Maui Solomon

The negotiator

Maui Solomon’s Moriori ancestors are deep in his soul. He’s been carrying them around for a long time. Ever since he made them a promise, to find their truth, to tell their story.

And a brutal story it is too. Killed, cannibalised and enslaved by invading Ma¯ ori in 1835, the Re¯ kohu Chatham Island Moriori were all but wiped out. To heap insult upon injury, their very existence was denied.

Solomon (Moriori, Ka¯ i Tahu, and Pa¯ keha¯ ) was able to fulfil that promise when he signed the Moriori Treaty Settlement on February 14, finally acknowledging the decimation of his people and the mythologising of a race that had been the architects of passive resistance – the Moriori were true to their sacred covenant of peace and refused to fight their invaders.

Solomon, the grandson of the last fullblooded Moriori, Tommy Solomon, and chief negotiator for the settlement, feels some peace is restored to his ancestors on Re¯ kohu.

Peace, relief, exhaustion – yes, he feels all of these. But mainly happiness.

‘‘I appreciate the flaws and imperfections of the settlement, but on the day it was a time for the people to celebrate. I was satisfied that we have done everything that we can to reach a settlement that we can live with.’’

It included an agreed historical account, a Crown apology, and $18 million. On the day of the signing at Moriori Ko¯ pinga Marae, Solomon did a karakia facing the pou on which the names of his ancestors are etched. Next to 1561 names are crosses: one for those who were killed, two for those who were cannibalised.

That was more than 90 per cent of Moriori. That’s genocide, he says, though that has never been acknowledged.

Solomon was 24 and fresh out of law school when he became chairman of the Tommy Solomon Memorial Trust Foundation in 1984. He knew little of his Moriori heritage and threw himself into a journey of discovery with some gusto.

What he discovered shocked and saddened him, he says. ‘‘I felt strongly enough to make a promise to my ancestors that I would do what I could in my lifetime to get their story told, to have the truth told.’’

For 35 years, he has been telling that truth and fighting to secure redress for Moriori. The fact that his people were mythologised cut particularly deep, he says. Those myths were popularised and spread through The School Journal. It wasn’t till 2011 that this was officially rectified.

‘‘There have been layers of oppression that Moriori have suffered over generations – the loss of life, liberty, land, language and to actually have our identity stolen from us by myth-making and the creation of these stories about being driven out by Ma¯ ori [Nga¯ ti Mutunga and Nga¯ ti Tama], about being weak and inferior – that to me was almost worse than what happened when they were invaded.

‘‘There seemed to be a deliberateness about using Moriori as a scapegoat, as an inconvenient truth to be ignored and then used. Pa¯ keha¯ could use Moriori against Ma¯ ori to justify colonisation. Some still do, a la Don Brash.’’

He has always been one to want to right a wrong, he says. If he sees an injustice he’ll rail against it. ‘‘That’s what I have done throughout my life and career, working for those who don’t have a voice themselves.

‘‘I’m someone who is motivated not to dwell on things that have gone wrong, but to ask what you can do about it. How do you put things right? I’m an optimist.

‘‘I remember putting in a huge garden at home when I was 15 to help my mother, who was a very important person in my life. I saw that if I applied myself to this rough patch of grass I could turn it into a beautiful space where things will grow. That memory stayed with me my whole life.’’

It was a metaphor for how he would approach difficult tasks ahead.

Solomon, 59, knows first hand what it is to have his heritage denied. At the age of 13, his social studies teacher told him Moriori simply didn’t exist. ‘‘I knew that we were Moriori, Ma¯ ori and Pa¯ keha¯ . I remember saying to him that my grandfather was full-blooded Moriori and he said, ‘No, that’s just nonsense.’ ‘‘

He did apologise later on in life at a Temuka High School reunion when Solomon was asked to deliver the keynote address. But as a child growing up with his 14 siblings, Solomon knew little about his Moriori history, identity and culture.

‘‘By the time my grandfather was born in 1884, Moriori history had been almost obliterated. He grew up more Ma¯ ori in his culture and language than Moriori. He wanted his family to survive and prosper so he wasn’t going to dwell on the past and I respect him for that.

‘‘My father never knew anything about Moriori so he didn’t have anything to pass on to us. There was no learning at my father’s knee because he had nothing to teach, which is sad. I think he struggled to understand why I was doing what I was doing for Moriori later on in my life.’’

After a Rotary exchange to Canada, which opened his eyes to the possibilities outside

Temuka, he studied law at Canterbury University.

He has spent many years coming and going from the islands as he worked on the Treaty settlement. Much of that work was done around his legal career, and a decade of it voluntarily. He joined the Hokotehi Moriori Trust, an organisation representing the interests of Moriori people, in 2010 and has been executive chair since 2015.

He wasn’t always popular. He wasn’t advocating a popular cause. Some feared a settlement process would cause division in the small community of 600 people. The Moriori, Ma¯ ori and Pa¯ keha¯ had lived in relative harmony for a long time. What might a Treaty settlement for Moriori do to this delicate balance on a remote outpost like Re¯ kohu?

But Solomon was never deterred. Weary, dispirited maybe, but he never considered deviating from that promise he made as a young man to his ancestors.

‘‘Someone once said, ‘It’s important to stand for something otherwise you stand for nothing’. This has been my chosen path. People have said I have too much power in the settlement process, on the Hokotehi Moriori Trust, but I don’t see it that way.

‘‘I’ve never regarded it as power; it’s responsibility, and that’s different. I’m not saying I’ve got everything right, but I took the organisation in 2010 from a $1 million loss to a $1.5m profit through major restructuring and that was difficult. People lost their jobs.’’

He spends more and more time on Re¯ kohu. A place he and his second wife, Susan Thorpe, have in Titahi Bay is more of a bolthole.

He remembers the first time he walked on his family land at Manukau on Re¯ kohu, at the age of 24. He felt his ancestors calling him. He hears them now. ‘‘When I’m there I feel like I’m truly home. I walk the land, I feel it, absorb it through my toes and up through my body. That’s how I feel when I’m on that land. I’m a part of it.’’

The first thing he does on his return is collect kina – eats it right there on the rocks.

There’s still a lot of work to do postsettlement, but now it’s time to focus more on family, he says. Solomon is father of two sons and a daughter. Susan, an archaeologist, has two sons who have Nga¯ ti Mutunga connections, so the blended family is the embodiment of a cultural mix living in harmony.

He and Susan are on a mission to recloak the island in trees. They have planted 5000 so far. ‘‘We want to plant millions of trees. We want to plant experimental crops to make the island more resilient and self-sufficient. We want to relearn the Moriori language, bring back people who identify as Moriori to the island. ‘‘We want to give back to the island.’’

That sounds like a promise.

‘‘I’m someone who is motivated not to dwell on things that have gone wrong, but to ask what you can do about it.’’