[11/5/96. This paper is distributed for purposes of discussion by the Constructs of the Social and Cultural Worlds of Antiquity Group of the AAR/ASOR/SBL, Annual Meeting, New Orleans, November 1996. It is strictly a working paper in progress, is not for publication, and may not be reproduced in any form without the author's permission Ð d.gunn@tcu.edu]

Prolegomena to some reflections on the Bible and dispossession
in Aotearoa/New Zealand, North America, and Palestine/Israel

David M. Gunn
Texas Christian University

It did seem an anomaly that in this wide world there should be, as Seeley puts, it, "On the one side men without property, on the other side property waiting for men." The problem was how to provide outlets for the starving people, and open up waste lands for their possession and use. [Rev. James Chisholm, Fifty Years Syne: A Jubilee Memorial of the Presbyterian Church of Otago, Dunedin, 1898, p. 12]

* * *

Israeli authorities have approved plans to build nearly 4,000 new homes in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, putting into practice a government decision to lift restrictions on settlement expansion there and in the Gaza Strip . . . [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 20, 1996]

Eitan Mazouz is 6 years old and knows little about the neighbors beyond the barbed wire. But of one thing he is sure. "They hate us," he says in a small voice. Palestinian police and Israeli soldiers waged gunbattles in the terraced hills of olive and fig trees just a quarter of a mile from the Jewish settlement where Eitan was born and lives. During the fighting, Eitan stood pressed against the wall of his classroom, crying and waiting for his mother, Evita, to pick him up and take him home. [Evita] Mazouz, 38, acknowledged that she worries every day until all of her six children are safely home. But she says she won't leave PsagotÐa community of 1,000 now protected by tanks and reserve troopsÐeven if violence erupts again. The 145,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are the first line of defense against Palestinians eager to push out the Jews, Mazouz said. "If I live in Tel Aviv, then they will come to Tel Aviv." . . . In Psagot, settlers are getting ready for a possible attack from Ramallah, a town of 50,000 Palestinians that begins on the next hill-top . . . .

Psagot residents are deeply religious, and many believe that they are the central players in a divine drama. They say the 1967 Mideast War in which Israel captured the West Bank and GazaÐparts of the biblical Land of IsraelÐwas God's signal that redemption was near and that they should settle the land.

Many of them learned from bitter family histories to distrust non Jews. . . . Mazouz is from London, where her brother was beaten up by thugs after they spotted him wearing his Jewish school scarf. She often tucked her Star of David necklace into her blouse because her parents told her not to be conspicuous. In Psagot, she said, she is teaching her children to be proud Jews. "I want my children to know that this is their country, and I feel that this is the only way," she said, holding little Eitan close to her. "If the Arabs won't agree to us living here, then what can we do? We have to fight for our land." [From article by Karen Laub for the Associated Press, appearing in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 5, 1996].

New Zealand agreed yesterday to settle the biggest land claim ever filed by indigenous Maoris and to apologize 152 years after colonizers took over nearly half the country. Beginning in 1844, the Ngai Tahu people lost 80 percent, or 86 million acres, of [the] South Island. The tribe was left in deprivation for generations. . . . Under the settlement, the Ngai Tahu will receive a land-cash package worth $117 million and regain some traditional fishing rights. The government also agree to recognize the Maori names of 78 places on the island, along with their European names. The highest peak, 12,349-foot Mount Cook, will also be known as Aoraki. [Fort Worth Star Telegram, October 5, 1996]

* * *

"They hate us." The categories of dispossession are often stark. To "them" the notion that it is the Jews who are the object of dispossession from the land would be risible were it not in their eyes such a breathtaking inversion of a catastrophic reality. The stark terms and sharp polarities of the discourse of dispossession are often shot through with complicating irony, though the construction of that irony is always, of course, strictly a matter of the location of perception. To me, who is neither "them" or "us" (but only in the most literal senseÐmy implication in both categories is in fact quite deep, as will become apparent) Evita Mazouz's notion is a sign of tragic naivete, a naivete that any student of colonial expansion meets constantly in the source material deriving from "settlers." When set alongside other stories, from "other" sources, usually such settler stories begin to lose the hard edges of their boundaries, take on other huesÐtones, tensions, ironiesÐand perhaps they may even fragment.
About the same time as this newspaper article I watched on television another young mother being interviewed, very sympathetically, in another West Bank "settlement." She was deeply saddened by the violence. "They do not have peace in their hearts," she said. "We have peace in our hearts," she said, "but they do not. How can there be peace in the land if they cannot learn first to have peace in their hearts." The sincerity of her sorrow touched me. Yet her words could be construed as but a domestic version of Prime Minister Netanyahu's rather less touchingÐbecause disingenuousÐpolitical challenge to the Palestinians on the main news a couple of days later, in Washington after meeting with President Clinton and King Hussein: "They must renounce all resort to violence."
The settlement is a neutral, even benign, social act. The problem of peace lies in the heart of the Other. Ringing Palestinian townships with tanks is not resort to violence but deploying the instruments of peace with security. Violence is what "they" do. So in the eighteenth century the native American Indians in the East were asked to accept that the establishment of European forts pushed deep into their territory was for their own protection and economic advantage. And likewise when Pontiac's last war tapped into native American anger and frustration and left a swath of dead settlers, men, women, and children, European American settlers reacted in outrage at this treacherous assault on the innocent and the peaceful, this attempt to drive them (Europeans) off their hard-won land. [Jacobs 1985:59-103]
I remember quite distinctly, as a young boy in New Zealand, learning of the Hauhaus. I read about them, was taught about them in lessons on the history of the white settlement of New Zealand history. Hate, fanaticism, and savage violence were what I remember they stood for. Fortunately, I learned, they were stopped in their tracks by "our" soldiers, but not before they had massacred men, women, and childrenÐ"us." Some Maoris in our history I had learned to admire as brave warriorsÐTe Rauparaha, Rewi Maniapoto, and Honi Heke who three times, and each time more recklessly, cut down the British flag pole at Russell in the Bay of Islands (a quintessentially "British" thing to do, I thought). But the HauhausÐthis is where "paganism" and the "native" conjoined to produce the "savage." It is ironic, really. The Hauhaus were the fighting men of an indigenous religious movement of the early 1860s called Pai MarireÐ"the Good and the Peaceful." I don't remember the "peace" part ever being mentioned or explained. (Now I might be given Heretaunga Pat Baker's novel to read, The Strongest God.) I only remember the story of the fanatics and their savagery.

* * *

Prospects of peace, however, were shattered by the rise of the Pai marire religion or Hauhauism, a cult which mingled the worst elements of primitive religion with a debased form of Christianity. Its adherents made a rallying point for the implacable sections of the Maoris. [The Cambridge History of the British Empire, 1933, p. 138]

* * *

Colonial expansion takes, of course, many forms. But one of the dimensions of the European incursions into Northeast America and New Zealand that has most struck me is the degree to which from the earliest stages of incursion economic entanglements produce interdependence between the immigrants and the indigenous. Rarely is it easy to define "us" and "them" as distinct entities with wholly conflicting interests. Thus Maoris and Pakehas ("white" people) quickly found a mutual advantage in trading manufactured goods, including muskets, for produce and labor. As guns rapidly changed the technology of traditional Maori warfare the control and maintenance of supply became matters of strategic importance for the survival of individual Maori tribes. The move from a subsistence economy meant that resistance to Pakeha encroachment could not simply be formulated in terms of driving the settlers into the sea. Many Maoris in the early decades of white settlement considered Europeans to be valuable. They looked, therefore, for a rapprochement which would enable the new economic order to continue but which would retain Maori independence within it. For a time the two communities maintained zones of political independence which intersected economically.

Economic interaction was vital to both zones . . . generally Maori markets, primary production, and coastal and river transport under-pinned the economy of the European settlements. These settlements in turn provided the Maori with markets for their own goods, and trading-centres for the distribution of European goods. . . Economically, the two [zones] were mutually dependent. Even the most staunch Maori opponents of British expansion, in the midst of the war period, found this situation satisfactory. In March 1863, a Ngati Ruanui spokesman noted that, as a result of the Taranaki war, 'the only land in European hands [in Taranaki] was the town'ÐNew Plymouth. 'As for the town,' he informed Governor Grey, 'let it be; it was very right that there should be a market for their produce.' (Belich 1988: 303)

The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 by over 500 Maori chiefs and an agent of the British crown. In the understanding of the British, the treaty ceded sovereignty of the country to Britain and gave the Crown "an exclusive right of pre-emption of such lands as the Maori people wished to sell. In return, the Maori were guaranteed full rights of ownership of their lands, forests, fisheries and other prized possession" (Orange 1987:1). (They were also guaranteed the rights of British subjects and the protection of the Crown.) When shortly thereafter the British made some attempts to turn this nominal sovereignty into a more substantive assertion of control they met with severe rebuffs.

In 1843, a posse of armed settlers set out to teach Te Rauparaha that he was subject to British sovereignty in fact. At Wairau, it was routed. . . [T]his was the first and last settler commando [expedition] ever mounted in New Zealand. . . [O]ne reason why New Zealand settlers did not treat the Maoris as their Australian counterparts did the Aborigines was that, when they tried, they got killed. [Belich, 304]

When the British governor employed imperial troops to extend his authority in the north a few years later these were checked by Hone Heke and Kawiti: "in the succeeding decade the government consequently did less encroaching. Other chiefs in other districts did not fight their own 'Northern Wars' because they did not have to. Thus checked, and believing Maori independence was fading naturally, the British were more circumspect between 1848 and 1860Ðthe heyday of New Zealand race relations" (Belich, 305).
As in North America, however, land became a fundamental issue. Settler hunger for land and the connivance of governmentsÐwho placed their short-term responsibility to the settlers (or the political powers of the "home" country) before their treaty obligations to the indigenous peoplesÐled to the polarizing of the communities and to wars which, in the case of New Zealand, dragged on for more than two decades, until 1870. They were North Island wars. In the South Island, where the Maori population was relatively sparse, the Pakeha had acquired the bulk of the land and asserted authority with relative ease. Indeed in 1864, as the latest war in the North Island began to look unwinnable to many Pakehas, the province of Otago petitioned the British government to let the South Island go its separate way on the grounds that it could no longer sustain the financing of what they saw as an increasingly futile endeavor [Belich, 198]. In the North the war itself exacerbated the land question. In the Waikato war of the 1860s against the Maori King Movement the government committed itself to a policy of extensive confiscation of Maori land, ostensibly as "punishment" but in reality as a means of financing the warÐthrough sales and as payment for service in the MilitiaÐand with an eye to effecting the total subjugation of the "rebellious" tribes. As it happens, the policy proved less effective than planned because the government, despite an imperial army of 10,000 troops or more, found that subduing the Waikato was a much tougher proposition than they had supposed, so that for some time there was little new land to sell. (When it did confiscate, the land was often that of the weakest participants while major players went relatively unscathed. The discrepancies did not go unnoticed.)

The Maoris lost in the end, and this had grave consequences for them, of which casualties, economic damage, and some demoralization were only the most obvious. Defeat reduced the political cohesion of some tribes, as it did the power and influence of the main supra-tribal organization: the King Movement. This in turn reduced the capacity of the Maori to control social and cultural assimilation, the application of coercive British law, and the alienation of land. Confiscation was not so important. It fell mainly on three or four tribes, and of the 3.5 million acres theoretically confiscated, only 1.6 million were actually occupied. But the diminution of Maori power and political cohesion enabled the British, with the help of the Native Land Court machinery established in 1865, to inaugurate a new spasm of land-selling similar in scale to that of 1840-55. By 1891 the Maoris retained only eleven million of the North Island's twenty-eight million acres. Moreover, land owned by the Maoris was no longer a broadly accurate definition of the extent of their autonomous zone. A substantial minority of Maori land was leased, or held in small blocks scattered through Pakeha territory, and was therefore under British control. [Belich, 305]

James Belich, whose fascinating account of the New Zealand wars I have been following here, suggests that race relations in New Zealand can be understood in terms of the growth, contraction, and interaction of two zones (302-3).

Broadly speaking, the zones were the geographical areas predominantly controlled by one people or the other, but this territorial definition is not absolute. Power could be divided according to kinds of issue as well as geographical areas. The rulers of a part of one zone might have great influence over part of the other. They might even exercise a kind of suzeraintyÐthe right of general control over a semi-independent or autonomous entity. But they did not rule; they did not exercise a decisive internal influence, they did not impose the major social constraints, and they rarely supplied the main coercive power which backed them. The zones were not totally independent of each other, but they were autonomous. [302]

The European zone took shape first with the small mission and trading stations that established themselves about 1820 usually managing most of their own affairs under the general suzerainty of the local Maori chief. In 1839 the British government, after considerable reluctance, decided to become officially involved in the country and to allow organized immigration. In 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. The European zone then expanded greatly. In the South Island, as I have already indicated, the settler zone rapidly gained overwhelming predominance. In the North Island, the Maori zone predominated until 1863: Maoris controlled most of the land and (until 1861) most of the people. "Some historians acknowledge this," writes Belich, "but it has not been fully incorporated into the orthodoxy. New Zealand historiography has yet to recover from the fact that, in 1840, a few London map-makers coloured the North Island British red."
The corollary of the expansion of the British zone was the alienation of Maori land.

Maoris sold for many reasons: to attract Pakeha, to meet debts, to gain capital for the development of remaining land or for arms and ammunition. One owner of a block might also sell to revenge himself on a rival co-owner, or to make the ultimate assertion of ownership in the case of a disputed claim. Willingness to sell land did not necessarily indicate naivety, demoralization, or social dislocation.

This gradual dissipation of Maori land by individuals and individual tribes could only be stopped by tribes and consortiums of tribes asserting their authority to veto land sales. The King Movement Ðan alliance of tribes under an elected king (paramount chief)Ðattempted to do just this in the 1860s, and it was in some part the enforcement of this veto that led to the Waikato wars. Thus, as Belich argues, "Maori autonomy and the capacity to constrain land sales were . . . inextricably linked" (303). At this stage the zones were politically independent of each other but involved social and cultural interaction and some legal and administrative crossover. Some Maoris were willing to use British magistrates and legal apparatus, though usually only selectively and as supplement to their own systems.
While the autonomous Maori zone began to disappear in the late 1860s and was obviously greatly affected by the final loss of the wars, Maori autonomy persisted in places for years. Centers of resistance continued. One reason for this, argues Belich, "was less Pakeha benevolence than latent Maori military power, and the after-effects of formidable resistance." Most notably, until well into the mid-1880s, the King Country (in the north central North Island) was effectively an independent state, "making and enforcing its own laws, conducting its own affairs, sheltering fugitives from Pakeha justice, and killing Europeans who crossed its borders without permission." Far from isolated, it was a center of economic and cultural activity involving many Maoris outside its borders (306, citing Sorrenson). It was, in size, about one sixth of the area of the North Island, including much rugged hill country. Even after resistance ceased to be realistic these centers continued to provide a focus of Maori identity, and organizations and movements emanating from them exerted important influence (on both Maori and Pakeha) far into the twentieth century.
Curiously, another way in which Maori autonomy was subsequently conserved was through what Belich calls "centres of collaboration"Ð"collaboration" in the narrow sense of alliance with the government. The role of the kupapa, Maori forces in the service of the colonial government, is a sensitive subject. They have been judged with approval for foresight in seeing the futility of resistance. Belich, on the other hand, is obliged by his own analysis of the wars to acknowledge that the Maoris might well have won had they not been divided against each otherÐas had been their custom long before the Europeans arrived. Particularly after the departure of the British regular troops, when the British Imperial government effectively refused to continue to underwrite the war, the kupapa were often the major fighting forces on the colonial government side. As a result, the wars ended with a number of Maori tribes allied to the settlers.
The blessings of this arrangement, for the Maoris, were mixed. Much of the land sold in the splurge of land-selling that followed the cessation of the wars was sold by kupapa tribes. By the same token many found themselves ensnared in the sometimes less than admirable machinery of the Native Land Court and ended dispossessed.

* * *

Consanguineous relationship and rank are reckoned through both sides of the house [male and female], and property, such as land, is transmitted in a similar manner. In the Native Land Courts a Maori claims land through both parents, and the task of defining the ownership of native lands is one for a Solomon. [Elsdon Best, The Maori. 1924, Vol. I, p. 361]

* * *

On the other hand, the kupapa retained their armed power and this enabled some protection of tribal cohesion and, for some, a degree of autonomy. Likewise, because it was undeniable that the kupapa had been vital to the colonists war efforts in the later period of the wars (1865-72), they could not be denied some share in the political and economic arrangements that were a consequence of the war. The four Maori seats in the House of Representatives that were established in 1867 went to kupapa chiefs. Kupapa leaders were appointed to the Legislative Council. Some government jobs were handed over. It could be argued, therefore, that it was the kupapa who established the toehold in the Pakeha political and administrative system that was later to be exploited by Maori politicians of various persuasions and traditions, including Kingites (Belich, 309).
It is not perhaps until the early decades of the twentieth century that the autonomous Maori zone ceased to exist altogether, a century after the arrival of the European settlers with their overwhelming advantage in economic and technological resources. The attenuation of the period over which the change took place meant that "subjugation, when it came, was less complete . . . Language, culture, and identity were preserved. This was beneficial in itself, and provided a springboard for subsequent social and political resurgence" (310). The main reason for the attenuation, argues Belich, was Maori military power.

* * *

"The great threat to the Maori-European symbiosis," argues Belich, speaking of the period before the European zone had come to predominate, "was less a material conflict of interest than a conflict of aspirations":

A situation of parity with, or inferiority to, peoples like the Maori simply did not accord with British expectations. The British were not satisfied with part of the land, part of the economy, or part of the government. But the persistent stereotype of the fat and greedy settler has always been a scapegoat for less tangible factors. British expectations arose, less from individual greed, than from the racial and national attitudes that were part of the Victorian ethos. [304]

For many Europeans it was in the natural order of things that the Maoris should give way to the Europeans and their claims to the land, as the inferior gives way to the superior. This was the age of Darwin and "progress." And inasmuch as the Maoris did at least selectively begin to adopt European (more particularly English) waysÐin commerce and agriculture, in their rapid move to literacy, and in the willingness of many to think favorably of ChristianityÐthe more they were liable to viewed as "salvageable" for civilization. Resistance, on the other hand, tended to confound those who believed that the indigenous race could learn to emulate European civilization and discover true religion (the position of many of the early missionaries), and to confirm those who had always viewed such a possibility with deep scepticism. White people quickly latched on to armed resistance and especially Maori "atrocities" involving the killing of civilians as "proof of [the Maoris'] fundamentally unregenerate character" (Belich, 328). As a newspaper editorial in 1863 put it:

We have dealt with the natives of this country upon a principle radically wrong. We have conceded them rights and privileges which nature has refused to ratify. . . . We have pampered ignorance and misrule, and we now experience their hatred of intelligence and order. The bubble is burst. The Maori is now known to us as what he is, and not as missionaries and philanthropists were willing to believe him. [In reality, the Maori is] a man ignorant and savage, loving darkness and anarchy, hating light and order; a man of fierce, and ungoverned passions, bloodthirsty, cruel, ungrateful, treacherous. [Southern Cross, cited by Belich, 328]

Students of North American history will immediately recognize this "savage" whose nobility was only ever a tenuous thing. A man of darkness and wild passions, cruel andÐthe sine qua non of white accusations against the native American IndianÐtreacherous [cf. Jacobs, 83-93].

My particular interest here lies in the place of the Bible in this ideology of Victorian colonialism. A perusal of documents relating to the settlement of New Zealand suggests that the Bible was implicated in the following main ways:

1. The notion of the "chosen people" is ubiquitous in British (especially English) thought during the nineteenth century (not to speak of earlier). It is, if you like, the English version of "manifest destiny." The term "destiny" crops up repeatedly, often in a specifically Christian understanding (behind which lies the Christian co-option of the biblical "people of Israel") but not infrequently in more secular versions where "civilization" has largely taken the place of "Christianity" (which nevertheless usually sits alongside it) and the spirit of progress (often in the guise of Providence) looks fair to supplant God. The promised land may be one particular land or it may be the many that it was the duty and destiny of the chosen British race to populate and/or govern. Election, then, is one of the essential doctrines of British colonialism.

It is impossible to resolve these facts [viz., that the most numerous in the religions of the empire are first, pagans; second, Mohammedanism; third, Protestants; and fourth, Roman-Catholics) without receiving a deep impression, that the moral state of England is of immeasurable importance to the whole human race. God has placed her in a position to advance or retard the highest interests of our species, such as a nation never occupied before; such as involves a high and unappreciable trust . . . Let it be the cherished hope of your heart, that, in ages to come, the people of other lands will refer to the English, not as the invaders who crushed their ancient dynasty, to introduce a foreign yoke, but as the benefactors who, bringing the light of truth, cast a radiance on the path of their benighted fathers, by which they discovered first of all the way to God, and then to the arts, laws and institutions of civilization; to the interchanges of friendship, and the endearments of home. [Rev. W. Arthur, "The Extent and Moral Statistics of the British Empire," Exeter Hall Lectures, 1845-6 (pp.75, 79)]*

The conviction of election sustained the settlers in the face of the hostility of the indigenous peoples. The following items were written during the New Zealand wars of the 1860s:

A divine mission was given to the colonial subjects of the Crown when New Zealand was given over to the sovereignty of Great Britain, a mission to mature and complete the civilization and Christianity of the native race, which, alas! has been of late years chequered with the renovated rise of heathenish maxims and customs. [Nelson Examiner, March 6th, 1861; letter from "A Patriot"]*

As to the sentimental side of the questionÐthe right of a civilized race to colonize a barbarous country,Ðit is not worth disputing about. If necessary, it might be justified upon the very highest grounds. The fairest portions of the globe were not intended to remain for all time to come the hunting grounds of cannibals. It is the highest duty of a powerful nation to extend the blessings of civilization and Christianity to the utmost of its means. Our right to New Zealand is precisely what our right was to New Holland or to the continent of North America . . . [New Zealand Herald, 31st March, 1864 (p.4); reprinted from Australia and New Zealand Gazette, 9th January, 1864]

The great civilizing peoples of the earth seem to have been deliberately chosen out and allowed to increase out of all proportion to their means of sustenance at home, for the very end that, driven abroad, they might carry civilization to all parts of the world in the train of Christianity. . . . Our present war then is waged in the cause of civilization, and against, not Maoris, but barbarism. [Southern Monthly Magazine: "Our Colonial Scheme"; April 1864 (p.80)]*

The reverse side of destiny is the fate of those chosen not for a high and noble end but for doom. Providence, God's will, can raise some and crush others, and against that determination there is no recourse. In the hands of the faithful, this is powerful theology. There were no few Scottish Calvinists in New Zealand in the 1860s.

What Noah did on his being made aware of his son's wickedness, flowed not from his paternal displeasure, but from the impulse of the Spirit of God, who is righteous in all ways. His providence shows, that parents not unfrequently are punished in the misery of their posterity; and from the subsequent history it will appear, how the Canaanites were terribly enslaved by the posterity of Shem and of Japhet, according to the tenor of Noah's curse. . . . Noah's curse was not causeless, and therefore it came. And it has descended from generation to generation; as no distance from the seat of Canaan's original settlement has hid the people of the curse from its operation, so no interval of time has weakened its power. The tribes of Africa appeared for ages to have escaped it. But when Japhet's posterity discovered and seized on the new world, they supplied themselves with servants from Africa, and the groans and oppression, the tears and the blood of Afric's sons, all proclaim that they own Ham for their father. To this day the slave trade is not suppressed, and the black population of both Americas, yet kept in degrading bondage, testifies to the same truth. Christians justly labour for their freedom, but till the curse remove, the expectation of success is vain. The origin of the original tribes of America, now so nearly exterminated, hangs in great doubt, but if we could trace them to Canaan, their fate would at once be accounted for. [From "Canaan" in Brown's Dictionary of the Holy Bible, Glasgow, Edinburgh and London, 1859 (pp. 176, 177-78)]

2. Expressed in numerous contexts is some version of the biblical passage in Genesis 1:27 where God commands the humans to multiply, subdue the land, and make it fruitful. It is the unquestionable conviction of the colonists that they have the fundamental right and, indeed, obligation to "improve" the land. Constantly the land to be taken is judged to be wild and desolate, egregiously neglected by the native inhabitants. It is the God given right of the British to take the land in order to fulfill the commandment and make the desert bloom:

Though by virtue of our great Circumnavigator's discovery and surveys; though by virtue of that great unwritten law which declares that the earth is God's gift to man, and that a handful of savages shall nowhere lock up millions of acres of a wild garden wherein they pluck no fruit, a body of hard-working, half-starved Englishmen had a right to plant their little Settlements in New Zealand, and to take a portion of the immense unused wilderness to the plough, yet they did not do this. [from Charles Hursthouse, New ZealandÐthe "Britain of the South," 2nd edn., 1861]*

We cannot hesitate for a moment to say that emigration is according to the will of God. Given a world like this, with conveniences in every part for the habitation of man, and one original pair appointed to be father and mother of a raceÐa single centre and not many centres of human increase, and a command such as we read in Genesis, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth"Ðand emigration follows as a necessary consequence. [Rev. J. Stoughton, Anglo-Saxon Colonies, Exeter Hall Lectures 1852-53 (p. 343)]*

[The author asks whether the trappings of EmpireÐwharves, mills, ships, mines, foundries, farms, are inconsistent with religion. He continues:] Quite the contrary. We see in all this man pursuing his divinely appointed vocation, and God's design in process of fulfilment. "Replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over everything that moveth upon the earth." [Rev. L. Wiseman, Things Secular and Things Sacred, Exeter Hall lectures, 1855-6 (pp. 364-65)]*

Why should immigrants who have come hither, and who will still come hither, to cause the wastes to bloom and blossom, and give bread to their fellow men to eat and to spareÐwhy should such be "branded" as greedy, grasping and overreaching, because church missionaries are sympathisers in the land league, and are opposed to everything that does not square with their own idiosyncratical philanthropy? [Auckland Register, Editorial: "False or True!" May 5th, 1860]*

Not infrequently the "wilderness" is equated with "emptiness," since land use is judged wholly by nineteenth century European norms of agricultural and industrial use.

Without protective institutions [i.e., British rule], such a country is also without all those things which are calculated to flourish under their protection. No arts or manufactures, or next to noneÐno general distribution of the people into trades or professionsÐno diffused appearance of regular industryÐno commerce, domestic or foreignÐno coin or other circulating medium;Ðthese are a few of the more conspicuous deficiencies that must strike even the most ignorant observer of savage life, who have been accustomed to another condition of society. They will force themselves upon his attention, in fact, as looks even upon the landscape around him. The country is nearly a wilderness,Ðall swamp or woodland, except a few scattered patches by the sea side, or along the courses of the rivers; the only cultivation to be seen is in the heart, or the immediate vicinity, of the villages; and these (how unlike the populous cities and towns of a civilized country, with their streets of palaces, and intermingled spires, and towers, and domes!) are merely small groups of hovels that dot the earth like so many mole-hills, each a shelter from the weather, only one remove from the caverns of the Troglodytes. Then there are no roads, those primary essentials of all improvement; and, it is needless to add, no artificial means of conveyance from one place to another. To make a journey of any length is an enterprize of labour and peril, which can only be accomplished by the union and co operation of a band of travellers. There is not an inn throughout the landÐnor a bridgeÐnor a direction-postÐnor a milestone. The inhabitants, in fact, have not, in any sense of the word, taken possession of the country which they call their own; and they are merely a handfull of stragglers who wander about its outskirts. [The New Zealanders, in The Library of Entertaining Knowledge, London, 1830 (pp. 396-7)]

* * *

I was born in 1942 in a little country town called Te Awamutu ("The End of the River"). It lay in the upper Waikato district between the Mangapiko and Puniu rivers, at the border of the King Country. It was part of the land the British confiscated from the MaorisÐWaikato, Ngati Maniapoto, Ngati RuruÐafter the British invaded the Waikato in the war of 1863-64. The British forces were for a time headquartered in the town. At nearby Paterangi, Rangiaowhia, Hairini Hill, Kihikihi, and (most famously) Orakau, desperate battles were fought. A few miles across the valley to the southwest, Kakepuku's indigo-blue volcanic cone rises up. The town itself sits in a valley plain, around it land that rolls gently, offering sheltered valleys, leisurely winding streams, dotted with small lakes. It was known years agoÐI don't know if it still isÐas "the old Maori garden lands," though after the confiscation the farms and groves that covered it were Pakeha cultivations. In the days before the war the population was wholly Maori apart from a few missionaries and their families and several traders and other "pakeha-Maoris." Communication with the lower Waikato and Waipa valleys was by canoe, a three day journey. The first roads were pushed through by the military to facilitate the war.
In 1852, young Heywood Crispe made the canoe journey into the interior and years later related his story. The Maoris at Rangiaowhia gave his party a royal welcome. After a good night's sleep he took in his surroundings:

There was a line of whares erected on the crown of Rangiaowhia Hill, from which we could obtain a fine view of the surrounding country, and it had a grand appearance in our eyes. There was a long grove of large peach trees and very fine fruit on them.. . .One never sees such trees of peaches now. We, the Europeans, must be the cause by the importation of pests from other countries. A large portion of the ground round the hill was carrying a very good crop of wheat, for the Maoris believed in that as a crop, and they used to convert it into flour at the various flour-mills they had. It was of a very good quality, and some of the Waikato mills had a name for the flour they produced, a good deal of which was put on the Auckland market, being taken down the Waikato, via Waiuku and Onehunga. . . .

The Maoris provided all their pakeha friends with a most excellent meal on the ground, and peaches galore, as well as horses to ride. We rode some distance round to view the county, the Maori flour-mills, and cultivation. There were a lot of good cattle and horses about, and the crops of wheat and patches of potatoes were particularly good, although no bonedust was used in those days. [Cited by Cowan 1922:18-19]

In later years, too, Mrs Crispe, Heywood's widow, described life in the Upper Waikato as she saw it as a girl at school for two years in the Rev. John Morgan's mission school in Te Awamutu. The wheat fields were enclosed by hedges of hawthorn. The wheat grown and ground (in water-driven flour-mills) by the Maoris of the district was bagged and sent down by canoe to the white settlements for sale. The proceeds went to clothes, blankets, tea, sugar, and all kinds of European goods. James Cowan continues her reminiscences:

In front of Mr Morgan's mission house at Te Awamutu there was a row of almond trees. These almondsÐso seldom seen in a New Zealand orchard now [1922]Ðwere widely distributed among the natives; hence the remarkably large trees, up to about thirty feet in height, which grew on the old Maori cultivations at Orakau and elsewhere, and survived long after the land had been confiscated by the Crown and settled by white farmers. [Cowan, 21]

In 1859 Dr Ferdinand von Hochstetter, an Austrian geologist, climbed Mount Kakepuku and from the summit viewed the valley of the Waipa:

The beautiful, richly-cultivated country about Rangiaowhia and Otawhao lay spread out before us like a map. I counted ten small lakes and ponds scattered about the plains. The church steeples of three places were seen rising from among orchards and fields. Verily I could hardly realise that I was in the interior of New Zealand. [Cited by Cowan, 21-22]

This prosperous agricultural life of the Maoris was destroyed by the war. The neatly arranged streets of thatched houses, shaded by groves of peach and apple trees, were abandoned. The inhabitants were driven off the land and settlers took their fields and orchards.

* * *

I arrived at Te Awamutu at daybreak on the 21st [February, 1864], and immediately pushed on to Rangiaowhia,which I found nearly deserted. The few natives who were in the place were completely taken by surprise, and, refusing to lay down their arms, fired on the Mounted Royal Artillary Forces and the Colonial Defence Force, whom I sent on in advance of the column. The natives were quickly dispersed, and the greater part escaped; but a few of them, taking shelter in a whare [house], made a desperate resistance, until the Forest Rangers and a company of the 65th Regiment surrounded the whare, which was set on fire, and the defenders either killed or taken prisoners.

I regret to say that several casualties occurred on our side, and amongst them Col Nixon, commander of the Defence Force, who was severely wounded in endeavouring to enter the whare. Our loss was two killed and six wounded. About twelve natives were killed and twelve taken prisoner.

I have detained 21 women and children who were found in the village. Immediately after the settlement was cleared I marched the troops back to Te Awamutu. [General Cameron's dispatch to Governor Grey; from Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1864 E3; quoted in Baker, The Strongest God, 239]

When it came to the time of the murder at Rangiaowhia, then I knew, for the first time, that this was a great war for New Zealand. Look also: Maori have been burned alive in their sleeping houses . . . . When the women were killed at the pa [fortified village] at Rangiriri, then, for the first time, the General advised that the women should be sent to live at places where there was no fighting. Then the pa at Paterangi was set aside as a place for fighting, and Rangiaowhia was left for the women and children. As soon as we arranged this, the war party of Bishop Selwyn and the General started to fight with the women and children. The women and children fell there . . . . It was the affair at Rangiaowhia that hardened the hearts of the people. The war was Rangiriri; a murder; Rangiaowhia; a murder . . . . [Wiremu Tamihana, chief of Ngati Haua, who lost several close relatives at Rangiaowhia; a document in English and Maori; from Appendices to Journals of the House of Representatives, 1864, G-5; quoted in Baker, The Strongest God, pp. 239-40]

* * *

The Bible, for many, was the hallmark of civilization (besides roads, milestones, and steeples). The missionaries brought it to the "benighted" and the "benighted" were apt students. Maori became a written language.

The language in which Maori [learned] to read and write was the Maori language. By the 1850s Maori had much higher rates of literacy than the European settlers, although because it was in Maori it had limited usefulness as the Pakeha society became more dominant.

For the Protestant missionary societies the Bible had ultimate significance as the textbook for life and faith. Great energy went into its translation, printing and distribution. By 1837 the complete New Testament was available in Maori. It was not until 1868 that the whole Bible was printed. The Bible had a profound effect on Maori. They learnt the Bible off by heart, they wove its message into their own beliefs in ways that did not alway easily cohere with the missionaries' message. There was an unexpected impact . . . . [Davidson 1995: 6]

From the early days of European involvement in New Zealand most of the missionariesÐin particular the (British) Church Missionary Society (CMS)Ðhad opposed white settlement. Evangelicals, missionaries and "humanitarians" were influential in making representations to the select Committee of the House of Commons which reported in 1837 that "all past colonization had for non-European peoples been a calamity involving oppression or even extermination" [Sinclair 1969: 63]. The CMS hoped to keep British interference in the country to a minimum in order to keep the country as a pristine preserve of the missionaries. The hope was for an eventual Christian Maori state. Thus, along with the likes of James Busby, British Resident in 1833, and Captain William Hobson, R.N., sent to protect settlers in 1837, Dandeson Coates, the Lay Secretary of the CMS, proposed that the British Government should recognize the "Native Authorities" and take the country under its "protection" with a view to controlling the existing European settlers and contacts between Maoris and settlers. Coates spoke against "the curse of colonization," and urged that further British settlement not be encouraged. "So long as New Zealand remained Maori territory, he thought that any Europeans could do little harm because they lived on sufferance, with no government to back them up and perhaps to oppress the Maoris in the event of trouble" (Sinclair 1969: 63). Most of the missionaries in the field agreed. In the end, however, this policy failed to carry the day, despite a significant measure of support in the Office of the Secretary of State for the Colonies. In 1839 settlement became (politically) inevitable.
The upshot of this struggle was a continuing uneasiness, if not at times an actual rift, existing between settlers and missionaries (as opposed to the settler churches). ("[S]ympathy for the missionaries working among the Maori, let alone an interest in Maori Christianity, were very limited in settler society" ÐDavidson 1955:17; see further 23-24.) In the difference lay two visions of New Zealand societyÐa replica British society and a utopian Christian one. As war broke out the pressures on the missionaries, regarded as "soft" on the Maoris, became intense. Few (T. F. Grace was one) managed to retain their alliance with their flock. One point of contention that arises in the bitter controversy brought on by the war concerns the Bible. Putting the Bible in the hands of the Maoris, argued many settlers, was a dangerous thing. These "savages" could not be trusted to read it the right way:

We do not deny the use or advantage of such monitors [i.e. missionaries to the Maori]; but when we find the natives taking up their teachings and describing us as Ahabs, and themselves as Naboths, we fear the effect of the seed they sow; and foresee a crop in which thistles are likely to gain the upper had, as much as in the deserted cultivations of Taranaki [where war waged]. They have encouraged ideas and expectations in the native mind, which have matured into a struggle for independence. [Nelson Examiner, Editorial, January 26th, 1861]*

Let the General Assembly send the Maoris a message to say 'We wish to help you; but we will bring you to your senses if you resist Her Majesty's authority. We will give you the best assistance we can, and will teach you to do something more than misquote ScriptureÐto keep the Decalogue, which you have never done; to love your neighbour as yourselves; to give compensation when you do an injury.' When they did this they might be called British subjects. [Mr. Wilson, New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, Want of Confidence Debate, July 3rd, 1861 (pp.115-116)]*

[The following writer, under the title of "Priestly Influence," is addressing the topic, What do the Maori get from the Bible? His barbs are directed at the missionariesÐwho have urged the Bible on the Maoris.] Two doctrines will, no doubt, be to their tasteÐthat of revenge; that of blood for blood in the Old Testament; that of equality in the New. . . . Far more intractable, therefore, are the Maories, than if they had never been converted. We do not say that their conversion was wrong; but it was a fatal gift if they are to live in permanent severance from the colonists. They will, from ignorance, transmute Christianity into a principle of antagonism. This is an element in future contests which has been altogether overlooked. The Maoris have set up a king; ere long they may have fanatical prophets among them, urging them, by examples from the Bible, to indiscriminate slaughter of their hated foes. [The Taranaki Herald, April 20th, 1861; reprinted from the New Zealand Examiner (London)]*

Indeed, this last statement was to prove prescient, though whether the slaughter was any more or less indiscriminate than the killing of the inhabitants of Jericho or the massacre of the Amalekites is a moot point, as indeed is the question whether the prophets deserved to be compared to Samuel in terms of fanaticism. At any rate, the general point was well taken. The Bible was a subversive document.

* * *

A whole month, the month of October, 1868, was spent in finalizing his preparations. The recitation of passages of Scripture to stimulate the fire and enthusiasm of the raiders was part of the proceedings. One of these passages was from the Book of Joshua, chapter 23, verses 5 and 6, which reads as follows:

"And the Lord your God, he shall expel them from before you, and drive them from out of your sight; and ye shall possess their land, as the Lord your God has promised unto you. Be ye therefore very courageous to keep and to do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses, that ye turn not aside therefrom to the right hand or to the left."

With a religious zeal such as that which characterizes the fiercest of crusaders or the administrators of the inquisition, the massacre was committed in the early hours of the morning of 10 November, 1868, four months after the landing from the schooner Rifleman at Whareongaonga. The position of the various settlers' residences was obtained, and the raiders divided into several attacking parties, each led by a man appointed by Te Kooti. Among those killed were some of the leaders of those who originally sent the prophet into exile. Thus the massacre served the double purpose of inflicting a blow upon the enemy, and of executing vengeance upon those who were responsible for sending a man into exile without even the semblance of a trial.

Among those killed were Major Biggs [who, with Captain Wilson, had presided over Te Kooti's deportation] and his wife and baby together with two servants and a half-caste girl; Captain Wilson and his wife, three of their four children, and a servant named Moran; two sheep-farmers named Dodd and Peppard; Lieutenant Walsh together with his wife and child; and many others, in all thirty-three Europeans and thirty-seven friendly natives. [William Greenwood, The Upraised Hand or The Spiritual Significance of the Ringatu Faith, Polynesian Society Memoir, No. 21, The Polynesian Society, Wellington, NZ, 1942 (p. 25); cf. Ross, 62ff.].

. . . [I] returned to New Zealand to hear of a most lively massacre at Poverty Bay, perpetrated by three hundred Maori gentlemen, very well up in their Old Testaments and extremely practical in the use of the New (they made cartridges of them) . . . . [The Earl of Pembroke, from his Introduction to the Australian edition of Old New Zealand: A Tale of the Good Old Times by A Pakeha Maori, 1893, p. ix]

* * *

Te Kooti Rikirangi Te Turuki was born about 1830 and educated at a mission school near his home in the Turanga (Gisborne) area up the East Coast of the North Island. "His name, Kooti, is a Maori version of Dandeson Coates, the lay secretary of the CMS after whom he was named" (Davidson 1995: 10). It would seem that during the wars of the 1860s he was a kupapa, employed by the colonial government as an ammunition carrier, against the Pai Marire "Hauhaus". In 1865 he was arrested, at the instigation of a chief friendly to the settlers, on a charge of spying for the enemyÐa charge for which no good proof was forthcoming, so that he was released. With the suppression of the Pai Marire forces on the East Coast, some of the captured "rebels" were allowed to go free. Others were deported to a penal settlement on the Chatham Islands, a desolate location 400 miles to the east of New Zealand. Te Kooti was re-arrested and deported along with them. They were men, women and children from several tribes, about three hundred in all. This was in early 1866. Te Kooti attempted to appeal to the Superintendent at Napier. No answer was ever returned.
During his captivity Te Kooti fell into serious illness and despair. As Gabriel had appeared to Te Ua, the prophet of Pai Marire, so the spirit of God spoke to Te Kooti (Elsmore, 141):

When I became conscious my corrupt spirit and this sinful body became separated then the spirit of God raised me and said, Arise, God has sent me to bring you to life to make known His name to His people who are in captivity in this place so that they may know that Jehovah drove them out into this place . . . . [Te Kooti MS, February 21, 1868, cited in Ross 1966:31; for other encounters with the spirit at this time, see Ross 32-33]

Recovering, he began to read his Bible, especially the Books of Joshua and Judges and some of the Psalms. He held religious services morning and evening. His fellow prisoners began to recite Psalms (Psalm 64 was a daily devotionÐ "Hear my voice O God in my prayer: preserve my life from the fear of the enemy . . .") and prayers that contained passages from Scripture (Greenwood, 21; Ross, 34).
Te Kooti wrote a prayer:

O God, if our hearts arise from the land in which we now dwell as slaves, and repent and pray to Thee and confess our sins in Thy presence, then, O Jehovah, do Thou blot out the sins of Thy own people, who have sinned against Thee. Do not Thou, O God, cause us to be wholly destroyed. Wherefore it is that we glorify Thy Holy Name. [Translated by Bishop Colenso, Fiat Justitia, Napier, 1871, (p.23); cited in Elsmore, 142]

He made careful note (see Elsemore, 143) of the Scripture which said:

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. (1 Samuel 15:3)

So New Zealand was the homeland and the Chatham Islands the house of bondage. The Maoris were the Israelites and their enemies the Canaanites or Amalekites. Te Kooti prophesied that soon an ark of salvation would appear and be their means of deliverance. (Greenwood, 22). On June 30th, 1868, a government schooner and a ketch arrived bringing provisions. With remarkably little bloodshed Te Kooti's followers overpowered the guards, seized the schooner, beached the ketch, took arms and supplies from the garrison, and sailed for home. After a stormy passage they arrived at Whareongaonga ten days later. They unloaded the ship and released the crew.
When the Europeans on the coast learned of the escaped prisoners' arrival, they sent a force to demand their surrender. Te Kooti refused but stressed that his intentions were peacefulÐhad his people not treated the garrison and the crew with consideration? He and his people then moved inland, heading from the alluvial coastal plains of Poverty Bay into the relative safety of the high country bordering the Urewera mountains and Lake Waikaremoana. The colonial authorities refused to let him alone. Strong forces (of settlers and kupapa) were sent to intercept him and there was several fierce engagements (see Belich, 216-26). Te Kooti, wounded, made his escape and his people fortified themselves in a mountain village. In November, the fugitive turned into the hunter: abandoning his base at Puketapu, "he descended on the British and Maori settlements at Poverty Bay and destroyed them" (Belich, 227; see 227-34; Greenwood, 24-26).


* * *

Palestinians clashed with Israeli troops in the West Bank yesterday after the funeral of an 11-year-old boy who witnesses say was fatally beaten by a Jewish settler . . . . During the funeral, more than 2,000 people walked behind the bier chanting "Destroy Beitar!" Beitar is a tiny Jewish settlement a mile from Hussan where the Israeli suspected in the death, Nachum Kolman, served as security chief. [Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 29, 1996]

* * *

The story of Te Kooti continues long beyond the attack on Poverty Bay (see Belich, 258-88; Greenwood, 27-28). Pursued from place to place, his people fought bravely for their independence. In the end they lost and for many of them that meant their lives. When in early 1868 Te Kooti lost Ngatapa Pa to an overwhelming force of Pakeha and kupapa, he and others escaped down a precipice. Of some 500 people in the Pa, perhaps 300 or more were women, children, and Poverty Bay prisoners. About 135 women and children and 140 men were taken prisoner. "Some 120 of the male prisoners were then killed . . . The men were collected and executed in batches 'after a few questions'" (Belich, 266). In 1872, with five men and one woman, Te Kooti made his way into the King Country, where he remained "still bitterly hated and feared by colonists and kupapa, and still with a price of £5,000 on his head, but securely protected by the King Movement. In 1883, he was finally pardoned as part of a government attempt to open up the King Country by peaceful means" (Belich, 286). He died ten years later.
In Te Kooti's captivity on the Chatham Islands, the land of bondage, was born the Ringatu religion, a major spiritual force in Maori life up until the present day. The Ringatu, the Sign of the Upraised Hand, signified to Te Kooti, the prophet, not the power to ward off bullets (its meaning to Pai Marire) but an act of homage to God.

Come my people enter thou into my chambers and shut thy doors about thee.

And none shall go out the door and will not suffer the destroyer to come into your houses and smite you.

I laid me down and slept, I awakened for the Lord sustained me. Now the Lord is that Spirit and where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.

[Panui 7, quoted by Wi Tarei, "A Church called Ringatu," p.64; in Elsmore, 145]

"Where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty."

"But when we find the natives taking up their teachings and describing us as Ahabs, and themselves as Naboths, we fear the effect of the seed they sow . . ."

* * *

I recently picked up a copy of a new book, by Mitri Raheb, called I am a Palestinian Christian. God and Politics in the Holy Land: A Personal Testimony. Raheb is pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, where his family have lived for hundreds of years. Chapter 6 is called "Daher's Vineyard." It is the story of a piece of land near Bethlehem.

Daher was an Arab Christian from Lebanon whose family settled in Bethlehem at the beginning of this century. With the money he had brought with him he bought a piece of land of about 420 dunums in the vicinity and began, with his two sons, to cultivate it. It took a lot of labor to clear the land, but they did so and planted extensive grave vines, pomegranates, almonds, figs, and olives. "The land became a small paradise for Daher and his family, but one that needed constant care and preservation if it was to bear fruit. . . . The whole family would move out to the fields every day: father, mothers, sons, and daughters all participated in the work as well as the harvest.. . ."
After the truce in 1949, one of the sons moved onto the land in order to work and watch over it. "His land became his life's companion; he lived with it for thirty-five years. Only death could separate him from it." When Daher's other son, an evangelist, also died, he left behind a wife and nine children, the youngest six years old. They found it impossible to cultivate all of the land: they lacked money to buy new equipment. "But because the land was so important to them, they tried as well as they could to cultivate and preserve the inheritance of their fathers. Their goal was some day to farm all of it, and they awaited the moment they could realize that goal." That was not to happen. "In October 1991, Daher's grandchildren learned by accident that the Israeli military government intended to confiscate thirty hectares of their land. The reason given: the land had lain fallow for some time."
Such a reason, Raheb observes, may sound reasonable to some, "for the myth that Israel had transformed this "Palestinian desert" into a "green oasis" still survives in the subconscious of many Westerners." But there is more to this than meets the Western eye. Raheb explains:

1. It is impossible for the Daher family to obtain the water necessary to cultivate all the land, since the Israelis have limited the Palestinians' water allotment to the minimum level (close to the 1967 level). Furthermore, Israel reserves almost 80 percent of the water in the occupied territories for its own use. For the 20 percent remaining to the Palestinians, they must pay four times the price. If Israel grants to the one million Palestinians living on the West Bank about 137 million cubic meters of water, it makes about 100 million cubic meters available to the Israeli settlers on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Thus every settler receives nine times more water than the Palestinians.

But how can the Palestinians develop their agriculture under these circumstances? They can plant only the kind of fruit trees that need only the rain to water them. Daher's vineyard had been planted with this kind of tree. Yet every day, whenever the Daher family went out to work on their land with their own hands, and whenever they looked over the fence to the neighbouring vineyard, they were reminded what it means to be a Palestinian. Over there, only 500 meters away, was the Israeli settlement with the biblical name "Daniel's oasis." The Israeli government provides these settlersÐwho live on land confiscated from PalestiniansÐwith everything they need: water, land, money, electricity, bulldozers, and tractors. No wonder these settlements are blooming while Daher's vineyard looks wilted.

2. If one thinks about it, the real reason for confiscating the vineyard is obvious. The Daher family's vineyard occupies a lovely hilltop surrounded by three Israeli settlements. This vineyard is a thorn in their side. It is the goal of some of the larger religious organizations (for example, the Amana Movement of the Gush Emunim, the Herut-Betar Movement of the Herut Party, and the Ha'oved HaLeumi of the Likud Party) to confiscate this vineyard and establish another settlement for the religious conservative extremist Jewish settlers. Those organizations are officially supported by the Israeli government as well as by the leading international Zionist organization. Their appetite for land knows no limits, not even the limits imposed by human life and human rights.

Raheb comes to the crux of his story:

The Daher family came to me with the Israeli military order to confiscate the vineyard in hand. I read it. I cannot say I was totally surprised. What was clear to me was that the Israeli government was following a biblical tradition set by King Ahab and his wife Jezebel (1 Kings 21). [Raheb, 47-49]

* * *

On October 5th this year I attended a lecture given at the University of Texas (Dallas) by Michael Beyth, an Israel professor whose subject was "The Water Problem." He was one of the Israeli team of specialists in the multilateral talks at the 1991 Madrid conference. Israel is faced with a multi-billion dollar crisis in water provision if it is to continue to grow as it has. It has been for some time by far the predominant water taker from the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan. Since 1948 it has presided over the depletion of the major coastal aquifer to the point where, Beyth acknowledged, it has been rendered effectively useless. The other major system, the mountain aquifer, is in danger of going the same way. Consumption figures and comments bore out Raheb's contention: the settlers in particular and the Jewish-Israeli agricultural enterprise in general enjoy hugely disproportionate government favors when it comes to water. Palestinians have not only watched their land being alienated, they have watched their most important resource, water, being taken too. At the end of the discussion, I asked Dr. Beyth: How dependent has the State of Israel become on the mountain aquifer and access to it through the West Bank? He paused a few seconds, and then, very quietly, answered: Very dependent. [On the water question see further the bibliography]

* * *

When a nation extends itself into other territories the chances are that it will there meet with other nationalities which it cannot destroy or completely drive out, even if it succeeds in conquering them. When this happens, it has a great and permanent difficulty to contend with. The subject or rival nationalities cannot be perfectly assumilated, and remain as a permanent cause of weakness and danger. It has been the fortune of England in extending itself to evade on the whole this danger. . . . [However] it is is only in . . . the Australian colonies [including New Zealand] that the statement is true almost without qualification. The native Australian race is so low in the ethnological scale that it can never give the least trouble, but even here, since we reckon New Zealand in this group, we are to bear in mind that the Maori tribes occupy the Northern island in some force, much as in the last century the Highland Clans gave us trouble in the northern part of our own island, and the Maori is by no means a contemptible type of man. Nevertheless the whole number of Maories is not supposed to exceed forty thousand, and it is rapidly diminishing. [Sir John Seeley, The Expansion of England, 1883; quoted from 1922 edn., pp. 55-56]]

* * *

In 1862 my great-grandfather on my father's side, Farquhar MacDonald Gunn, arrived in Port Chalmers, in the South Island province of Otago, from Wick in the far north of Scotland. Descended from Viking settlers hundreds of years earlier, his clan, like most highland clans, had been dispossessed of their land in the great highland "clearances" Ðto make way for sheep and, before long, deer. The object was the "improvement" of the land. The immediate beneficiaries, the absentee gentry of Edinburgh and London.

The sheep is a very valuable, as well as innocent creature; and the land [the Highlands of Scotland], if wholly devoted to sheep, will yield the landlord more money and wool, as well as give him and his factor less trouble, than if it had been made to maintain its due complement of men in fair proportion to its bearing capacity. And the deer is a noble beast, furnishing sport for noble men and gentlemen with full purses and vacant time; so that the land, if laid out as a deer forest, may, while giving the landlord almost no trouble at all, yield him more money as rent than if laid out as a sheep farm;Ðmoney that otherwise might have gone away out of the country, to salmon fishing in Norway, or buffalo hunting in the Rocky Mountains, or tiger shooting in BengalÐanything to kill vacant time. Pondering deeply on these things, the landlord thinks it better that the money should go into his purse. And accordingly, by a simple act of his will, the country is emptied of men, and filled with deer. And the consequence is that, in relation to the nation's public interest in maintenance of men, the land has in effect ceased to be, as effectively as if it had been filled with tigers of Bengal, or sunk into the bottom of the sea. [Rev. J. MacGregor, The Land Question, Oamaru, NZ, 1883, pp. 8-9]

The clearances in Caithness and Sutherland had begun early in the century:

From Assynt on the Atlantic coast, Commissioner and factor turned their attention to the parish of Kildonan, where this ran in a green and meandering strath from the inland plateau to the northern ocean, and it was here that resistance was first met. [Lord Stafford's factor (manager)] surveyed the land. Summons of removal were prepared against tenant and sub-tenant, and Sheriff's Officers were warned to make ready their delivery. The country was divided into lots and advertised, so that gentlemen from the south might inspect the property and make ready their bids. Never had the parish seen such a coming and going of foreigners. Lowland men and English, who rode along the banks of the Kildonan making notes in their record-books. This narrow valley, bordering on Caithness, was the country of Clan Gunn, a dour and hard people, more Norse than Gael, who had been made increasingly uneasy by the stories they had heard [of evictions] from Assynt, Farr and Rogart. Their reaction to the strangers in their glen was abrupt and angry, and news of it travelled far south to London, interrupting the Marchioness's [i.e., the Marchioness of Stafford, the wife of the landlord] season.

"I hope to be in Scotland this summer," she wrote, "but at present I am uneasy about the sort of mutiny that has broken out in one part of Sutherland, in consequences of our new plans having made it necessary to transplant some of the inhabitants to the sea-coast from other parts of the estate. The people who are refractory on this occasion are part of Clan Gun . . . who live by distilling whisky and are unwilling to quit that occupation for a life of industry of a different sort which was proposed to them. London is more full and gay, if possible, than usual. A great many foreigners from Russia, etc., parlant bon anglais-russe." [Prebble, 65]

The resistance proved futile in the face of a powerful military detachment.

At Whitsun large areas of Strath Kildonan were cleared and left to grass which, even after a century and a half, still grows greenest where the people had their tiny potato-patches. They were offered meagre lots of land on the [precipitous and dangerous] cliffs at Helmsdale, the choice of becoming herring-fishers or leaving the country. [Prebble, 68]

Many left the country. The evictions continued through the highlands, while the establishment (Church of Scotland) ministers supplied the dispossessed with suitable theology: it was God's will that they should obey those whom He had placed above them (cf. Prebble, 73, 97, 101, etc.). In 1819 the upper strath of Kildonan was cleared: "The whole inhabitants of Kildonan parish, with the exception of three families," wrote the minister, Donald Sage, who had been born in the manse at Kildonan thirty years earlier, "nearly 2,000 souls, were utterly rooted and burned out. Many, especially the young and robust, left the country, but the aged, the females and children, were obliged to stay and accept the wretched allotments allowed them on the seashore and endeavour to learn fishing." [Sage, Memorabilia Domestica, ed. by his son, 1889; cited by Prebble, 103]
As the numbers of destitute poor rose through the succeeding decades, the landlords pressed for reliefÐsince support of the poor, such as it was, was a burden on their own purses (cf. MacGregor, 22). A Committee of the House of Commons decided in 1841 that a more efficient system of emigration was urgently needed. The "excess in population," wrote the Inverness Courier, "is variously calculated as from 45,000 to 80,000 souls" [quoted in Prebble, 199]. The proprietors and the Press proclaimed ever more glowingly the "promise" of the "promised land." In 1851 a Government supported, but largely private, scheme of planned emigration was evolved. The Society for Assisting Emigration from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland was born.

Highland proprietors welcomed the Society with enthusiasm and relief (three of them sat on its committee). To judge from an interim report, they gladly paid for the opportunity to be rid of a people whom they wished to replace with sheep. "The owners of the properties from which the emigrants depart will be expected, and, so far as they have been applied to they have not declined, to pay one-third of the sum disbursed by the Society towards the expenses of the emigration." The remaining two-thirds were begged from the public which, as usual, responded with the generosity that should put Governments to shame, but never does. Quartermaster Sergeant Hoban of the 13th Light Infantry, for example, sent 4s. 2d., and there was "A Widow's Mite of Twenty Shillings". Highland soldiers abroad donated a day's pay, and Scots settlers already in Canada or Australia [and probably New Zealand] sent messages of encouragement with their collections. The Queen gave £300 and the Prince Consort £100. The Dukes of Sutherland, Argyll and Buccleuch each gave £100, and the Bishop of Argyll and the Isles sent ten shillings (but he did preach a sermon on the subject of emigration at St Matthew's, Spring Garden, and collected £36 1s. 11d. from his congregation). [Prebble, 203].

In 1853 the first ships sailed for the Society. Nine years later my great-grandfather set out for New Zealand. He was about twenty-four. The only thing he took with him that remains in the family today was Brown's Dictionary of the Holy Bible Corrected and Improved According to the Advanced State of Information at the Present Day, by the Rev. James Smith. It was in English, published in Glasgow in 1859 and bought by him in 1861 for the journey.
Apart from the Bible Dictionary and the fact that he spoke excellent English I know little of his circumstances. My great-aunt mentions his parent's farm as where he learned about sheep, but whether she knew of that or was simply assuming it, I do not know. Clearly he could not have been destitute. Some highlanders fared relatively well in the clearances and their aftermath. A year after Strathnaver was burned (in 1819) a woman who had lived there, paid it a visit. On her return she cried, "I have seen the timbers of our church covering the inn. I have seen the kirk-yard filled with tarry sheep and [the minister] Mr Sage's study turned into a kennel for Robert Gunn's dogs" (Prebble, 101). Robert Gunn was a factor (an agent or manager for the landowner). George Gunn was a factor at Golspie sometime in the 1830s or 1840s (p. 155). Most likely Farquhar Gunn had worked as a shepherd, like many of his countryfolk who took their skills abroad. The dispossession of the many made some openings for a few: in Assynt in Sutherland, for example, by the middle of the century, where there had once been hundreds of tenants there were eleven families, the families of shepherds on a 30,000 acre run (p. 155).
At any rate, the disruption caught him up, one way or the other, and he left his family and his native land, and like many of his people he took a ship to a new country. They were some four months at sea. He then made his way north to Oamaru and inland to Kurow, towards the Alps, crossing the great Waitaki river by boat, into what is now South Canterbury. He took a job as a shepherd on the Waitangi StationÐnamed, no doubt, after the TreatyÐone of a number of large sheep stations that the Pakehas established down the east side of the South Island in the hill country in the lee of the Southern Alps. The land had been purchased from the Maoris and was now Crown land. The station owner leased it on favorable terms.

* * *

For the descendants of the colonisers as well as those of the colonised, the history of the colonial encounter is an ineradicable and a formative experience. It must be confronted, not denied; met in its complexity, not forced into manichaean oppositions; understood, not simply resisted. [Williams 1990: 12-13]

With this quotation Michèle Dominy begins a study of white settler descendants who farm large Crown pastoral lease properties in the South Island high country of New Zealand. Dominy worked in particular with eight stations and their extended families over three generations in a valley first settled as a single high country station in 1852. The paper is titled "White Settler Assertions of Native Status." It examines evidence these high country people presented before the Waitangi TribunalÐa judicial body adjudicating Maori land claimsÐconcerning their attachment to the land as significantly definitive of their cultural identity and sense of belonging. Dominy suggests that, indeed, for these families "the landscape is a central metaphor in [their] conceptual system . . ., providing them with a way of thinking about their cultural distinctiveness" which has a direct bearing on the issues of land and identity that are in the purview of the Tribunal.

[The testimony of the runholders before the Tribunal] demonstrate the ways in which high country people voice their sense of belonging when land is at stake and participate as particular Pakehas in the rhetoric of emergent nationalism apparent in the tribunal proceedings. While noting that the explicit voicing of an affinity and identification with the land comes at a time when lessees perceive themselves to be potentially displaced and threatened with loss, I examine the rhetoric as a moment in the process of striving to acquire [authenticity] and, equally important, as conveying authenticity. [Dominy, 360]

Dominy's paper belongs with a growing body of research that seeks to understand the processes and dimensions of postcolonial identity formation for both Maori and Pakeha. Indeed those terms themselves, as multivocal, are open to critical inquiry. Dominy, for example, makes a strong case for distinguishing the high country people from the politically and culturally dominant urban Pakeha. A case is also made against assuming that settler cultures are merely derivative. European settlers negotiated relations with new landscapes: they lived between exile and indigeneity. "Constructing indigeneity" and asserting difference from an inherited tradition are key processes in the construction of postcolonial identity (cf. p. 359-60 and Ashcroft 1989:136).
The Treaty of Waitangi Act of 1975 established a tribunal to "make recommendations on claims relating to the practical application of the principles of the Treaty [of Waitangi of 1840] and, for that purpose, to determine its meaning and effect and whether certain matters are inconsistent with those principles" [Orange 1987: 246]. There were two versions of the Waitangi treaty, one in English, one in Maori. Most Maori chiefs signed the treaty in its Maori version.

The text failed to convey the meaning of the English version, and the treaty negotiations did not clarify the difference. Each party to the treaty was left with expectations about the power they would exercise. Difficulties of interpretation and implementation dogged the colony's early years and were to continue. [Orange, 1]

Claudia Orange has traced the complexities and vicissitudes of the Treaty through the history of Maori and Pakeha relations up until the present day. Though after the wars many white people found it convenient to lose sight of the Treaty, difficulties in dealing with the Maori people, especially where Maori-owned land was concerned, kept it alive as an issue that the Government could never entirely ignore. As the centenary of the Treaty signing approached, interest grew again among Pakehas as well as Maoris. In the last few decades the Treaty has become a major focal point of focus for a discourse on political and cultural identityÐa discourse about power that has grown increasingly acerbic. Orange sums up how she saw the treaty in 1987:

Maori protest has kept the treaty alive more than any other single factor. It has challenged the long-standing assumption that the treaty forged "one people" and that New Zealand was a special experiment in relationships between a European and an indigenous people. The treaty has had a modifying influence on official dealings with the Maori people, and more generally on public attitudes, but the European record in the last century and a half has shown a determination to dominate. In many respects New Zealand, in spite of the treaty, has been merely a variation in the pattern of colonial domination of indigenous races.

The gap between Maori and European expectations of the treaty remains unbridged. [Orange, 5]

I grew up believing that New Zealand was indeed a special and successful "experiment in relationships between a European and an indigenous people." I learned to be proud of that "fact" about my country perhaps more than any other. It comes very hard to have to see the "fact" through other eyes.
Nonetheless, the tribunal, some believe, takes a step towards bridging the gap (Davidson 1995: 28). Given the difference between Maori and English versions, where ambiguity or doubt exists about its meaning, considerable weight must be given to the Maori version [Dominy, 360; citing McHugh 1988:13]. The composition of the tribunal is bicultural. In 1985 this included the Chief Judge of the Maori Land Court and six other persons, at least four of whom are MaorisÐappointed by the Governor-General on the recommendation of the Minister of Maori Affairs, who consults with the Minister of Justice [Dominy 371; citing McHugh 1988:6]. (From 1989 the total number rose to 17; at the time of writing I do not have information on the bicultural mix, but I assume that it is similar.) While the tribunal's judgments do not have the force of law it is empowered to make recommendations to the Crown with respect to compensation and has acquired a reputation for tackling hugely difficult issues with integrity. In practice the Government has faced a growing pressure to address the tribunal's recommendations with appropriate legal remedies.
The Ngai Tahu claim before the tribunal sought remedies for the Crown's failure to protect rights guaranteed to the tribe by the Treaty. It pertained to eight areas of land purchased from the Ngai Tahu as well asÐand very importantlyÐtheir dispossession from their traditional mahinga kai or places where food is gathered. This latter encompasses fishing, bird, mineral, and forestry rights. The claim was based on the Government's failure to allocate land to the tribe after promising to set it aside as reserves.

Ngai Tahu assert[ed] not only that the Crown imposed its rights of preemption to acquire their land extremely cheaply but that some land was confiscated without agreement or compensation. They also contest[ed] the Crown's denial of their right to lay claim to pastoral land on the same basis and scale as Europeans. Thus, Ngai Tahu assert[ed] that the Crown's actions caused the loss not only of their economic base but of their chosen way of life. [Dominy 361]

The 20 million acre 1848 Kemp purchase which was at issue involved a serious dispute over boundaries. The Maoris understood the purchase to extend from the coast to an inland boundary along the foothills of the southern Alps. The Government understood the purchase to extend from the coast all the way inland, across the Southern Alps, to the West coast. In dispute were not only the high country lands, but national parks and the freshwater sources of many of the great southern lakes. Ngai Tahu asked to be involved in the administration of the national parks so that they might "exercise absolute authority in the Maori historical and cultural interpretation of the parks to the public" [anyone who has followed the dispute between the King Center and the National Parks Service over the MLK memorial site in Atlanta recently will recognize the terms of this claim]. Most of Kemp's original purchase had been transferred to the provincial governments of Canterbury and Otago and eventually sold to European settlers, at which time "the food rich waters were gradually drained or fenced off, and so the mahinga kai were mostly lost" [from claim, 1988]. According to the Treaty action cannot be taken against private owners. The Ngai Tahu offered a different course of action:

Ngai Tahu . . . do not ask for the plains of Canterbury or the suburbs of Christchurch or the city of Dunedin to be restored to themÐas in justice they might well do. They know that is not practical. Instead they say that there is throughout this island Crown land which can be measured in millions of acres. It is to that land that they point and say: "There is our remedy." [in Dominy, 362]

The claim, therefore, included 2.6 million hectares of South Island high country (about one-tenth of the nation), land currently held under Crown pastoral lease tenure by 360 sheep farming families of European descent. [362]. No wonder the high country people were unsettled: as they saw it, they were in line to be dispossessed as an easy solution for the Government "and in fact every Joe Bloggs in the Street" as one farmer put it [362]. Their argument was not against the historical bases of the Ngai Tahu claims, which the representatives before the tribunal did not question, but rather against the possibility of the high country people, a "third party," being forced to furnish the remedy for past injustice because they simply happened to be Crown leaseholders instead of freeholders like most other white property holders. For their part the Ngai Tahu argued that they were simply seeking management and control over the economy of their traditional territory; by gaining a role in decision-making about land use practices in the upriver catchment areas they could have some control over the Ngai Tahu mahinga kai downriver. They also hoped "for the restoration of manaÐ'the cultural and historical association with that vast southern landscape which is the tribe's spiritual home'" [Dominy 362; citing O'Regan 1989:259].

The high country people presented a variety of arguments to reinforce their claim to the land [see Dominy 363-67]:
(1) A legal rhetoric of contractual obligations: the lease (as last defined by the Land Act of 1948) was clear and bindingÐexclusive right of pasturage over the land and a perpetual right of renewal for terms of 33 years, but no right to the soil or right to acquire the freehold. In return for the renewal rights, the landholders were able to make long-term commitments and "improvements" (buildings, tracks, pasture plantings, fences, but not changes in cultivation, which the Land Act prevents).
(2) An assertion of social connection to the land by measuring the continuity of inheritance patternsÐof leases passed down through generations of farmers acting as custodians of the land:

If any group of New Zealanders can claim to be the indigenous people of the pastoral lease land perhaps it is the lessees themselves as they are the only people in the history of New Zealand to have actually settled on and worked the land in question. My people, regardless of race or creed, including members of the Ngai Tahu tribe, consider themselves to have the indigenous feeling of the high country. In many cases the occupation by these lessees extends back over four or five generations. [Hamish Ensor, NZWT 1988 P22(b), 7.10]

Dominy comments that indeed there is a demonstrable continuity of ownership based on kin ties over the generations, with the inheritance usually passing through the sons. Daughters who marry out will continue to regard the family station as a "family" place, will return throughout their lives, and often, in order to preserve this emotional center, they will "accept the inheritance opportunities of their brother rather than forcing siblings to buy each other out."
The Ngai Tahu responded that because they were wrongly denied retention of extensive areas of land which would have included some high country, they were left with no high country land and virtually no other land "Ngai Tahu were in no position to engage in pastoral farming whether in the high country or elsewhere. But European settlers, by contrast, were enabled to take up extensive runs of many thousands of acres" [NZWT 1991 23.2.2]
(3) A rhetoric of knowledge which authorizes guardianship: "I knew every inch of the place. You had to," observed a retired farmer. "You know the land you walk," said his nephew. His son added: "We are caretakers. We care for the country as a whole, for the next generation as opposed to managing for the day." From a youngest son who did not inherit: "What inheritance is all about really is heritageÐinheritance of knowledge. It is a fragile environmentÐyou have to know it."Security of tenure allows the development of knowledge and high degrees of management skills enabling the farmers to maintain a delicate balance between production and conservation. The argument is that the high country people are guardians of the land, not only for themselves and their own descendants but for the nation as a whole.
(4) An argument from spiritual affinity: high country people shared an evolving way of life defined around place and people's relationship to place as pastoral farmers. "While acknowledging a material affinity . . . for the land as expressed in its use values, [Jim Morris] also elaborated a spiritual affinity in which connection to the land and identity were inseparable." This argumentÐwhich the tribunal found movingÐchallenged the notion that Pakehas were simply materialistic and unable to share with Maoris in an elaboration of the symbolic nature of land and its emotional ties. "Landscape is thus both a physical and conceptual place constituting identity" [Dominy 367].
Such expressions of spiritual affinity, hardly typical of the stereotypical Pakeha, might be viewed as suggesting "an apparent convergence of affinities" between Maoris and Pakehas: a pointer towards cultural reconciliation, or, alternatively, as a move towards "cultural and territorial displacement arising from one people's appropriations of another people's language and self-imagery" [Dominy 367; citing Levine 1990:6]

* * *

There is a song of Ngati-Maniapoto often chanted in the old days when a fighting column paraded in the village marae before setting out on the warpath. The chief, facing the parade of warriors, uplifted his taiaha and shouted as he pointed to the blue mountain looming near:

Ko whea, ko whea --
Ko whea tera maunga
E tu mai ra ra?
("What is yonder mountain soaring high above us?)

And with one voice the warriors yelled, as they burst into the ferocious stamp and weapon-thrusting of the tutu-ngarahu or peruperu dance:

'Tis Kakepuku!
'Tis Pirongia!
Ah, 'tis Kakepuku!
Ah, draw close to me,
Draw close to me,
That I may embrace thee,
That I may hold thee to my breast!
AÐaÐah! [Cowan, 8-9]
* * *

The tribunal ruled that the Treaty had indeed been seriously and repeatedly breached over a twenty year period of purchase negotiations, thus reducing the Ngai Tahu to near landlessness and great deprivation:

The Crown, through its agents, rode roughshod over Ngai Tahu's rangatiratanga [unqualified exercise of their chiefship], over their right to retain land they wished to keep, over their authority to maintain access to their mahinga kai. Instead of respecting, indeed protecting, Ngai Tahu's rangatiratanga, the Crown chose largely to ignore it. In so doing it acted in breach of an important Treaty obligation, and has continued so to act to the present time. [NZWT 1991 2.4:78]

In 1991 the tribunal found that the Ngai Tahu did agree to sell beyond the foothills, to the west coast. On the other hand it found that the Crown entirely failed to fulfill its obligation to provide adequate reserves for their villages, homes and gardens and to reserve their mahinga kai which, in line with Maori understandings of the term at the time and against early European definitions, were taken to be "the tribal resources in and on the land, in the forests and in the rivers, lakes and sea, and in the sky" [Dominy 368]. These the tribunal considered basic to the whole social fabric of Maori life as well as to its economy. "Seriously disadvantaged by their tiny allocation of land holdings, Ngai Tahu were unable to compete with European settlers who gained control of thousands of hectares in the pastoral system (NZWT 1991 2.4:76)".
As for the high country people, the tribunal noted and appreciated their spirit of good will toward the Ngai Tahu but urged that Crown leasehold land must be considered a remedy at hand. It saw "no reason to believe that, were the Crown title to pastoral leasehold land to be vested in Ngai Tahu, they would be other than sensitive and caring for the proper conservation of this high risk land" (NZWT 1991 24.5.1).

* * *

Ngai Tahu and the Crown will sign a historic, non-binding agreement worth [NZ]$170 million in Wellington today to settle the tribe's long-standing Waitangi Tribunal claim. The value of the settlement is mostly in assets, and the only cash involved will be interest on the settlement from this morning to when the deal is finally signed by Parliament. Ngai Tahu will be able to choose from a range of Crown assets up to a value of $170m, and will be allowed to buy a further $30m worth from the pool with its own money. If accepted by Parliament, the settlement will bring to an end what Ngai Tahu believes is the longest-running claim by an indigenous people in the world, dating back 147 years. The claim involves about 1.38 million hectares, one tenth of the land Ngai Tahu sold to the Crown, and is based on breaches of legal contracts by the Crown. Estimates have put the loss to the tribe because of the breach of contract at $20 billion. . . . The agreement is on a par with the other big settlement achieved so farÐthe Tainui settlement, also worth $170m. . . .

Under the agreement, Ngai Tahu has first right of refusal over surplus Crown assets including Crown land, Crown research institutes, Crown health enterprises, Landcorp, Transit New Zealand, tertiary educational institutes, and the Fire Service. It will also have first right of refusal over the Highbank power station, Crown shares in Dunedin and Invercargill airport companies, and Milford Airport other than the land. It will have second right of refusal in the Christchurch International Airport. . . .

[Sir Tipene O'Regan, the Ngai Tahu chief negotiator] said one of the big sticking points in negotiations had been an attempt by the Crown to extinguish "aboriginal rights". "They will not be extinguished, but we will not have the right to litigate any breach of those rights prior to 1992. Our right to defend them against future breach has been protected. That was our biggest concern. It was absolutely fundamental to us." . . . .

Title to the Muttombird or Crown Titi islands, of the Southland coast, will be vested in Ngai Tahu, and managed under a conservation management plan. Sir Tipene said the islands' primary function was as a muttonbird resource, and secondly as a nature reserve.

Of the three Otago high-country stations the Crown put aside for the tribe . . . . [t]he Crown will transfer to Ngai Tahu the farmable part, about 10 percent of the total, while the non-farmable parts will be leased back to the Minister of Conservation in perpetuity at a peppercorn rental. Public access would be guaranteed, and a substantial block of the properties would be gifted to the nation, Sir Tipene said.

The tribe's relationship with its sacred mountain, Mount Cook, had still not been resolved. Negotiations would continue . . . .

[The Press On-Line, Christchurch (NZ), October 5, 1996]

* * *

In all these submissions, in the tribunal's response, and in the subsequent settlement negotiations, as far as I am aware, no one constructed the past, or claimed authority for the present, by appeal to the Bible.
* * *

Ghada Karmi was born in Jerusalem to a middle-class family. It was 1940. For eight years she lived in a house in Qatamon, in a "beautiful, leafy residential area of substantial villas set in gardens full of flowers." Most of the inhabitants were well-to-do Palestinians; in addition there were several foreign consulates and a very small number of European Jews who had immigrated during the 1920s and 1930s. Her father was an education department inspector for the Mandate government. She was the youngest of three children. A peasant woman, Fatima, came daily to clean the house and look after the children. She was much loved and the children would beg her to stay the nightÐwhich she would never do, returning each night instead to her village, al-Maliha, on the outskirts of the city. The house was a sandy weather-beaten stone villa in a sleepy road off the top of the Qatamon hill, not far from the Saint Simone monastery. [For this paragraph and all of what follows in this section: Karmi 1994]
The world around her was changing rapidly, though she was little aware of it. A meeting of world Zionist leaders had met at the Biltmore Hotel in New York and decided her fate. Arabs were pitted against Arabs: shortly before she was born her uncle was assassinated, by the Mufti's men her family believed. European immigrants kept arriving in greater and greater numbers. The Stern and Irgun gangs were killing efficiently and spreading terror. By the time she was seven, a security zone existed in an area of Qatamon down the hill and to the left of her house where there were several British Mandate offices. By the end of that year, 1947, her sister had to go through the security area, by way of the gardens in between, in order to get to school. One morning she saw a Bedouin carrying a tin of olive oil shot in front of her house by one of the many snipers, Jewish and Arab, who hid in the neighborhood. He was dragged into a house by a neighborÐGhada never knew what became of him. One night, she heard a commotion and on going to see what was happening was pushed back into her bedroom by her terrified mother. Later she learned that a group of armed Arabs had hidden in the garden, leaving for the next garden only in time to escape an armed Zionist group who appeared in pursuit. Early in 1948, life in Qatamon had become intolerable. The area was a constant target for the Jews. One night in January an explosion blew out the windows of her house. The sky lit up with fire. "My brother and I were terrified, and I can remember my mother dragging us from our beds onto the floor and pressing us against the wall." The Haganah had blown up the Semiramis hotel, on the corner of the road directly behind the Karmi house, killing at least sixteen people. It had been a center of Arab resistance from which attacks were mounted against the Jewish settlements of Rehavia and Kiryat Shmuel. Later that month the Haganah blew up a big Palestinian house in Qatamon, and then another and another. Ghada and her brother could no longer go to school. Her sister, ready to take her matriculation exams, became a boarder at her school because she could not safely get there otherwise. Getting food into the house became harder and her mother seemed endlessly harassed. She hardly saw her father.
She became desperately unhappy. The foundations of her life were shaken. Fatima no longer came each day. Her sister had left. She and her brother could no longer play out on the road or even in the garden. The air was electric with danger and anxiety. After April 9th, their neighbors began to pack up and leave, in panic. Later she found out about the Dayr Yasin massacre of 250 Arabs on that day. Her road became a ghostly place, abandoned to the snipers. One day her own family too packed up and left for Damascus, where her mother's family lived and where she would stay with her grandparents for a short while until the war was over. Her mother took only one suitcase, certain that she would be back soon. Ghada was not even allowed to take her much loved teddy bear. All their belongingsÐthe papers, the family photographs, the mementosÐall were left behind.

That event marked the end of my childhood. As the taxi drew up to the house that last morning and my parents started to pack it with our overcoats and few belongings, I was suddenly overwhelmed by gloom and loneliness. Fatima and our half-Alsatian mongrel dog, Rex, whom we children doted on, were to stay behind. I still remember with what passion my brother and I begged Fatima to come with us to Damascus. She refused, saying she preferred to stay in her own village, and I remember my mother giving her the key to the house and asking her to look after our affairs until we returned. I do not know what became of her, for her village, al-Maliha, was attacked and its inhabitants partly evacuated by the Zionists in early May, shortly after we left. A few months later, in July 1948, it was attacked again by the Irgun gang and all its people were expelled. I suppose that she must have died by now, though God knows how and in what refugee camp.

As the car drew away from the house, I knelt on the back seat to reach the rear window and take a last look back. And there I saw an ominous sight. Rex, who was never normally allowed to go outside the gate for fear of being run over, was standing in the middle of the road, his tail stiff, staring after our retreating car. It was then that all the half-digested, half-understood events in Palestine that had mysteriously overshadowed my short life coalesced into a kind of premonition, and I knew that something truly awful had happened to us.

They were among the last to leave and not a minute too soon: heading back for Jerusalem after leaving his family in Damascus, her father was stopped in Amman by the news that Qatamon had fallen to the Zionists and was now impassable.
Other family members arrived, including her aunt's family who had escaped from the Old City of Jerusalem. They lived all together in her grandparents' house, while her father looked for work, and she tried with difficulty to fit into a new school. Life in Damascus began to stretch on. Unbelievably, the war had been lost and Israel created. There was great confusion about whether the displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to their towns and villages. One day her father left for England, in search of a job, though she hardly noticed he was gone. It was as if he, along with her sunny villa, Fatima, and her childhood in Palestine, already belonged to an unreachable past. Her father wrote to say that he had a job with the BBC. The family, he said, should make the best of a bad situation and take advantage of what England could offer them. Her mother was distraught. She had no wish to join an alien people and adopt a strange way of life. In the event, they went into their second exile, in London.
* * *

Mazouz is from London, where her brother was beaten up by thugs after they spotted him wearing his Jewish school scarf. She often tucked her Star of David necklace into her blouse because her parents told her not to be conspicuous. In Psagot, she said, she is teaching her children to be proud Jews. "I want my children to know that this is their country, and I feel that this is the only way," she said, holding little Eitan close to her. "If the Arabs won't agree to us living here, then what can we do? We have to fight for our land." [Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 5, 1996].

* * *

They were among a tiny number of Palestinians who sought refuge in the Western world in the wake of the catastrophe of 1948. Ghada struggled miserably at school until she learned some English. Her mother was devastated. Gregarious, confident, centered on family and friends, she found herself in a world totally unfamiliar, incomprehensible. The second anniversary of the UN Resolution 194, which required Israel to repatriate the Palestinians, came and went. Israel did nothing. It began to dawn on Ghada's parents that nothing was likely to happen. Her mother refused to accept it and ran their lives on a temporary basis.

We lived out of a suitcase, so to speak, for years, and as I grew up I would echo faithfully what I had been taught whenever anyone asked me about my future plans: "We are going back to the Middle East." Meanwhile, my mother kept our house as if it had been in Jerusalem. Our food was Arabic, our radio played Arabic music, we spoke nothing but Arabic, all our friends were Arabs. Like a Palestinian Miss Haversham, for my mother the clock had stopped in April 1948 and she never looked forward thereafter . . . . And in his own way, my father fared little better. . . . His social life was as circumscribed as my mother's, and he never spoke of Palestine.

In fact, neither of my parents spoke of Palestine to us. I imagine that the wounds were too deep. They never wanted to visit Jerusalem after it became clear that return was impossible. For, of course, our house, Qatamon, and all of West Jerusalem had been taken over by the Jewish state in 1948 and no Palestinians were ever allowed back. All the Palestinian's houses, like ours, became the instant property of new Jewish residents who neither offered to compensate us for our losses nor ever acknowledge our ownership. . . [Both my father] and my mother preferred to preserve the memory of their home as it had been before they left, intact, like a photograph. . . .

I remember writing to the Israeli embassy in 1973 and asking for permission to go and live in Jerusalem, since I had been born there . . . They answered that there was no provision for such cases . . . . In fact, the prospect of going to Palestine filled me with dread . . . My brother and sister were no different: for them, too, the Palestine they knew had gone forever and they feared their own reactions to seeing the new proprietors.

In 1991 Ghada slew the dread monster: she went (on a visitor's visa) to a conference in the Galilee and made a visit to Jerusalem.

I drove to Qatamon on a hot August morning and stood at the bottom of the hill, looking up and straining my memory for a glimpse of the past. It seemed to have changed little, but it was not the detail, but rather the atmosphere and the colors . . . . I walked up and down the hill and into all the side roads, but could not find our road. There were no names to recognize, and no one I asked knew where the pre-1948 places had been.

Eventually she found an elderly shopkeeper who knew where the Semiramis hotel had stood, and from there she knew what must be her road. Many of the old Palestinian houses still stood in Qatamon, and it was considered prestigious to live in them. She prayed that hers would still be there. But not a house was original.

When I came to the site where our house had stood, I found a Jewish Yeshiva instead. I stood trying to recreate the memory, to will the image of our old house to blot out the building that had replaced it. A few children with long sidelocks looked at me curiously; they could not have known how alien and out of place to me they looked. . . . [T]rying to relive the past, to sniff at distant memories, I found a house down the next road very much like ours had been, with a veranda and a surrounding garden. A plaque said that it belonged to the lawyer Shlomo Schindler. I wondered to whom it had really belonged. Ironically, a few people took me for an Israeli, spoke in Hebrew, and smiled at me. I stayed for a long time, trying somehow to absorb what remnants of my history still lingered there, but it was no use. The place for me was desecrated and spoiled. Its current inhabitants cared nothing about me and my ilk. They had managed somehow to purge themselves of guilt or even knowledge of what they and their compatriots had done to us. For I have never yet met an Israeli who was prepared to apologize for what Zionist ambitions in Palestine have done to people like me.

We were an ordinary family with ordinary lives and ordinary hopes. . . . Instead, we were displaced, uprooted, and sent into exile.

* * *

The South Island runholders argued that the high country land should not be in the hands of a single group under private ownership for environmental (largely conservation) reasons. Dominy comments that they have been engaging "in a strategically spatial, rather than imperialist, discourse, one in which not only the status of boundaries, but also the protection of landscape and cultural values is at issue" [368]. The tribunal has provided here a forum for the encounter of postcolonial identitiesÐhigh country people (a category of Pakehas) and Ngai Tahu (a category of Maoris), the "postcolonial" and the "postindigenous" struggle for recognition. The runholders were no longer, as colonial settlers, simply penetrating the land and rejecting the indigenous peoples' claims to the land; rather they were acknowledging those claims and arguing for their own continued role in any settlement. And although they may be accused of furthering white domination by another strategy of "indigenization" (Dominy 369; see Goldie 1989), namely by "incorporating 'others' (and their land) through the appropriation of their symbols," it is hard, as Dominy argues, to deny the authenticity of their claims to spiritual affinity to the land, as though a priori this mode of belonging could only be exercised by Maoris. "In their testimony," argues Dominy, " both parties resist[ed] the notion of reified culture as continuous tradition" [369]. Moreover, they also affirmed their particularities.

"We tend for convenience to talk of two sides, Maori and Pakeha; however, both were complex societies and cultures and were becoming increasingly more so. There were never just two viewpoints, Maori and Pakeha . . . . Neither culture was static, neither was entirely "traditional" by the time the Crown purchases in the South Island were taking place." Nor is either culture any more static today [Dominy 370, citing Ward 1990:153]

Dominy's argument moves finally to a theoretical observation as a frame for viewing the high country people's claim for an authentic identity in relation to the land.

In The Road to Botany Bay, Paul Carter (1989:350) argues for a spatial history of settler society, one in which we seek intentions and the invention of a point of view or panoramic eye, rather than an imperialist history in which we seek chronological origins. He suggests that we have suppressed spatiality in our Western historical consciousness and urges us to recognize its form and historically constitutive role rather than focusing on its content. Perhaps most significantly for my argument, Carter argues against a diorama history, a "model of historical progress [that] has equally obscured a fundamental dimension of the colonizers' history," and argues instead for attention to the making of spatial history as settlers were "choosing directions, applying names, imagining goals, inhabiting the country" . . . . Thus places were invented, not found, through naming processes that described not a physical, but a conceptual, place. . . .

The high country submissions speak of an ongoing and constantly changing relationship to land, rather than of recourse to continuity with the past. They adopt a rhetoric of distinctiveness as they speak of their particular reliance on a reified nature, rather than using a generic discourse of similarity with other agrarian and urban whites, including their forbearers. They conflate the continuity of their presence over several generations in the high country with topographic and environmental knowledge, rather than with ownership and control of resources alone. They speak to the advantage of shared (Crown leasehold), rather than individual (freehold) ownership, of their suitability as caretakers for the national interest in leasehold lands, and of the need to acknowledge their complex similarities to, and differences from, Ngai Tahu. [Dominy 370]

The families of Daher, Ghada Karmi, and Evita Mazouz lack both a Treaty and a Tribunal. But were those institutions to be conjured up, I wonder where a spatial history would take or leave them.
* * *

I need to find out: When the New Zealand government pardoned Te Kooti in 1883 did it offer him an apology for his unjust exile to the Chatham Islands?

* * *

If there is a potential for similarity in present-day Israel to South Africa, its roots must be found in the inability of these, and similar, societies to come to terms with the legacy of their histories of colonization. [Gershon Shafir, 1988]

For there to be reconciliation between Maori and EuropeanÐbetween the first people of the land, anywhere, and those who come from afar and invadeÐthere must be recognition and acceptance of what has happened in our past. Together we can go on from there. [Heretaunga Panenu Pat Baker, 1988]

* * *

The name of the woman taken in adultery was Herita.
The blind man whose eyes were anointed with clay was Tapaineho.
The fig tree that was cursed was Hiona.
Naboth's vineyard belonged to Tanupera.
[Te Kooti, 1868] [in Ross, 33]

Works Cited

Arthur, Rev. W. 1845-46. "The Extent and Moral Statistics of the British Empire." Exeter Hall Lectures, 1845-46.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge.

Belich, James. 1988. The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict. London and Auckland, NZ: Penguin Books [First pub. 1986 by Auckland University Press].

Best, Elsdon. 1941. The Maori. Vols. I & II. Wellington, NZ: The Polynesian Society.

Carter, Paul. 1989. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Chisolm, Rev. James (1898) Fifty Years Syne: A Jubilee Memorial of the Presbyterian Church of Otago. Dunedin. J. Wilkie & Co.

Cowan, James. 1922. The Old Frontier. Te Awamutu: The Story of the Waipa Valley. Te Awamutu, NZ: The Waipa Post Printing and Publishing Company.

[Craik, George Lillie (?)]. 1830. The New Zealanders. The Library of Entertaining Knowledge. London: Charles Knight.

Davidson, Allan K. 1995. "The Interaction of Missionary and Colonial Christianity in the Nineteenth Century. New Zealand as a Case Study." Unpublished paper.

Dominy, Michèle D. 1995. "White Settler Assertions of Native Status." American Ethnologist 22:358-374.

Elsmore, Bronwyn. 1985. Like Them That Dream: The Maori and the Old Testament. Otumoetai, Tauranga, NZ: The Tauranga Moana Press.

Greenwood, William. 1942. The Upraised Hand or The Spiritual Significance of the Ringatu Faith. Polynesian Society Memoire, No. 21. Wellington, NZ: The Polynesian Society.

Rose, J. Holland, et al, gen. eds., and J. Hight, advisor for NZ. 1933. The Cambridge History of the British Empire. Vol. VII. Part II: New Zealand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hursthouse, Charles. 1861. New ZealandÐthe "Britain of the South." 2nd edn.

Jacobs, Wilbur R. (1985) Dispossessing the American Indian: Indians and Whites on the Colonial Frontier. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press [First edn. pub. 1972 by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York].

Kawharu, I. H. 1989. ed., Waitangi: Mÿori and Pÿkehÿ Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi. Auckland, NZ: Oxford University Press.

Levine, Hal B. 1991. "Comment on Hanson's 'The Making of the Maori'." American Anthropologist 93:444-46.

MacGregor, Rev. J. 1883. The Land Question. Two Lectures. Oamaru, NZ.

Orange, Claudia. 1987. The Treaty of Waitangi. Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books Limited [Repr. 1995. First pub. by Allen & Unwin New Zealand Limited].

O'Regan, Tipene. 1989. "The Ngÿi Tahu Claim," in I. H. Kawharu,ed., Waitangi (see above).

Prebble, John. 1969. The Highland Clearances. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books [First pub. 1963 by Secker & Warburg].

Raheb, Mitri. 1995. I am a Palestinian Christian. Trans. Ruth C. L. Gritsch. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Ross, W. Hugh. 1966. Te Kooti Rikirangi: General and Prophet. Auckland, NZ: Collins.
Sage, Donald. 1889. Memorabilia Domestica. Ed. by his son.

Seeley, Sir John Robert. 1922. The Expansion of England. Two Courses of Lectures. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. First edn. pub. 1883.

Shafir, Gershon. 1996. Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914. Updated edn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. First edn. pub. by Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Sinclair, Keith. 1991. A History of New Zealand. 4th revised and enlarged edn. London and Auckland, NZ: Penguin Books [1st edn. 1959].

Stoughton, Rev. J. 1852-53. Anglo-Saxon Colonies. Exeter Hall Lectures, 1852-53.

Tarei, 'Wi. "A Church Called Ringatu," in Michael King, ed., Tihe Mauri Ora: Aspects of Maoritanga. Wellington, NZ: Methuen.

Ward, Alan. 1990. "History and Historians before the Waitangi Tribunal: Some Reflections on the Ngai Tahu Claim." New Zealand Journal of History 24:150 167.

Williams, Williams. 1990. Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press.

Wiseman, Rev. L. 1855-56. Things Secular and Things Sacred. Exeter Hall Lectures, 1855-56.

Other bibliography

"Must read" novels recounting New Zealand history as touched on in this paper:

Heretaunga Pat Baker. The Strongest God. Whatamonga Bay, Queen Charlotte Sound, NZ: Cape Catley Ltd., 1990.

Witi Ihimaera. The Matriarch. Auckland, NZ: Picador, Pan Books, 1988. First pub. Heinemann Publishers, 1986. (On Te Kooti)

Maurice Shadbolt. Season of the Jew. New Zealand: Sceptre (NZ) [Hodder & Stoughton]; Pub. in the USA by David R. Godine, Publisher [Boston], 1990. First U.S. edn. pub. W. W. Norton & Company. First pub. 1986. (On Te Kooti)

On Palestine/Israel and water:

Bellisari, Anna. 1994. "Public Health and the Water Crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Journal of Palestine Studies 23 ( 2): 52-63.

Benvenisti, Meron. 1986. The West Bank Handbook. Boulder, CO: The Westview Press.

Elmusa, Sharif S. 1993. "Dividing the Common Palestinian-Israeli Waters: An International Water Law Approach" Journal of Palestine Studies 22 (3): 57-77.

ÐÐÐ. 1995. "The Jordan-Israel Water Agreement: A Model or an Exception?"Journal of Palestine Studies 24 ( 3): 63-63.

Kliot, Nurit. 1994. Water Resources and Conflict in the Middle East. New York & London: Routledge.

Lowi, Miriam L. 1993. Water and Power: The Politics of a Scarce Resource in the Jordan River Basin. London: Cambridge University Press.

*I am greatly indebted to Michael Grimshaw, Knox College, Dunedin, for providing the primary sources indicated with an asterisk.