John Roughan: May a marae visit bring just one man an epiphany

COMMENT

Don Brash intends to go to the dawn service at Waitangi on Friday. All going well he'll have an epiphany there.

All going well means (a) we get to sit on the floor of the meeting house, (b) newsgatherers don't drive away the spirit with cameras or indifference, (c) his presence doesn't prompt the war party to get out of bed before dawn, and (d) he is open to the possibility there we are actually more than one people.

Unlikely on all counts, I concede, except the last. But you never know. We always got to sit on the floor until a couple of years ago. The news reporting is now more subtle, and the radicals are not normally early risers. Most years they don't drum up a decent demo until well into the day, which suits television fine.

It also means that something subdued and splendid can happen at dawn.

Dr Brash will sense it best if he has to sit on the floor, although, despite the Orewa speech, I don't suppose that will happen. The hosts will probably insist he takes a seat along the wall. That is just the first of the graces that might touch him.

Not that there is anything insulting about the floor. Some high-ranking citizens go quietly to the little meeting house in the treaty grounds every Waitangi Day, leave their shoes on the porch and hunker down inside with the rest of us.

They go just to listen to the oratory and songs in a language they don't understand but which speaks to them anyway with warmth, spontaneity, humour, passion, anger, sadness and the wealth of its heritage here.

Listening, you wish white New Zealand had something to match it, and since it doesn't you wish it would simply embrace it. It would take centuries to duplicate anything as authentic.

Embracing it does not mean becoming it. I'm not Maori and have no wish to be, any more than a Maori wants to be me. We are not one people. Embracing it means responding to its warmth and welcoming its growing power in national life.

Because - and this might strike Dr Brash at the dawn service - a heritage so deep and powerful cannot be denied its national expression. We are not one people and we cannot be one nation.

A successful post-colonial state needs to give an expression to twin nations. We should find it easier than most because, thanks to the treaty, both nations here have confidence in colonisation's most valuable legacy - a common law. It was probably the reason the chiefs signed the treaty.

Maori still value the common law as highly as Dr Brash does; they are still using it assiduously to protect and assert the terms of the treaty.

We have the great benefit of "one law for all" and we won't lose it so long as it gives satisfaction and a sense of self-determination to more than one people. But I hope Dr Brash's epiphany is more heart-warming than that.

It might strike him in the dawn service that white New Zealand has more to gain than to give when it embraces these people.

Waitangi is a glimpse of the national soul as it could be and probably will be, one day beyond our lifetime.

You can leave the morning karakia so drenched in hope that whatever disruption is staged later in the day doesn't touch it.

You can almost admire the calculated rudeness of the now middle-aged agitators who assemble their annual war party at Ti Tii Marae and walk up the hill banners flying and fearsome to the holiday-makers.

The leaders know from long experience how far to push a march into the faces of police. You notice the control they keep while the tension is filmed for the evening news.

When you've been there the televised trouble seems as incidental to the national story as the predictable reaction on call-in radio.

In fact, you wonder whether the radicals realise that the warmth and grace of the dawn service has made a far more powerful impression on those present than the ugly mob they lead up the hill to do some deliberate offence later.

Sometime in Friday's dawn service, I suspect, Don Brash might suffer the sudden rush of intense embarrassment. To make your first considered speech on the treaty and deliver a litany of talk-back level sentiments ...

Worse for him, if he feels the Maori warmth at Waitangi, he might suddenly realise how utterly nasty his Orewa speech would have been to every Maori who read it.

He had had nothing to say to them, unless they shared his view that the treaty had created "one people", and they would have not found much of themselves in his idea of one people.

The ultimate oppression of any people is to rule them out of existence.

If Dr Brash does not realise what he is doing, he ought to have his researchers dig up a statement published in 1998 by people in the South Island who call themselves Waitaha.

Waitaha occupied their land long before the Ngai Tahu migrated south about 400 years ago. They still deny any affiliation to the larger tribe but Ngai Tahu have simply insisted, successfully, that Waitaha were absorbed by them, becoming one people as it were.

The protests of Waitaha became particularly inconvenient to Ngai Tahu's assertion of its treaty claim to most of the South Island and in the end were simply ignored.

Waitaha's 1998 appeal "to the people of the world" reads as a plaintive cry for survival. "To be legislated into a legal position not of our choosing" feels to them like a form of genocide.

Dr Brash will probably be invited to offer a prayer at the dawn service. Will he have something better than his Orewa sentiments to give? Or will he attempt to justify that miserable offering? I'm betting he will come to his senses.