Post by Kiwi Frontline on Jan 26, 2020 15:21:15 GMT 12
'ILLEGAL’ INVASION? - By Peter Hemmingson
The Kingites and their affiliates claim that Crown land confiscations and the Crown's "invasion" of the Waikato in the 1860s were "illegal."
Bollocks!
The Treaty of Waitangi was not with a collective "Maori." It was with tribes in a constant state of war with one another and inhabiting two main landmasses. The was no country until the English came and created one under the sovereignty vested in Queen Victoria by the Treaty of Waitangi.
Some 512 chiefs signed the TOW, and a substantial minority in the centre of the North Island (Tainui, Tuhoe, and Tuwharetoa) refused to, meaning there were probably around 600 of these individually insignificant groups.
Under the legal doctrine of privity of contract, only the parties to an agreement are bound by it, or can claim its protection in the event of a breach. Tainui never signed the Treaty, so the Kingites should never have been included in the Treaty settlement process.
Back in the day, the Kingites loudly proclaimed that because Tainui didn't sign the Treaty, they could organise as they saw fit on their own land, including electing a 'king" to govern themselves.
I'm inclined to agree with that view.
However, all that changed once the Kingites started projecting power outside their rohe.
They began a series of escalating provocations that led Governor Grey to first issue strongly-worded warnings, then move into the Waikato to put the Kingites in their place.
Followers of the self-anointed Tainui upstart ‘king’ were either aggressive challengers to the Crown’s sovereignty (tribes who hadn’t signed the Treaty of Waitangi) or rebels (Treaty signatories who’d repudiated their undertaking by mobbing up with the Kingites).
The Kingites and their allies refused to accept the legitimate government, had tried to set up a rival kingdom, and to force Europeans out of their territory. They’d fought against the Government in Taranaki, threatened Auckland, and murdered settlers.
After war, some of their land was confiscated. This was legitimate under law -- as well as according to Maori custom -- and the Kingites had been forewarned.
Only about 4 percent of NZ's land area was eventually – and quite rightly – confiscated from tribes who'd challenged the Queen's sovereignty and lost. They had been warned in advance this would happen if they didn’t pull their heads in.
When conflict was brewing in 1863, Governor Grey made this crystal clear:
“Those who wage war against Her Majesty, or remain in arms, threatening the lives of Her peaceable subjects, must take the consequences of their acts, and they must understand that they will forfeit the right to possession of their lands as guaranteed to them by the Treaty of Waitangi.”
Here’s Sir Apirana Ngata on this matter:
“Some have said that these confiscations were wrong and that they contravened the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi. The [majority of the] chiefs placed in the hands of the Queen of England, the sovereignty and the authority to make laws. Some sections of the Maori people violated that authority. War arose from this and blood was spilled. The law came into operation and land was taken in payment. This itself is a Maori custom—revenge, plunder to avenge a wrong. It was their own chiefs who ceded that right to the Queen. The confiscations cannot therefore be objected to in the light of the Treaty.”
Once peace was finally made, the Kingites were treated as British subjects, a far more benevolent fate than they'd have suffered if conquered by another Maori tribe, and indeed considerably better treatment than the Tainui tribes had meted out to others during the Musket Wars of the 1830s.
Here’s how Tainui invaders conducted themselves in the Taranaki at the sacking of the Puke-Rangiora pa:
"It is said that twelve hundred of Te Ati-Awa and their allied hapus were killed or captured in the final overthrow of the pa. The greater part of the prisoners were women and children, and these were driven back into the pa to be killed or tortured at leisure. That day Waikato glutted themselves on the bodies of the slain lying in gore around the pa.
"The next morning the prisoners were brought out, and those amongst them whose faces were well tattooed were decapitated on a block of wood, with the view of making mokaikai, or preserving them, as trophies to be taken back to the country of the Waikatos. Others, with little or none of this decoration, were immediately killed by a blow on the skull. It is asserted that Te Wherowhero [the first Maori ‘king’] — the head chief of Waikato and principal leader of the invaders — sat in the gateway of the pa, and as the prisoners were brought to him he killed one hundred and fifty of them by a blow on the head with his jadeite mere named 'Whakarewa,' and that he only desisted because his arm became swollen with the exercise. The headless bodies were thrown across a trench, which was dug to carry off the blood lying in pools about the plateau on which Puke-Rangiora stood. Others, less fortunate, were killed with every conceivable form of torture; some again were cast into the ovens alive, to the amusement of their sanguinary foes. Young children and lads were cut open by incisions made hastily down the stomach, enviscerated and roasted on sticks placed round large fires, made of the palisading of the pa.”
Interesting to note that twice as many Maori were killed by other Maori in this one massacre, than in all the fighting between Maori and colonial forces in the entire Waikato War.
Grey was entirely justified in putting down an increasingly aggressive foreign power on his doorstep that threatened the peace and security of the colony. As victor, the Crown was entitled to deal with the vanquished Kingites as it saw fit, including taking land off them as punishment for picking a fight.
Let it be said again: the victor dealt remarkably mercifully with the vanquished.
If the Ihumatao land in South Auckland was in fact confiscated from Ihumatao Maori in the 1860s -- something nobody has done more than assert without providing proof -- the Crown was fully within its rights in asking them to take a loyalty oath to establish their peaceable intentions.
Nothing "illegal" about that either under the Treaty of Waitangi or outside it.
It would have been military suicide to leave a group of potentially hostile fifth columnists to the rear of the troops, astride their line of supply, and close to an undefended Auckland.
Anyone refusing to take a loyalty oath and electing instead to retire to the Waikato and stand with the Kingites made their bed and got to lie in it, I say.
ENDS
The Kingites and their affiliates claim that Crown land confiscations and the Crown's "invasion" of the Waikato in the 1860s were "illegal."
Bollocks!
The Treaty of Waitangi was not with a collective "Maori." It was with tribes in a constant state of war with one another and inhabiting two main landmasses. The was no country until the English came and created one under the sovereignty vested in Queen Victoria by the Treaty of Waitangi.
Some 512 chiefs signed the TOW, and a substantial minority in the centre of the North Island (Tainui, Tuhoe, and Tuwharetoa) refused to, meaning there were probably around 600 of these individually insignificant groups.
Under the legal doctrine of privity of contract, only the parties to an agreement are bound by it, or can claim its protection in the event of a breach. Tainui never signed the Treaty, so the Kingites should never have been included in the Treaty settlement process.
Back in the day, the Kingites loudly proclaimed that because Tainui didn't sign the Treaty, they could organise as they saw fit on their own land, including electing a 'king" to govern themselves.
I'm inclined to agree with that view.
However, all that changed once the Kingites started projecting power outside their rohe.
They began a series of escalating provocations that led Governor Grey to first issue strongly-worded warnings, then move into the Waikato to put the Kingites in their place.
Followers of the self-anointed Tainui upstart ‘king’ were either aggressive challengers to the Crown’s sovereignty (tribes who hadn’t signed the Treaty of Waitangi) or rebels (Treaty signatories who’d repudiated their undertaking by mobbing up with the Kingites).
The Kingites and their allies refused to accept the legitimate government, had tried to set up a rival kingdom, and to force Europeans out of their territory. They’d fought against the Government in Taranaki, threatened Auckland, and murdered settlers.
After war, some of their land was confiscated. This was legitimate under law -- as well as according to Maori custom -- and the Kingites had been forewarned.
Only about 4 percent of NZ's land area was eventually – and quite rightly – confiscated from tribes who'd challenged the Queen's sovereignty and lost. They had been warned in advance this would happen if they didn’t pull their heads in.
When conflict was brewing in 1863, Governor Grey made this crystal clear:
“Those who wage war against Her Majesty, or remain in arms, threatening the lives of Her peaceable subjects, must take the consequences of their acts, and they must understand that they will forfeit the right to possession of their lands as guaranteed to them by the Treaty of Waitangi.”
Here’s Sir Apirana Ngata on this matter:
“Some have said that these confiscations were wrong and that they contravened the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi. The [majority of the] chiefs placed in the hands of the Queen of England, the sovereignty and the authority to make laws. Some sections of the Maori people violated that authority. War arose from this and blood was spilled. The law came into operation and land was taken in payment. This itself is a Maori custom—revenge, plunder to avenge a wrong. It was their own chiefs who ceded that right to the Queen. The confiscations cannot therefore be objected to in the light of the Treaty.”
Once peace was finally made, the Kingites were treated as British subjects, a far more benevolent fate than they'd have suffered if conquered by another Maori tribe, and indeed considerably better treatment than the Tainui tribes had meted out to others during the Musket Wars of the 1830s.
Here’s how Tainui invaders conducted themselves in the Taranaki at the sacking of the Puke-Rangiora pa:
"It is said that twelve hundred of Te Ati-Awa and their allied hapus were killed or captured in the final overthrow of the pa. The greater part of the prisoners were women and children, and these were driven back into the pa to be killed or tortured at leisure. That day Waikato glutted themselves on the bodies of the slain lying in gore around the pa.
"The next morning the prisoners were brought out, and those amongst them whose faces were well tattooed were decapitated on a block of wood, with the view of making mokaikai, or preserving them, as trophies to be taken back to the country of the Waikatos. Others, with little or none of this decoration, were immediately killed by a blow on the skull. It is asserted that Te Wherowhero [the first Maori ‘king’] — the head chief of Waikato and principal leader of the invaders — sat in the gateway of the pa, and as the prisoners were brought to him he killed one hundred and fifty of them by a blow on the head with his jadeite mere named 'Whakarewa,' and that he only desisted because his arm became swollen with the exercise. The headless bodies were thrown across a trench, which was dug to carry off the blood lying in pools about the plateau on which Puke-Rangiora stood. Others, less fortunate, were killed with every conceivable form of torture; some again were cast into the ovens alive, to the amusement of their sanguinary foes. Young children and lads were cut open by incisions made hastily down the stomach, enviscerated and roasted on sticks placed round large fires, made of the palisading of the pa.”
Interesting to note that twice as many Maori were killed by other Maori in this one massacre, than in all the fighting between Maori and colonial forces in the entire Waikato War.
Grey was entirely justified in putting down an increasingly aggressive foreign power on his doorstep that threatened the peace and security of the colony. As victor, the Crown was entitled to deal with the vanquished Kingites as it saw fit, including taking land off them as punishment for picking a fight.
Let it be said again: the victor dealt remarkably mercifully with the vanquished.
If the Ihumatao land in South Auckland was in fact confiscated from Ihumatao Maori in the 1860s -- something nobody has done more than assert without providing proof -- the Crown was fully within its rights in asking them to take a loyalty oath to establish their peaceable intentions.
Nothing "illegal" about that either under the Treaty of Waitangi or outside it.
It would have been military suicide to leave a group of potentially hostile fifth columnists to the rear of the troops, astride their line of supply, and close to an undefended Auckland.
Anyone refusing to take a loyalty oath and electing instead to retire to the Waikato and stand with the Kingites made their bed and got to lie in it, I say.
ENDS
