Toitū te Tiriti
I am Tangata Tiriti. I am here in this place and time because in 1840 the British Crown and Rangatira Māori signed the Treaty of Waitangi.
The British Crown represented the interests of my ancestors, so this document matters to me. Its clear aspiration was for my people to be here in partnership with, rather than dominance of, the people who were already here. That respect for diversity and self-determination is a baseline for how any agreement should operate, and not having fulfilled those aspirations means we should be trying harder rather than looking for reasons to back out of them entirely. It feels ridiculous that I might need to state this plainly in 2024.
Given the litany of bad-faith actions shown by the British Crown and their subjects before 1840 in New Zealand and worldwide, I firmly believe it was a grace for Māori to sign Te Tiriti at all. My commitment to fighting for treaty justice is fueled by my gratitude for that grace and my sadness and shame in how it was repaid, including how things are going right now.
The other part of my desire to uphold Te Tiriti comes from a knowledge of my ancestors, how and why they came to Aotearoa, and what their lives and the lives of their people had held before that. We are the best versions of ourselves when we are anchored in knowledge of where we came from. All of us are a mixture of successes and failures of our ancestors.
My ancestors learned the most effective way they could survive was through capitalism, and a surefire way to climb the ladder of capitalism was to escape the British class system. That might sound overly simplified, but most five-or-so-generation Pākeha like myself are so removed from how oppressive and absurd the class system in Britain was (and in many ways still is) that we struggle to conceive of how bad conditions were for most people outside of the peerage*.
Except for one (fun to read about) plausibly royal line, my tūpuna were miners, farmers, thieves and prospectors. They almost all made their way to Australia and New Zealand through assisted immigration, though I have a few ancestors who were transported to Australia as criminals.
Most hailed from Ireland, Scotland and Cornwall - all places that experienced the British colonial machine while it was still warming up. I often think about the loss of lands and ways that came from that steamroller of Britishness, and I am committed to unpacking the homogeny of whiteness and learning about the rich and diverse folklores and histories of my people. It’s a project that gives me great joy and anchors me in my whakapapa, because we all have whakapapa.
A clear throughline in all my ancestor’s stories - even the transportees - is they and their descendants were economically and socially better off because they came to New Zealand. It was here in Aotearoa that my people were able to thrive.
In the case of my family’s patriarch, Johan Heinrich Eberhardt, he was born ‘uneheliche’ [the suitably confronting German word for ‘illegitimate’] in 1839 Hamburg. He would have almost certainly spent a hard and short life there as a factory or dock worker. Instead, his mother, Anna Dorathea, took 3-year-old Johan to Aotearoa aboard the St Pauli** in 1842.
Johan died as John Henry Aberhart at 96. He had a large family and a successful market gardening business in Blenheim. He was also very proud of owning the first car in the region, and I have a copy of his driver’s license with “001” as the issuing number.
St Pauli sailed here because of the Treaty of Waitangi***. With full respect to my great opa and acknowledging his strength, work ethic and the struggles he faced, I think it’s fair to say he was able to grow his garden, his social standing, his whanau and their roots towards me, with the help of systems that undermined the Te Tiriti and disenfranchising Māori.
Here and now, in 2024, his legacy is still evident in the things my family has and does. His successes are ours. And here’s the thing: It’s okay to say that some of his successes were at the expense of Māori. That does not insult him or his legacy, and it doesn’t minimise his work or his dreams. It just situates him in a colonial structure that all of us are in, which we keep being offered the chance to redress and which we stupidly keep declining.
I don’t know what my ancestors would have thought or felt about Te Tiriti other than that it allowed them to come here, and being here was a thing they were glad for. In researching my family history, I have learned again and again how much my ancestors loved this place.
They stayed here when others in their family returned, they meaningfully tended the land in each generation, and in the case of Wellington, it has been the purposeful home of four generations of my family. I sometimes feel like its hills are in my bones, but perhaps it’s just that my people’s bones are literally in the hills.
None of that would be possible if the Te Tiriti hadn’t been signed. It is the agreement that allows my family to stand on this land with legitimacy and dignity. And even if l know this agreement has been regularly dishonoured, how could it possibly uphold my ancestors' mana and legacy to continue to dishonour it? How does it honour them to make my standing on this land even less dignified and less legitimate?
I stand in the mana of my ancestors to say now: I stand for Mana Motuhake. I support Māori in their righteous struggle towards self-determination, which was agreed upon by my ancestors and theirs.
Through the grace of Māori, my people escaped a system that had been oppressing them and came to a new land. I will repay that grace by helping end oppression here, now, alongside the people of this land.
Toitū te Tiriti. Ake ake ake.
*If you’re interested in learning more about what life was like for the working class in the UK. I recommend even just a short wiki hole about the enclosures of the commons, the Industrial Revolution and workhouses.
**Anna was braver than I can fathom by deciding to get as far away as physically possible from where she was, with her toddler in tow, as a woman in 1842. The ship was full of working-class Germans and a few Lutheran priests, and she married a shoemaker while they were aboard. It’s unclear if they planned to marry or even knew each other before boarding. They lived and died together in a little town that’s now called Hope, just outside Nelson.
***Specifically, the series of Naturalisation Acts that the British Crown enacted immediately after it was signed.