Dancing with the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864-1885 - Hardcover

Michael Belgrave (author)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1869408691 ISBN 13: 9781869408695

Publisher: Auckland University Press, 2018

Synopsis

After the battle of Orakau in 1864 and the end of the war in the Waikato, Tāwhiao, the second Māori King, and his supporters were forced into an armed isolation in the Rohe Pōtae, the King Country. For the next twenty years, the King Country operated as an independent state – a land governed by the Māori King where settlers and the Crown entered at risk of their lives. Dancing with the King is the story of the King Country when it was the King’s country, and of the negotiations between the King and the Queen that finally opened the area to European settlement. For twenty years, the King and the Queen’s representatives engaged in a dance of diplomacy involving gamesmanship, conspiracy, pageantry and hard headed politics, with the occasional act of violence or threat of it. While the Crown refused to acknowledge the King’s legitimacy, the colonial government and the settlers were forced to treat Tāwhiao as a King, to negotiate with him as the ruler and representative of a sovereign state, and to accord him the respect and formality that this involved. Colonial negotiators even made Tāwhiao offers of settlement that came very close to recognising his sovereign authority. Dancing with the King is a riveting account of a key moment in New Zealand history as an extraordinary cast of characters – Tāwhiao and Rewi Maniapoto, Donald McLean and George Grey – negotiated the role of the King and the Queen, of Māori and Pākehā, in New Zealand.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Belgrave is a professor of history at Massey University, the author of Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories (Auckland University Press, 2005) and From Empire's Servant to Global Citizen: A History of Massey University (Massey University Press, 2016), co-author of Social policy in Aotearoa New Zealand (Oxford University Press, 2008) and co-editor of The Treaty on the Ground: Where We Are Headed, and Why It Matters (Massey University Press, 2017). He was previously research manager of the Waitangi Tribunal and has continued to work on Treaty of Waitangi research and settlements, providing substantial research reports into a wide number of the Waitangi Tribunal's inquiries. He received a Marsden Fund award in 2015 for study into the re-examination of the causes of the New Zealand wars of the 1860s.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Dancing With The King

The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864–1885

By Michael Belgrave

Auckland University Press

Copyright © 2017 Michael Belgrave
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-86940-869-5

Contents

Acknowlegements, 
Chapter One: Stalemate, 1864, 
Chapter Two: Making the King Country, 1864–1869, 
Chapter Three: 'Kati – Kati – Kati me mutu': Accommodation with Violence, 1869– 1873, 
Chapter Four: The First Steps: McLean and Tawhiao, 1875–1876, 
Chapter Five: Impasse: Four Hui with Grey, 1878–1879, 
Chapter Six: Resisting the Court and Courting the Townsfolk: Rewi and Tawhiao, 1879–1882, 
Chapter Seven: Tawhara Kai Atua: A Bridge to Nowhere, 
Chapter Eight: 'In the place of the King': Bryce and the Leaders of the Rohe Potae, 
Chapter Nine: The Dance of the Petitions, 
Chapter Ten: Tawhiao goes to London, 
Chapter Eleven: John Ballance: Paternalist and Land Activist, 
Chapter Twelve: Finale: Turning the Sod, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
List of Maps, 
Index, 
Plates, 

CHAPTER 1

Stalemate

1864

In late march 1864, rewi maniapoto of ngati maniapoto and raukawa was one of the leaders of a small band of fighters who were caught defending an ill-chosen and poorly prepared position at Orakau. They faced well-trained, better armed and more experienced troops led by Duncan Cameron, one of the British Empire's most respected generals. The defenders possessed shotguns and some rifles but were also armed with pounamu and whalebone mere and taiaha. They had little ammunition, resorting to using peach stones and wooden projectiles for bullets. With little food or water, outnumbered six to one, these supporters of the Kingitanga (the Maori King movement) held out for three days, suffering heavy casualities when breaking through the lines that encircled them. In the escape, Ahumai Te Paerata of Raukawa took four hits to her body and one that blew away her thumb. She escaped with one of her brothers, but her father and another brother died in the siege, as did around 150 of the defenders. Some had been protecting their homes, such as those from the related tribes of Ngati Maniapoto, Ngati Apakura and Raukawa. Others had come from much further afield, Ngati Whare and Ngai Tuhoe from the Urewera, and Ngati Porou from the East Coast.

Heroism, defiance and defeat soon became enshrined in the mythology of the country's origins, defining Orakau as 'a place of sadness and glory, the spot where the Kingites made their last hopeless stand for independence, holding heroically to nationalism and a broken cause', as the war's most important early historian, James Cowan, put it. According to the myth, when Cameron offered them surrender, the defenders replied, 'E hoa, ka whawhai tonu ahau ki a koe, ake, ake!' ('Friend, I shall fight against you for ever, for ever!'). When the women and children were offered safe passage, a voice from the pa called out, 'Ki te mate nga tane, me mate ano nga wahine me nga tamariki' ('If the men die, the women and children must die also'). That their escape was marked by rape and the brutal killing of the surrendered played no part in the myth that emerged. The battle became the defining event of the campaign, the one that proved most useful in creating a nation-making image of valiant but doomed Maori pitted against the inevitable force of a superior European world. George Grey used the events at Orakau to describe Maori resistance as 'an act of unconquerable courage upon the part of ... adversaries, who fell before superior numbers and weapons – an act which the future inhabitants of New Zealand will strive to imitate, but can never surpass'.

'Rewi's last stand', as the battle was soon labelled, marked the end of the Waikato War. Over a million acres of confiscated land in the Waikato was now available for settler towns and farms, and hundreds of thousands more quickly fell into the hands of Auckland speculators through land purchases. Cameron's troops moved on, to Tauranga and the East Coast and back to Taranaki where the war had begun. Historians, like camp followers, have moved with them, finding new heroes or villains in later war leaders, in Kereopa Te Rau and Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki, in Titokowaru and in the passive resisters to military aggression, Te Whiti-o-Rongomai, Tohu Kakahi and Rua Kenana. The one recent exception has been Vincent O'Malley's locally focused, history of the invasion of the Waikato, which explores the consequences for the region from that time until the present.

For the Waikato people, Orakau signified the end of one form of resistance and the beginning of another. The defeat expelled them and their allies southward to beyond the points of navigation of the Waikato and Waipa rivers. Led by Tawhiao, the second Maori King, they retreated into an armed exile in the Rohe Potae, the King Country, in the midst of their Tainui relations and allies, Ngati Maniapoto, Ngati Apakura, Ngati Tuwharetoa and the iwi of the upper Whanganui. It was a massive area from the Puniu in the north to the Whanganui in the south, and from Taupo west to the sea. From 1865 to 1886, Maori and Pakeha recognised the aukati – the border between the Queen's authority and the King's. South of the aukati, the King's people were contained, but they remained an independent state beyond the control of the New Zealand government's police and land surveyors, tax collectors and railway builders. Europeans travelled into the area at their own risk, and a few met violent deaths. Their killers, in a constant reminder of the limits of colonial power, remained at large within the King's court and defiantly beyond the grasp of colonial law. The Rohe Potae also became the refuge for Maori who had taken up armed resistance to the Crown, most notably Te Kooti from 1872. For years, he sat audaciously beyond the legal authority of the Queen and the vengeance of those communities he had ravaged on the East Coast.

The war had turned the Kingitanga into a secessionist movement. Prior to July 1863, the tribes of the Waikato and central North Island retained political independence, while recognising the mana of both Governor and Queen. The establishment of the Rohe Potae, in the aftermath of the war, created an independent constitutional entity with its own borders and its own centralised authority. The Waikato war was in effect a civil war and, like the American Civil War, it led to the creation of an independent breakaway state. Yet unlike the American South, this state was as much the creation of a successful war against the Kingitanga, as it was a deliberate act of secession by the Kingitanga itself.

For twenty years after the war, while most of the country's remaining Maori land passed through the Native Land Court and was opened up for settlement, the King Country remained beyond the reach of the court. The authority of the King, Tawhiao, and his allied rangatira extended over the King Country while the Queen's authority did not. The end of the Waikato Wars marked the beginning of a cold war between King and Queen.

Dancing with the King is a history of this cold war and the diplomatic dance that accompanied it. For twenty years, neither the forces of the King nor the Queen were prepared to return to active warfare, but neither side recognised the legitimate authority of the other. Negotiations between King and Queen took place as a form of dance. The Rohe Potae leaders and their settler counterparts engaged in acts of diplomacy that involved gamesmanship, conspiracy, pageantry and hardheaded politics, with the occasional act of violence or threat of it thrown in.

Those negotiations were filled with irony. Those well-read, articulate, Christian founders of the Kingitanga during the 1850s gave their leader the title King, and by doing so forced on those governors and colonial officials who wished to deal with the Kingitanga the language of diplomacy. While the Crown refused to acknowledge the King's legitimacy, the colonial government and the settlers were compelled to treat Tawhiao as a King, to negotiate with him as the ruler and representative of a sovereign state, and to accord him the respect and formality this involved. Colonial negotiators Donald McLean and George Grey even made offers for settlement with the King that came close to recognising his sovereign authority. Not only that but, at least in the early years, the colonial government saw the King's role as essential in maintaining order and in shifting from a society riven by war to one with a settled peace. For some time, the colonial state needed the King.

At the centre of all this diplomacy, until 1882 was the person of King Tawhiao in his court. Never far away was Rewi Maniapoto, who proved as adept a politician and a statesman as he had been a courageous defender of Orakau. After 1882 the colonial government sidelined the King and other leaders took up the role of negotiator: Wahanui Huatare and John Ormsby for Ngati Maniapoto, and Te Heuheu for Ngati Tuwharetoa. Wahanui was a giant of a man, big of voice and a shrewd negotiator. A British visitor said of him that, 'No one can look at the splendid physique and commanding presence of Wahanui without feeling that he was born to rule his fellows a personage of immense stature, stately mien, symmetry and form, with intelligent features, the beau-ideal of a Maori orator.' Unlike Tawhiao and Rewi, Wahanui was able to reach agreements between 1882 and 1885.

For the Crown, Donald McLean, the Minister of Native Affairs, began the peace-making process in 1869 when he met many of the Rohe Potae's leaders, but not Tawhiao, just inside the aukati. Following almost a decade of hesitant diplomacy between intermediaries, the first official negotiations involving the King in person occurred in 1875. After McLean's death in 1877, there were several meetings between the King and Premier Sir George Grey, and John Sheehan, the Minister of Native Affairs. In the early 1880s the Crown was represented by John Bryce, after he had dispersed Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi's community at Parihaka. In 1883 Bryce granted an amnesty to those in sanctuary in the Rohe Potae and gained major concessions on the introduction of the Native Land Court and the initial work on building the railway. Then, later in 1885, John Ballance engaged in the last negotiations to open up the Rohe Potae for the railway and for the Native Land Court.

These negotiations were often extraordinary events, which went on for many days and involved many thousands of participants, including representatives from all the country's major tribes. Yet, despite the time involved, the actual discussions that took place between the King and the Queen's ministers were often elliptical and brief. For most of the negotiations, there was a fundamental impasse, and for his part, the King needed to assert his authority to deal exclusively with the land, and to be able to veto its survey and sale and the building of roads, railways and port facilities. All of these activities had proven the vanguard for European settlement and loss of Maori autonomy. His efforts were not just directed against the colonial government. He also had to work to ensure that his chiefly supporters held the line, preserving the aukati. Above all, the Native Land Court had to be kept out.

The Crown on the other hand was just as dogged in insisting that the Native Land Court be introduced to the Rohe Potae and the Queen's authority be recognised by all. The colonial government's diplomatic aims were little different from Grey's in 1863 when he announced that he would 'dig around' the Kingitanga till it fell. Confiscation was the unbridgeable difference. The King insisted that the land taken in the Waikato be returned, and to his control, while the return of land already settled by Europeans was non-negotiable for the government. Surprisingly, however, the government's need to open up the King Country and its confidence in peaceful resolution of the impasse led to offers in 1875 and again in 1878 to recognise the authority of the King, which would have been unthinkable in the 1860s, and, unfortunately for Tawhiao who rejected Grey's offer in 1879, just as unthinkable by 1883.

* * *

This is a diplomatic history, because the participants found the language and forms of diplomacy useful or even unavoidable in the telling of it. From 1864 through at least 1882, Maori leaders and colonial government negotiators both adopted, however reluctantly on the European side, the language of sovereignty and diplomacy in their dealings with each other. This was at the heart of their middle ground, a common language with meanings that were little influenced by cultural differences. Whatever the distinct cultural backgrounds of the Kingitanga and the colonial government, this is the story of the common language available to each in attempting to create a formal and durable peace. It may not have been quite the formal language of European diplomacy, although both colonial ministers and Kingitanga chiefs appreciated the etiquette of international negotiations, but their dialogue was in the language of two separate sovereigns talking to each other.

If the language was taken from European diplomacy, then the setting and form came out of the Maori world. One of the most significant aspects of these negotiations until 1882 was that they took place on Maori ground and according to Maori protocol. The hui (meetings) attended by McLean, Grey and, at least initially, by Bryce were subject to the kawa (protocol) of the marae, to the rituals of powhiri (rituals of encounter, welcome) and manaakitanga (hospitality, kindness), and to timeframes established by the hosts. Perhaps surprisingly, the leaders of the Rohe Potae were also able to take the ritual and protocols of hui into the European towns, sometimes explicitly, such as in the 1878 meeting between Grey and Rewi at Waitara, but at other times, such as in the formal welcome of Tawhiao to Hamilton in 1881, the hui form developed in a European setting almost intuitively. The leading citizens of Hamilton lined up to greet the King and he responded with whaikorero (speechmaking) and waiata (song), before hand-shaking replaced the hongi (pressing of noses in greeting). Such was the cultural authority of the Kingitanga in this period of political accommodation.

These rituals of diplomacy were a form of performance, where control over the place and form of the discussions often reflected the respective power of the participants. After 1882, Bryce deliberately attempted to take cultural control of the negotiations, to shift them to the Queen's side of the aukati and into a European format. His reasons were varied. He did not want to be seen to be forced to make concessions because he was in a Maori community, but he was also conscious of how McLean and Grey had been drawn into long Maori events, which dragged on for many days and yet failed to reach an agreement. He was far too impatient a man to sit idly at the side while the Kingitanga engaged in what seemed like interminable discussions amongst itself. Both Bryce and Ballance were able to take the negotiations into the European world, and that shift was a sign that Maori power to force concessions was being eroded.

If the Queen's representatives were impelled for some time to accommodate themselves to the kawa of the marae, the King's side took up the forms of British constitutional democracy. Particularly towards the later period in the negotiations, after 1880, Maori leaders attempted to influence and benefit from European public opinion while also negotiating with the colonial government. Tawhiao's great progresses to the Waikato towns, to Auckland and then to New South Wales and Victoria on his way to London were exercises in popular diplomacy, and in this they were hugely successful. His visit to London was a triumph as he became the hit of the 1884 season, the darling of the popular press, fêted by politicians and society leaders, and a familiar face in the royal box at London theatres. All this occurred after his constitutional power to control the lands of the Rohe Potae had all but evaporated. The Rohe Potae leaders also drew on the constitutional tools available from the colonial state: they used petitions, sometimes as much against each other as against the Crown; Wahanui appeared before the bar of the House of Representatives; and there was talk of Rewi and Tawhiao becoming members of the Legislative Chamber.

* * *

Some aspects of Maori history have become increasingly focused on the unique nature of Maori cultural identity, assuming it far more likely for European and Maori negotiators to talk past each other rather than to communicate effectively. Without in any way trying to deny the importance of Maori spiritual and cultural values and practices as they influenced this negotiation, this book focuses on and to a large extent celebrates Maori and Pakeha efforts to understand each other and come to common understanding, including understanding where their positions differed. Such an approach explores the political rather than the cultural gap between the parties. What follows acknowledges the degree of intellectual rigour and political creativity that went into attempting to overcome the practical difficulties of peace-making after a divisive and destructive war.

Both sides were able to reduce the complex issues of negotiation down to their essentials: responsibility for the war, sovereignty, the confiscation of land and the introduction of European institutions, most notably the Native Land Court. The negotiations between the colonial government and the Kingitanga may have swirled around the recognition of the Queen's authority, and survey, telegraph building and road construction, but at the centre was the Native Land Court – keeping it out or, as a very last resort, containing it. By the 1880s, the Maori world was almost completely united in its hostility to the court as much as by its dependence upon it. For this reason, the negotiations between the King and the colonial government and between the colonial government and the rangatira of the aukati had implications for the whole Maori world, not only for the Rohe Potae.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Dancing With The King by Michael Belgrave. Copyright © 2017 Michael Belgrave. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1869408691
• ISBN 13: 9781869408695
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 436