an outlier society could also be an insider society. When the empire imploded in the second world war, a nervous settler society at the end of long, thin lifelines sought to alleviate its loneliness by huddling with American kin. We also sought, after 1935, to seal our economy from the shocks of unpredictable international capitalism. It didn't work.
Our independence revolution of the 1970s and 1980s took us out into the world. We are independent in the world, economically, politically and, societally. We are on our own but in the world. Can we maintain that, or might some shock drive us to huddle with Australia?
In the 100 years since 1907 many of the co-ordinates have been reset. New Zealand's settler society of the original Dominion Day has come a long way down the path towards a settled Aotearoa, through statehood to nationhood. But to secure legitimacy and enduring attachment may need most of another 100 years.
* This article is taken from an address given by Colin James to the "Concepts of Nationhood" symposium held in Wellington yesterday under the auspices of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and the Department of Internal Affairs.
