A river runs through the Waikato and a new book grapples with who owns it
The issue of who owns the Waikato River’s water isn’t going away.
Waikato-Tainui’s Raupatu claim for its lost lands was lodged initially in 1987, and settled with the Crown in 1995. The Waikato River itself, however, was excluded from that settlement, and negotiation with the Crown then lasted another 15 years. Marama Muru-Lanning’s book explores that negotiation.
She’s a member of Turangawaewae Marae and an anthropologist. Her scholarship is objective, but also takes for granted, she says, the validity and legitimacy of a Maori worldview. The book is based on the 1995-2010 period, but its epilogue extends to more current events – specifically the ownership or otherwise of the Waikato water that’s been, in Muru-Lanning’s word, “commodified” and that is now turning Mighty River Power’s turbines.
The book is a wide-ranging study of the differing viewpoints and the language of the protagonists. For Waikato-Tainui, it’s tribal mana inextricably bound up with the river. For Mighty River Power and its “techno-managerial” language, it’s Maori rights as river “stakeholders”. And always there’s the recalcitrant Crown. By 2006, according to Muru-Lanning, it was apparent the state would not discuss customary property rights in river water, pushing instead for a settlement around co-governance and co-management, resulting finally in a new body, the Waikato River Authority (WRA). By a convincing analysis, Muru-Lanning shows how, within this process, the tribe’s non-royal bureaucratic leaders and tribal negotiators came to the fore – most prominently Hemi Rau and Tukoroirangi Morgan. The King movement itself, she suggests, lost traction.
Inspired in her discipline by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault and Fredrik Barth, she pays close attention to language. “Ko Waikato toku awa” is translated often as “The Waikato is my river”, Muru-Lanning says, but a closer translation would be “I belong to the Waikato River”. English Common Law, we might suppose, just wouldn’t get that one.
The river, she says, was traditionally referred to as “tupuna awa”, which translates as “river ancestor”. Whanganui iwi fought for their river as just such a tupuna awa, and their 2012 agreement with the Crown recognised the physical and metaphysical force of the river as a single legal entity, indivisible from the mountains to the sea.
The consequences of that have yet to play out, but in Waikato’s case, MuruLanning notes, the 1995-2010 negotiators accepted a subtle change in the Waikato’s description from “tupuna awa” to “awa tupuna” or “ancestral river”,
A closer translation would be “I belong to the Waikato River”
diminishing its metaphysical aspects.
Finally, Waikato-Tainui’s representation on the WRA was the same as the other four Waikato river tribes – one member for each iwi – and was balanced anyway by five Crown appointees. Waikato-Tainui’s river domain also seemed now to end at Karapiro. The tribe did not, as Sir Robert Mahuta, a member of the Kingite kahui ariki (royal family), originally claimed, assert its mana over an indivisible river, up to Huka Falls.
Muru-Lanning doesn’t say so, but whatever loss occurred here in terms of Kingite prestige may be a reason the movement remains strong on the water issue. Her epilogue recounts that Prime Minister John Key forbade Government MPs or Crown representatives from attending the great pan-tribal hui of September 13, 2012, at Turangawaewae Marae. King Tuheitia called the meeting and stated, “We have always owned the water.”
Key responded just a day later – “King Tuheitia’s claim … is just plain wrong.” Well, of course, for it threatened what was then the pending partial sale of Mighty River Power shares. But the Deed of Settlement for the river, it’s worth noting, does not extinguish aboriginal title or customary rights that WaikatoTainui might have in relation to the river.