KEY POINTS:
The thing I love most about this country is its identity crisis. We are in a healthy adolescence, confused but confident, not sure whether we are one nation or two.
We are, it's true, 167 years old on Tuesday, but you can't rush constitutional growth. The best you can do is follow your finest instincts and see what happens.
The new Governor General, Anand Satyanand, is travelling to Waitangi today and plans to stay until mid-morning on Tuesday. His schedule says he will attend the 5am service at the Upper Marae. His instincts are good. I hope he speaks.
The dawn service at Waitangi is without doubt the shortest and toughest speaking engagement any non-Maori can be called on to make. It is not a speech, it is a prayer. It's humbling. It is very hard for a spiritually undeveloped ego to do.
Jenny Shipley and Jim Anderton have managed to do it. Helen Clark cannot. That is the real reason she avoided Waitangi for several years. Dame Silvia Cartwright probably could have done it but, in deference to the Prime Minister perhaps, she didn't.
Dame Silvia used to go walkabout at Waitangi, believing it was enough for the Governor General to be seen at the Treaty ground, not heard. It isn't.
It is more important for the Governor General to live up to expectations at Waitangi than for the Prime Minister. The Treaty is our constitution in the best sense of the word and the Governor General is, or should be, the guardian of it.
Good ones have followed their instincts at Waitangi almost to the point of defiance of their Westminster constitutional limitations. Sir David Beattie once received a group that Sir Robert Muldoon wanted to spurn. And Sir Michael Hardie Boys pointedly attended the ceremonies the first year that Helen Clark stayed away.
"Satch" could easily become the best we have seen. He is certainly the most personable on a platform of any appointee for a while. This is his first Waitangi Day. He needs just to take central place, hear anything that will be said and to respond with generosity of spirit.
That can be a tall order up there. One of the less delightful quirks of the indigenous people, particularly in the North, is a propensity to make offensive accusations they do not really mean. Helen Clark has struggled with this too.
It is a characteristic explained in the Waitangi Tribunal's Muriwhenua Land Report. Assessing some of the fiery Maori debate at the Treaty signings, the tribunal said, "Impassioned declamation is a standard oratorical tool. It solicits a clear position on a point at issue. Thus Europeans opposed to the treaty [for annexation would restrict their ability to trade and buy land] had advised Maori that the Governor would enslave them and leave them landless. The Maori way is to clear the air by so averring, in order to compel a forthright denial ...
"A matter is koretake [of no account], to Maori, if it arouses no passion or debate, while a battle of words does justice to the cause, sharpens the issues, augments the occasion and leaves stories to memorialise the event."
I have pinched that quotation from a recently published book, Historical Frictions - Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories (Auckland University Press) written by Michael Belgrave, a historian at Massey University, Albany. Belgrave's book is interesting because it points out that the Treaty, the touchstone for our identity crisis, has changed its meaning for us many times.
At the beginning, he says, it was primarily to regulate land sales. Tribal sovereignty was not then an issue because it was obvious, and settlers were happy to acknowledge it because most had already bought land and pre-colonial sovereignty made those transactions lawful.
But within a few years, says Belgrave, "everything changed". The New Zealand Company, once it failed to get exclusive land buying rights and the company's pre-Treaty purchases came under investigation, turned against the Treaty and refused to recognise Maori sovereign rights to uncultivated territory.
The Treaty then became primarily a charter of land rights, celebrated by Maori but contentious with settlers as their numbers grew.
Settlers did not really embrace the Treaty until 1860 when it became useful as an antidote to the Maori King movement. The primary emphasis became the Treaty's guarantee of equal rights available to loyal Maori as subjects of the Crown. Maori were given their own seats in Parliament.
In the early 20th century, new Maori leaders, Apirana Ngata, Maui Pomare and Peter Buck, were able to advance inside mainstream parties. Later, the non-tribal Ratana movement won all the Maori seats and formed a lasting alliance with the Labour Party.
The Treaty became a national artefact. The Waitangi ground was given to the nation by Lord Bledisloe in 1934. The wharenui, where the dawn service will be held on Tuesday, was built and opened by Ngata at the 1940 centenary.
By the 1950s, the Treaty was regarded by both sides as the one-nation recipe that Don Brash tried to revive a few years ago.
The re-appearance of Maori protest in the 1960s took us by surprise. Young, tertiary-educated Maori looked at the promises of the Treaty and called it a fraud. Then they looked at the Maori version and called for it to be honoured. The Maori version never surrendered tribal sovereignty.
The Waitangi Tribunal was set up to clarify the meaning of the Treaty and hear any new grievances. In the 1980s the tribunal's writ was enlarged to hear historic claims, and legislation wrote the "principles of the Treaty" into law. The Court of Appeal interpreted the principle to be one of "partnership" in which Government and tribes should deal in good faith.
The partnership principle and the preparation of claims to the tribunal have revitalised tribal organisation and made the modern Treaty a source of division more than national unity.
But there is no getting around it. Out of the spirit of that much-chewed parchment we will grow into our dual identity. Meantime, we celebrate the potential.
