Rangi Kemara
The story of how Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara came to be running around Te Urewera with a gun started much earlier than the police investigation that put him in prison.
It began when Hoturoa, the captain of the Tainui canoe, set out for these shores more than 800 years ago.
It began when Hoturoa’s descendant, Rereahu, was born, and when Rereahu fathered Maniapoto, whose final advice to his people was: “Stick to that, the straight- flying cormorant!”
That’s to say, take a fix on where you want to be and charge towards it.
It began when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed and when colonisation changed life forever for Maori.
For Rangi Kemara — Ngati Maniapoto and Ngati Rereahu — it began when he was born.
It began at school, when speaking Te Reo was being too clever, and cleverness was insurrection against adult superiority.
It began when he left school for a “working class” job as a linesman only to find unemployment through the economic reforms of Labour finance minister Roger Douglas.
And it began when the welfare reforms of National finance minister Ruth Richardson’s welfare hit those recently unemployed.
People were severed from job security, and then from what could be expected of life.
“I guess we were demoted from the working class to the bilge class,” says Kemara, 49.
His generation had been born into a system which had changed utterly during the 1980s and 1990s.
“None of us voted for it. This new system had nothing more to offer us so we wanted to bring down the Government.”
When the internet arrived, Kemara taught himself computer coding and IT security. It was “a welcome relief — a place to get your head down and scream into the void”.
Then, in the early 2000s, he met Tame Iti.
He remembers sitting in St Lukes shopping mall and seeing this “mokoed Maori” walk past.
“He stopped and looked and made the eyebrows and then made a beeline, sat down and introduced himself.”
Over the next few months, as they got to know each other, Kemara said Iti helped calm him down.
“He was good for me . . . helped me look for more non- violent means of emancipation.
“Not every form of insurgency or uprising has to be with violence.
“He basically said, ‘ bro, you’re going to wind up dead’.”
Kemara’s activism had now aligned with the tino rangatiratanga movement — the fight for selfdetermination — and he had a minor role organising the 2004 hikoi to Wellington and the Tuhoe land hearings. And also being invited to the rama — Iti’s training camps in the bush behind Ruatoki.
So, Kemara’s presence in Te Urewera had been coming a long time.
He had found another place to “scream into the void”.
“It was a free space. It was a welcome relief from the onerous toll of activism.
“It had quite a serious, bushhardening, military- style component, but it was mainly a space to freely discuss ideas within the confines of wananga.”
There were “hundreds” of people who attended, including, by Kemara’s description, some interesting and unusual characters. Any protest attracts these. “It was a very diverse group of people. I’d hung out with a lot of activist groups but never been with one where there was such a diverse view of the world.”
Among them was Jamie Lockett, an angry man who had talked violence for years.
Lockett had a well- established anti- Government rhetoric of carnage and being the police’s worst nightmare before he aligned himself with the Maori sovereignty movement in
2006. He spoke of this before the rama, was captured doing so by police surveillance and continues such talk to this day Police picked up conversations about getting guns, modifying guns, using guns. There was talk of bombs being used and people being killed. But Tame Iti’s protests have always been dramatic, with artistic flair or some tikanga point lost on non- Maori. “I was certainly aware I was under surveillance,” says Kemara. He says he had a sticker under the visor which said: “Warning — this car is probably bugged.” There was talk of violence — although Kemara says the police put the “worst possible spin on it” — but that’s all it was. “There was a lot of talk. The ones who don’t talk — they’re the ones you’ve got to watch. More than 300 police involved in raids around the country using powers granted under the Terrorism Suppression Act. Tame Iti and 17 others arrested after covert investigation, dubbed Operation Eight, into military- style training camps in the Urewera. Those arrested faced firearms charges. The Solicitor- General declines permission to lay terror charges. Dr David Collins, QC, said the police had uncovered some “very disturbing activities’’ but could not prosecute under the Terrorism Suppression Act. This was because the terror law was “unnecessarily complex, incoherent, and as a result almost impossible to apply to the domestic circumstances observed by the police in this case”. Firearms charges against 13 accused are dropped after the Supreme Court ruled video surveillance evidence was gathered unlawfully. However, the same evidence was allowed to be used against Tame Iti, Rangi Kemara, Urs Signer, Emily Bailey and Tuhoe
“It was venting and getting all that heinous shit out.
“There’s nowhere else to vent it. And that’s what I felt about the rama — it was a good place to vent.”
Just weeks after the final rama, Kemara and 17 others were arrested at gunpoint under the auspices of the Terrorism Suppression Act.
No terrorism charges would ever be laid, although the label has stuck.
“When ( then- police commissioner Howard) Broad approached the Solicitor- General before the raids, he would have promised him the world. What they found on the raids was my rifles and a few other rifles.
“There were meant to be bombs and bomb- making kits.
“It was a house of cards,” says Kemara, “that they couldn’t deliver.”
In 2012, after five years of legal wrangling, Kemara and the others were convicted of firearms charges.
“Four of us were found guilty of being in possession of Pakeha rifles while harbouring Maori thoughts,” says Kemara. “Don’t ever explain that to your parole officer. They won’t let you out.”
Is Kemara too self- serving in his recollection?
Groups of armed “activists” running around in the bush carrying out military manoeuvres shocked New Zealand, no matter what criticisms might be made of media coverage.
In sentencing Kemara and the others, Justice Hansen said their lawbreaking “occurred in pursuit of a worthy ideal” and “involved only a remote risk that it would lead to crimes of violence”.
The problem Justice Hansen identified was that “the training brought about the heightened risk of putting arms and know- how into the hands of individuals who could not be relied on to exercise the same restraint” as those before the court.
Text messages from some of those who attended the camps showed Lambert. This was because they faced more serious charges of participating in an organised criminal group. Lambert died before standing trial. The “Urewera 4” were convicted of firearms charges after a four- week trial in the High Court at Auckland. The jury could not decide on the most serious charge of participating in an organised criminal group with “objectives including murder, arson and using guns against police”. “extreme anarchist views”, he said.
Kemara was jailed for 2 ½ years, released on parole after just nine months.
“I wasn’t the first Maori to go to prison and I won’t be the last.”
Sitting underneath everything that happened, Kemara says there’s another influence on what took place.
“It sits in the subconscious of the country, I think.
“It’s the belief ‘ the Maori are coming’. That somehow we are going to come back and take this place that was stolen from us.
“The imagery of Maori with guns conjures this subliminal fear.
“It’s part of the colonial guilt, I suppose.” Iti and Kemara were sentenced to two and- a- half years in prison, while Signer and Bailey received home detention. Justice Rodney Hansen said the evidence showed a private militia being established, although there was no imminent plans for violence. “A crime committed in pursuit of a noble ideal is as much a crime as a criminal act done for a base motive,” he said. “The end does not justify the means.” The Independent Police Conduct Authority report says Operation Eight was justified, but criticised police actions at roadblocks and detaining people in their homes as unlawful. Police Commissioner Mike Bush visits Ruatoki to apologise. Though saying the investigation was necessary, Bush apologised for the manner of the raids. “The situations some community members were placed in, the fear that was experienced and the harm that was caused was unacceptable.” attention to the traumatised children who received no counselling and are still suffering 10 years on.”
The young activists from Wellington had stuck out among those police had charged in the aftermath of the raids.
Signer was a lanky, Swiss- born, fair- haired music graduate from Victoria University and was known for his involvement in social causes.
Bailey, another university graduate, had been similarly active in a long list of charitable projects, campaigns and voluntary environmental work — among them community gardens and a non- profit service offering locals access to internet and film and audio equipment.
At sentencing in May 2012, Justice Rodney Hansen remarked how Signer’s “peace- loving character” was “impossible to reconcile with a man engaged with others in learning how to use Molotov cocktails and who authored training scenarios which at least simulated violence to persons and property”.
Hansen acknowledged Signer and Bailey had been “followers, not leaders”, and the couple had played a lesser role in the activities police had charged the four with.
Ultimately, a jury failed to agree the four were part of an organised criminal group, but found them guilty of firearms charges.
Signer and Bailey had been found to be in joint possession of a . 22 calibre rifle, primarily used for hunting small animals.
Signer was found guilty of five firearms charges and not guilty of five; Bailey was found guilty of six firearms charges and not guilty of four. The pair eventually served out a ninemonth home detention sentence in their new home, Parihaka, another part of the country with immense significance to Maori.
That small settlement, lying between Mt Taranaki and the Tasman Sea, has been a symbol of non- violent resistance since the Maori chiefs Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi peacefully protested against land confiscations in the 1870s and 1880s.
“The oppression of Maori continues in this country — just look at the high rates of incarceration, poverty and homelessness for tangata whenua — but so does the quest for Mana Maori Motuhake,” the couple say.
“We still support this struggle: the liberation of the poor and oppressed; taking care of the environment, the atmosphere, rivers and forest.”
Signer and Bailey moved to Parihaka to support the tight- knit community, and to raise t wo children, who have grown up learning three languages.
They have since popped up in the media, campaigning for other causes. Their group Climate Justice Taranaki has been involved in protests against oil and gas block offers around the region, and Signer launched an effort in 2015 urging Kiwis to take in refugees, mustering support from hundreds of people.
“We formed a charitable trust for environmental education and we continue to learn Te Reo Maori and support Taranaki iwi on the ground,” the couple say. “We are busy, but we are happy.” But they haven’t moved on. “What happened that day and in the weeks and years that followed will always be a part of us,” they say.
“It changed our lives and we will never forget.”