To New Zealand for Land

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LAW 343 Dispossession

Notes

while the 1865 creation of the New Zealand Native Land Court is often cited as a central tool of Māori dispossession, Belich noted that its opening coincided with the arrival of the first of nearly 18,000 British soldiers

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breaches of the spirit and letter of colonial laws were not so much colonial anomalies as they were constituent elements of colonialism

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European colonial system was at its core a “culture of paper,” and the increasing primacy of the written word and the subsequent emphasis on literacy irreparably altered the medium of historical discourse

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the translation issues surrounding the treaty caused so much discord that it remains impossible to talk about a single Māori understanding of what the treaty conveyed.

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there could be no possibility of the Māori signatories having any understanding of government in the sense of ‘sovereignty’ … on the basis of experience or cultural precedent

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common law remained flexible enough that the exact interpretation could change from court-to-court, a phenomenon which almost always benefitted the colonial power

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many settlers complained about vast tracts of ‘waste land,’ which they believed the Māori to be squandering

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the Wars played a much more direct role in the dispossession of Māori than any previous or forthcoming legal action, as without the power imbalance created by such a large-scale conflict, future legislation would not have been enforceable on the ground

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the court itself was horribly inefficient and made faulty judgments in the vast majority of cases, either awarding land to the ‘wrong’ person or simply sucking the money out of the Māori landowners through the lengthy and expensive process

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steep growth of the kauri industry was enormously detrimental to the forests of New Zealand, with less than 10% of the original kauri forests left standing at the turn of the twentieth century

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Using such a literal interpretation of the Act, it could easily be argued that there was no legal difference between Māori land held in traditional tenure and land held in British fee simple.

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