A trailblazing critique of the Treaty of Waitangi has proved, like the treaty itself, open to interpretation – affecting NZ law, policy and culture ever since, writes historian Bain Attwood.
The ways in which te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi has been interpreted by New Zealanders over the past 50 years owe a great deal to a famous scholarly journal article published in 1972 by a remarkable historian, Ruth Ross.
Or rather, interpretation of the treaty owes an enormous amount to the changing ways in which her article has been read, inside and more especially outside the cloistered world of universities.
This is probably unsurprising. The main reason an article such as Ross’s becomes famous is that interpretation of it does not lead to any definite conclusion. The history of any major text is often a history of divergent or even conflicting interpretations, and the different uses to which it is put by those who read it. This is true of both Ross’s article and the treaty itself.
In other words, her famous article in the New Zealand Journal of History is something like a bellwether seat in national elections. As interpretation of it changes, so, too, does the way in which the treaty is interpreted.
Yet, as far as Ross was concerned or aware, she had just one thing to say in her article: the treaty was “a hopeless shambles”. The historic agreement was deeply flawed in her view because, at the time it was made in 1840, the English text had been hastily and inexpertly translated into te reo Māori.
As a result, she argued, its provisions were ambiguous and contradictory, and this meant it could never amount to a sacred covenant or a legal contract between the two peoples who had signed it. This was despite claims to the contrary by many Pākehā and Māori that it was New Zealand’s founding document.
But this is not all Ross had to say. If it had been, her article would simply have faded from view. The first scholar ever to give serious and sustained consideration to the Māori text of the treaty, she suggested that the meanings of what she deemed to be its key words – te tino rangatiratanga, kawanatanga and taonga – were fundamentally different from the meaning of the equivalent words in the English text – sovereignty, government and possessions.
What’s more, she insisted that the Māori text – that is, te Tiriti o Waitangi – was the treaty because this was the version on which the vast majority of the rangatira who signed the agreement had put their signatures or marks.
This argument led to Ross’s article being read in the way that underpins the widely held understanding of the treaty today: as a founding charter that sets down both the rights of Māori as the tangata whenua and the duty of the British Crown to uphold them.
Cultural immersion
These days, Ruth Ross herself is barely remembered beyond a small circle of people. I’ve just published a book about her, ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History. It took me on a voyage of discovery that began in the archives, or rather a particular archive.
When Ross died in 1982, aged just 62, she left her personal papers to the Auckland Institute Library, now the Auckland Museum Research Library Te Pātaka Mātāpuna. Many of them relate to her trailblazing historical work on te tiriti, as she insisted on calling the treaty long before it became commonplace to do so.
Running to some 90 boxes, this archive includes things such as her research notes, the clippings she made from contemporary newspapers and drafts of her writings.
But it also comprises thousands of letters she wrote, most of them on her trusty typewriter, to colleagues, friends and acquaintances. Major figures in New Zealand’s cultural life – JC Beaglehole, Charles Brasch, EH McCormick, James K Baxter, Pei Te Hurinui Jones, Keith Sinclair, Frank Sargeson, Ralph Hotere, Judith Binney and Claudia Orange – appear in this correspondence, many of them in a light that will surprise most readers.
Ross’s scholarly work is rather dry, typical of the writing of most historians who have been trained in universities. But her letters are exceptionally lively, often funny, repeatedly irreverent and frequently acerbic. She also swore a good deal, hardly the done thing for a middle-class woman of her generation.
“Yes, Rangiaowhia and Hairini in the past, and Rangiaowhia and Hairini in the present are all mixed up for me,” she wrote to one of her correspondents in September 1955 after visiting an infamous site in the 1864 British invasion of the Waikato. “And past and present on Hairini ridge are all mixed up with my ire with the Beaglehole and Brasch brigade and their beef about the inarticulate, or was it unconscious, New Zealand tradition … and the people who bleat we are just a young country, not like the England where every stone and every track is steeped in history. Ughghgh – they make me mad. They have neither the eyes to see with, nor ears to hear with, and there is no damn sense or sensitivity in them.”
Ross’s unusually rich archive enabled me to make sense of the circumstances in which she came to write about the treaty. It took me on a journey: from her childhood in small-town Whanganui through university to apprentice historian at the Department of Internal Affairs in Wellington; to marriage to Ian Ross after World War II and her juggling the raising of two young boys in Auckland with writing stories for schoolchildren; and eventually to her living in an economically impoverished but culturally rich Māori community in the Far North, where her engagement with Ngāpuhi, young and old, prompted her to think about the treaty in startlingly new ways.
Different takes
When I first read the famous 1972 journal article, I assumed its genesis lay in the cultural and political ferment of that time, when young Māori radicals had begun to fight for indigenous rights, especially those concerning land, language and culture. This seemed to make sense. But as I delved into her archive, I learnt this was a mistake. She had made nearly all the same main points in a paper nearly 20 years earlier.
Just as I registered the significance of this fact, I also realised her article had been interpreted in radically divergent ways in the years that followed its publication. I came to believe that this reception was encapsulated by two particular historical sources. The first was a cartoon Bob Brockie drew for the National Business Review in 1982. Brockie’s cartoon drew on part of Ross’s article:
“The [Māori and British] signatories of 1840 were uncertain and divided in their understanding of its meaning; who can say now what its intentions were? Ratification is a legal and constitutional process; a treaty – if this was indeed a treaty – can surely be ratified only in the terms in which it was signed. However good intentions may have been, a close study of events shows that the Treaty of Waitangi was hastily and inexpertly drawn up, ambiguous and contradictory in content, chaotic in its execution. To persist in postulating that this was a ‘sacred compact’ is sheer hypocrisy.”
Fraud or foundation?
Brockie’s reading of the article was in keeping with the way most historians and many Māori political figures had received it in the decade after it was published: the treaty amounted to a fraud. But just a year later, Edward (Eddie) Taihakurei Durie, then chairman of the Waitangi Tribunal, read it very differently. In the first of many landmark reports he wrote for the tribunal, he picked up on Ross’s argument that the two language texts of the treaty differed significantly from one another and argued that the Māori text was the more authoritative in determining its meaning and effect.
He also concluded that the words in the Māori text that Ross had spent years thinking about – te tino rangatiratanga, kawanatanga and taonga – were fundamental to its meaning.
He would soon suggest that the treaty provided “the foundation for a developing social contract” and it was not only a valid legal agreement but was well on its way to having “the status of a constitutional instrument”.
Durie’s way of reading Ross’s article was increasingly the way it was received. More importantly, it was the way the treaty itself came to be interpreted and this has had a major impact on New Zealand law, culture and history.
How to make sense of the fact that the article was read in strikingly different ways – and within a remarkably short period of time? It’s often assumed that with a piece of writing like Ross’s, or with the treaty itself, the author’s intentions are accurately conveyed as a coherent and unified whole. This is seldom the case. Usually, there are ambiguities within a text that an author is unconscious of.
One way of explaining the paper’s widely divergent reception may lie in thinking of its text as like a musical composition that can suddenly shift from a major to a minor key, lending a different character or emotion to the same melody or idea.
In this case, the “major” argument was that the treaty’s terms were ambiguous and contradictory; the “minor” one that the treaty’s two language texts differed significantly, and the Māori version was the more important.
If we focus on the major key, as Brockie did, we might conclude Ross was trying to put to rest any notion that the treaty was a “sacred covenant”.
But if we read it in terms of its minor key, as Durie did, we might conclude she was trying to recover how Māori understood the meaning of the treaty and was seeking to breathe new life into it as a “social contract”.
Transformative role
Another possible reason for the differences in the article’s interpretation concerns the contexts in which it was read.
As New Zealand began to undergo radical changes from the early to mid-1980s – as major shifts took place in its geopolitical position, economic policy, the nature of the rights claims of indigenous people and legal consideration of the historical treaties the British Crown had made with them – the article increasingly came to be read in the way Durie the lawyer, rather than Brockie the cartoonist-cum-student-of-history, had done. In turn, the treaty itself came to be interpreted very differently from the way it had been previously.
Ross was alerted to Brockie’s cartoon shortly before she died, but she was dead by the time Durie’s first report for the Waitangi Tribunal appeared. She would never know that her article had begun to play a crucial role in the transformation of the status of the treaty and its place in New Zealand law, culture and history.
What would she have made of these extraordinary changes? Her various writings on the treaty suggested to me that she would have been delighted by the growing influence of Māori perspectives of the past and their ways of being in history. This was clearly one of the main threads in her work.
Many of her letters led me to believe she’d have been amazed that questions about the sovereignty of the state and reparation for the losses Māori suffered could be considered by government, because in her lifetime, few seriously thought these matters could be addressed any longer. I also think she would have welcomed the redress that has accompanied this change.
But at least one of her letters, written in 1973, led me to conclude she’d have been surprised by the way lawyers came to interpret the treaty after she died, though this had started to occur at the time her article appeared. More than this, the letter suggests she’d have been astounded to see the vast majority of New Zealand’s historians interpret the meanings and implications of the treaty in much the same way as the lawyers did, for she recognised that lawyers and historians usually spoke what she called “different languages”.
I came to the view Ross would have been troubled that New Zealand’s most influential historians have lent a degree of historical legitimacy to legal interpretations of the treaty that they would otherwise not have had.
I also concluded she would have been ambivalent about the democratisation of history that has grown apace since she died. She would have welcomed the fact that the voices of Māori – previously hidden by the discipline of history – were now being heard. But she might have been puzzled by the claim that there are radical differences between the ways the discipline of history seeks to understand the past and Māori ways of knowing it.
In the closing part of my book, I discuss the pressures that the democratisation of history has placed on the discipline in which Ross was trained, even including the way in which its basics, such as sources, research, facts and truth, are now being challenged.
This prompted me to consider how histories of the treaty might best be told, for what purposes and to what ends, to contemplate how the different forms of knowledge that Māori and Pākehā are said to have about the past and the present can be negotiated, and to ask what the implications of this are for New Zealand as a democracy.
I expect some of what I have said in this regard will prove controversial, not least because in New Zealand today, as in other democracies, discussion of important matters is riven by partisanship. In many quarters, not least the universities, politics – or what is taken to be politics – threatens to invade everything and spare nothing. l
New Zealand-born Bain Attwood is a professor of history at Monash University, Melbourne. His last book, Empire and the Making of Native Title, was the joint winner of the New Zealand Historical Association’s 2021 WH Oliver Prize.
‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History, by Bain Attwood, (AUP, $59.99).
