poring over these documents in archives is the only way i can get to know my family that no one spoke about – out of fear, shame or not-knowing. the archives keep our past in our present and futures, just how the aboriginal temporal system dictates everything always is, always was and always will be. my family were surveilled, categorised, documented, then filed away in some departmental library, to be retrieved and looked upon now with, hopefully, more humane eyes.¹

From Archie Moore (Kamilaroi/Bigambul) I turn to archives that hold heritage in documentary and object form. I think of what they have done to Indigenous peoples, our histories and ancestors, to our stories that they call mythologies, our taonga they call curio. These memory institutions that for so long have done the remembering for us, non-Indigenous hands who have typed us into catalogues and, as Moore writes, filed us away.

I think of Robert Pouwhare from Ngāti Haka Patuheuheu of Ngāi Tūhoe who in 1990 made a sculptural triptych with its component parts titled Raupatu, Te Kaea and The Waiohau Fraud. Commissioned for ‘Mana Tiriti: The Art of Protest and Partnership’, this exhibition was part of a national commemoration programme to mark the 150th signing of te Tiriti o Waitangi and has been a preoccupation of mine since I first read about it in the exhibition’s accompanying publication. This triptych is conceptually located in the township of Waiohau, a town so small it is difficult to find a definitive population number. While te Tiriti has had an indelible influence on jurisprudence and legislation in Aotearoa since its signing, this work brings a localised specificity that a nationwide influence can sometimes obscure. In reality, it is the patchwork of microhistories across Aotearoa, like those archived in this work, that gives te Tiriti its weight.

The work refers to the widespread raupatu that took place in the area Pouwhare is from, with The Waiohau Fraud representing land taken at Te Houhi by duplicitous means. Pouwhare shared this history in 2013. 

‘Last century our people were defrauded of 7000 acres of their lands in the "Waiohau Fraud", unlawfully evicted off our land at Te Houhi, and imprisoned on land in another tribal area in what Professor Judith Binney described as a concentration camp.’²

At the time, he was speaking in opposition to the inclusion of his hapū Ngāti Haka Patuheuheu into the Tūhoe Deed of Settlement. The hapū felt that atrocities committed against them were being used to benefit the iwi in a way that would not be commensurably redressed to Ngāti Haka Patuheuheu as constituent members of a greater whole. The Crown refused to accept the hapū withdrawal and Ngāti Haka Patuheuheu remained subsumed within the wider iwi settlement. The Crown determined the rules of engagement.

***

What the archive conceals and obliterates are the people behind the paper filed away in cardboard boxes, stored in cold vaults in the basements of buildings. These places are the prisons of Aboriginal history that attempted to incarcerate our memories of blood and Country—just as the official state-operated prison system incarcerates our physical bodies—the dual imprison­ment.³

As a document, te Tiriti o Waitangi continues to enact meaning on this country. On 15 November 2024, the divisive Treaty Principles Bill was introduced into parliament by the conservative right-wing Act Party. When voicing their party’s votes on the bill’s introduction, party representatives gave their vote counts in favour or opposed. Representing Te Pāti Māori was first-term MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke (Ngāpuhi, Waikato, Taranaki, Ngāti Porou, Ngāi Tahu).

Te Pāti Māori is a Māori-led political movement that was formed in 2004 by then-junior minister for the Labour Party, Tariana Turia (Ngāti Apa, Ngā Rauru, Tūwharetoa, Whanganui). Turia voted in opposition to a piece of legislation, the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004, that disenfranchised Māori and our connection to the takutai moana. In casting her opposing vote, Turia was aware she would be dismissed from her duties as a minister, and subsequently resigned from the party triggering a by-election for the seat of Te Tai Hauāuru. Turia held the seat as a founding MP for the newly-formed Māori Party (later Te Pāti Māori).

After announcing their party’s vote in opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill, Maipi-Clarke called the words: ‘Kāwana, ka whakamanuwhiritia koe e au!’ She then led the party in the haka ‘Ka mate’ by Ngāti Toa Rangatira leader, Te Rauparaha, simultaneously tearing the proposed bill in half. Members of other opposing parties also joined. Maipi-Clarke’s initial call can be interpreted as, ‘Government, you exist by my say so!’ A further interpretation being that the government is here because Māori have allowed them by right of te Tiriti o Waitangi. The video of Maipi-Clarke’s actions resounded the world over, being viewed over a hundred million times.

Maipi-Clarke’s karanga was a clarion call, searing its way through the walls of paper parliament produces, paper that has sought to define and redefine our identity and future at will.

***

I write a poem
because I was raised off Country
and I yearn and yearn for a place I don’t hold
that holds me⁴

In January 2025, along with whānau descended from my great-great-grandfather Te Ao-o-te-Rangi, we visited Te Houhi. Prior to reaching the site, we stood on the road named for the police officer who carried out the eviction of our tīpuna and gazed upon our maunga, Hikurangi. Newspapers of the time covered the fraudulent sale and subsequent eviction, with an exchange in the letters to the editor highlighting how the purchasers of the land, who were aware that the sale was fraudulent, were seeking support from the community to evict Ngāti Haka Patuheuheu. A sympathetic letter signed H.W.B. shares the feeling from the hapū who were refusing to leave the land,

‘They wish to enlist your sympathy in their endeavour to compel the Government to assist them with a force of police “with handcuffs,” as they say, to evict the hundred or so men, women, and children who so stubbornly cling to their old homes, and seem inclined even to risk dying for them.’⁵

The lawyers for the purchasers of the land responded as follows, ‘Probably 'H.W.B.' would prefer to see that estate still overrun with fern and tea-tree, and the Māori dog and pig in full sway. There are now squatting on the land in question about 50 adults.’⁶ Māori do not squat on our own land.

Standing with 60 other whānau members on the side of a rural road, nonplussed as cars slowed to pass us with querying looks, our eyes fell upon the land our ancestors once lived on. We were separated by a paddock and many farm fences but gently encouraged to build our tīpuna whare in our minds. There it once stood, before the eviction and accusations of squatting. Before it was dismantled and floated down the river to its current site where it was re-erected. The land holds the memory of that whare, and it compels us descendants to remember.

***

Since the beginning of the European dispossession of the world’s Indigenous peoples, the colonisers have defined and redefined it in a vast story archive.⁷

I believe in the power of the archive, I felt it in front of te Tiriti and have felt it every time I am in a collection store surrounded by taonga. These collections are not inanimate, they radiate with the stories of the people they came from. There is a prevailing idea about archives being dusty, or objects frozen in stasis. Te Tiriti shows this isn’t so, Robert Pouwhare’s work shows it isn’t so, so too do the words of Archie Moore, Jeanine Leane, Jazz Money and Moana Jackson. The archive has shifted meaning since I first encountered one as a history undergraduate on a back of house tour at the national archive. I’ve learned that the archive exists not solely in buildings with complex air conditioning systems and white gloves. The archive is in the land that has seen our people arrive and be forced to leave, seen us stand behind a gate and imagine a whare standing. The archive is in the rēwena bug shared to me by one of my Nanny’s and inherited from her mother Ameria, the daughter of Te Ao-o-te-Rangi, a bug I’ve nourished many puku with.

The land remembers
The people remember
Toitū te Tiriti