Part 4: Land Wars and Aftermath

(This is the 4th part of a 7 part series on my final term paper for Ethnics. Click here to start at part one)

Land Wars and Aftermath

The New Zealand land wars took place intermittently between 1860 and 1872, and nearly 18,000 British troops were deployed to the Island to combat the Maori. The British forces found the Maori extremely well organized and difficult to defeat since the tribes relied on guerrilla warfare instead of open battlefields where the British had the advantage. The British, blinded by sheer arrogance of their own superiority, could not believe that the Maori posses engineering and military expertise and thus could not defeat the Maori warriors easily.

During the War, Parliament passed the Suppression of Rebellion Act 1863 which allowed the punishment of rebels and the confiscation of their lands. Under this act nearly 3.5 million acres were taken, even though later many of the Maori were found to have not been in rebellion against the Crown. Some of this land was returned to a few of the Maori tribes after the war, but in the form of Crown title (Bourassa and Strong 234). The Waitangi Tribunal stated long after the fact in 1996 that:

The wars, in our view, were not of Maori making. The Governor was the aggressor, not Maori…In terms of strict law, the initial military action against Maori was an unlawful attack by armed forces of the Government on Maori subjects who were not in rebellion and for which, at the time, the Governor and certain Crown officers were subject to criminal and civil liability. (7)

The Crown also passed the Native Land Acts 1862 and the Native Land Act 1865 mandating that individual Maori men needed to own land in order to be eligible to vote. The Maoris did not posses the same ideas of the individual as the Western British did, and these acts posed problems for the Maori since Maori land was communal and owned by every member of the group. Many refused or were unable to individualize their shared land holdings into a fashion deemed appropriate to the English and were excluded from parliamentary participation (Fleras 555). This effectively excluded a large majority of Maori from any political bearing and contributed to causes of the Land Wars. There were continuing laws enacted to further undermine the Maori property rights. The Public Works Act 1864 allowed the Crown to take up to 5% of the land without compensation for roads and public works projects. The expansion of the road system into Maori land enabled the local governments to impose taxes on the Maori lands that led to further land confiscation.

The Maori Representation Act 1867 created a duel system of representation that gave the Maori some form of representation. The Act divided the land into four districts and allowed Maori men with voting rights to elect one representative from each district to the parliament. This was viewed by the Maori as a “Pakeha commitment to racial harmony through more equitable sharing of political power” (Ibid 556). However, the British desire was not so much to create racial harmony as to assimilate the Maori into acceptable British citizens. By establishing Maori representation the British were able to achieve four goals: pacify a formidable military opponent, quickly assimilate the Maori with low cost, provide safety for settlers while the government acquired land to secure a frontier, and keep the Maori from creating their own power base which could undermine parliament control.

The Crown wished to ease the Maori into their view of a better society—Christian and civilized—which would be achieved by the “Europeanization” of the Maori. As Augie Fleras states, “Maori representation arose as a politically deceptive strategy of indirect control which co-opted the Maori population while simultaneously conveying the illusion of democratic power sharing” (558). Groups like the Young Maori Party, who bought into the British and Western culture superiority over their “out-dated” customs, worked to change their culture. Being mostly European educated, these Maori would join political parties in efforts to enhance Maori life through acceptance of European ways of life. These groups were supported by the Pakeha and local governments but were eventually labeled as “sell-outs” during the 1970s activist movements and phased out.

Since the missionary schools had been weakened by the wars the government passed the Native Schools Act 1867, establishing English as the school language medium (Spolsky 557). These schools were created in order to force English monolingualism onto the Maori-monolingual speakers. The goal being to educate and civilize the Maori so that the British could control them easier and future wars could be averted. The government run schools provided another way for the Crown to assimilate the Maori into the ideal British citizen, making them “brown-skin Pakeha” (Fleras 557). Maori reaction to such policies were mixed. Separatists wished to completely reject such policies, which, they felt, undermined Maori autonomy. On the other side you had those who wanted such policies and felt the need to reject Maori language completely in favor of the dominant, English language and culture. Those in-between who favored both English and Maori language teaching, seeing the benefits of acquiring English but still wanting to maintain Maori culture. These three views remained prevalent in Maori language and political movements and can help us understand the Maori opinions today. The separatists were the ones who insisted on the revitalization of Maori language in the 20th century and played important roles in the language revitalization movements (Spolsky 558).