The result of parliament’s failure is two versions, one of Articles – the ‘Articles Treaty’, the other of Principles – the ‘Principles Treaty’ – and the consequences – a racially divided country and a group asserting co-governance rights.  How did it happen?

The 1840 Articles Treaty has a Preamble and 3 Articles that reflect the ideas, motives, and actions of the time. Similarly the Principles Treaty is of its time and place – the 1980s. The cause of enormous confusion and conflict is because the treaty today has the words of 1840 (whether in Māori or in English) but the meaning is late 20th century ideology.

The meaning of the 1840 Treaty exists in the Articles. Article I recognised British sovereignty. Article II recognised the rights of Māori to hold or dispose of property. Article III recognised Māori as British subjects. In start contrast, the inventors of the Principles Treaty have, after decades of uncertainty, finally settled on the so-called core principles of partnership, active protection, and redress, despite these words not appearing in the Articles.

The word ‘principles’ first appeared in the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act. In that legislation, ‘principles’ referred directly to the meaning, value, and purpose of the Articles. The word ‘principles’ was tied to the Articles. It had no referent outside those Articles. It did not state the word ‘partnership’, nor was active protection and redress mentioned or implied.

Three events detached the word ‘principles’ from the Treaty Articles, leading to decades of meaning creation. They are the 1985 Treaty of Amendment Act, the 1987 Court of Appeal’s ‘akin to partnership’ statement, and the insertion of undefined ‘principles’ into legislation from 1986.

The Articles-Principles detachment occurring in these three events was crucial to today’s invented treaty. It enabled the principles to acquire a different meaning, value and purpose – a new referent. To reflect the word’s new power, it was given a capital ‘P’. From that time treaty revisionists of all ethnicities talked excitedly about the ‘Principles’ as though they had always existed. Like sacred text, the meaning was lying in wait in the Treaty runes. It would be revealed by those who now interpret the Word to the World – the lawyers who are the modern secular priesthood.

As the practice of legislative insertion and legal interpretation gained momentum so too did an acceptance of the erroneous belief that the Principles had authority. An authority conundrum was created. It is reasonable to believe that insertion into legislation is the act of authorisation.

After all, members of parliament authorised the insertion. However they failed to define the Principles despite numerous and ongoing insertion. It was left to activist judges, officials and retribalists to take on the monumental task of deciding what the Principles were to mean.

In a democracy, parliamentarians represent us, the people. Yet does this authority have legitimacy when our representatives did not know what the Principles meant when they were inserted into law?

A vacancy of meaning, especially when concealed by righteous language, opens up opportunities for those with vested interests to insert their own meaning.  In inventing and consolidating the Principles, advocates for a kinship-based political structure have used traditional ideology to provide a timeless, spiritually authorised quality to their very time-bound interests. The erroneous partnership Principle is given the greatest weight, opening up a wide backdoor to power. Tribal corporations can now move beyond their economic interests to demand political power – to be entrenched first as co-governance, then as tribal sovereignty.

How do you get people to believe in an invention and then to agree to its consolidation in legislation? Retribalists simply used age-old strategies.

The first strategy laid the groundwork by creating alliances with those in government and the professions, particularly in the judiciary. It didn’t matter if the alignment proved to be incompatible – such as that between a racialised retribalising movement and emancipatory feminism. As a temporary alliance it served its purpose with many feminists proving to be ardent retribalists. Some later retreating in silence, unable to resolve a dilemma created by mistakenly defining equal rights and justice in identity terms. In this way, feminism was ousted by gender identity politics and women’s rights were side-lined.

The second strategy is to ride on the back of current intellectual movements. Using postmodernism’ mystifying and irrational idea that reality only exists in language means that if one say something is the case then it is – especially if it is said in the loud and certain tone of the righteous with prayers adding the gravitas of sacred authority. If it is stated that the Treaty has Principles, then it is for the secular priests to reveal that truth.

This emperor’s new clothes strategy was supported by the righteousness of Cultural Marxism, a thriving ideology in university social science and education faculties and in government departments staffed by those with postmodern degrees. Although the nonsensical conflation of culture and materialism would have Marx turning in his grave, it gives social justice intellectuals a site on the moral highground from where they can do well by doing good.

The third strategy, the language game, rests on this irrational intellectual bedrock.  Controlling the language that can be used when talking about the Treaty ensures that thought itself is restricted in both its expression and, more seriously its very development.  How can alternative ideas be developed if they cannot be spoken?  Even more seriously, once language is couched in moral terms then criticism is excluded.

The rapid inclusion of the word indigenous into New Zealanders’ everyday language from the 1980s shows how effective this method is.  Belief in a treaty partnership requires partners who are to live in a permanent relationship.  Differences are emphasised, sometimes even created, and commonality rejected.

Embedding one of those partners in the status of indigeneity with the other partner an intruder into Arcadia expands the moral distinction into a timeless mythical realm.  Romantic evocations of the evil coloniser and the indigenous colonised provide a more seductive narrative for the nation’s collective memory than the more prosaic fact that, from the thirteen century to the present, all New Zealanders are settlers.

Our history is one of waves of settlers. It is a shared experience that trumps an arbitrary division into the indigenous on the one hand and all other settlers on the other. But language control is most successful when it evokes the sacred. The word indigenous does this with its suggestion of a mythological connection to the land and its creators. Those who resist the language game are accused of refusing not only the word, but the Word as revealed truth. Those who insist that truth lies in reality – that the 1840 Treaty didn’t have Principles and that we are all settlers, no matter the time of arrival, are silenced by accusations of racism. Far better to be silent than to bear the racist taint suggestive of a profoundly immoral character.

It is in the revelation of sacred meaning that the fourth strategy has proved to be most effective. Today’s secular priests – the activist judges, tribalist law professors, and lawyer-politicians – have claimed the authority to interpret the truth from the Treaty runes. They have won the age-old battle between the World and the Word in securing doctrinal supermacy. Made vulnerable by their commitment to the Word and their role as its interpretors to the World, lawyers tend to believe that if it is said, and especially if it is said in legislation, then it must be true. That revealed Word is now the authority.

But tribalist intellectuals, activists and lawyers aside, the group most to blame for the invention of the Principles Treaty are our Members of Parliament. The inclusion into legislation of a statute without legislators knowing what it meant is an unprecedented failure of political representation. Compounding the failure by continuing to insert the Principles does not make up for that failure. Repeating an error does not diminish or remove it, rather the error is consolidated.

The initial authority for inclusion was not given by the people. Until this occurs, or if the people refuse to authorise the inclusion, the Principles do not have the authority claimed for them. They should be removed. In the end, legitimacy is decided by the people if democracy is to work.

Those who have done well out of the invention of Treaty Principles will object to their removal. They will use the loud voices and threatening tactics that have proved so effective and led to widespread entitlement. They will be shameless in calling on the democratic ideals of universal human rights to justify a racialised future.

But an unsettled and messy time is democracy in action. Indeed a degree of conflict is to be expected given the current mess.  But the message for legislators is clear. They act on behalf of the people. They must know what their legislation means before laws are passed. Officials and lawyers then interpret the law. They do not create its meaning in undertaking that interpretation.

It is in discussion with the people that our parliamentary representatives assure themselves and us that they know what they are talking about. The discussion about whether we want Treaty Principles may be four decades late, but it must happen for the sake of New Zealand democracy.

I identify three possible choices. The first is continue with the 1980s’ invented Principles Treaty knowing it justifies co-governance and will lead to the irresolvable conflict between a kinship-based polity and a universal democratic one, one justified in a racial division of people into indigenous and non-indigenous.

The second choice is to value the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi as one of the country’s most significant historical documents, but one with no practical relevance to a modern democracy.

The third choice is similar to the second but treasures the symbolic value of the historical document within the nation’s collective memory. It is to regard the principles (lower case ‘p’) mentioned in the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act as referring directly to the Articles but with no meaning or application beyond those Articles.

Democracy is not just arriving at a decision. It is the act of rational communication that enables the decision to be made. For this to happen, language must be pulled apart so that meaning is exposed, and with it, the intentions of the user. There can be no language priesthood, no sacred words, no moral highground.  Those who have controlled treaty language have controlled meaning for too long. It is now time to talk critically about the Treaty.

When Alice told the Mad Hatter that she didn’t think, his reply was – then you shouldn’t talk. But we must talk, the alternative is silence – and anger. So let us follow the March Hare’s advice – say what we mean. Language has three components – words, meaning, and the explicit connection of the word to its meaning.  Ideology intrudes in the vacant space when words are detached from their meaning. That has been the case with Treaty talk since the 1980s.

Let us insist on democracy’s rational communication in all its complexity and disturbing power so that we know what we mean when we speak and we can justify the meaning in explicit argumentative logic. Let us insist that our parliamentary representatives do the same.

(Note: The ideas in this commentary are based on my article: Rata, E. (2004) ‘Marching through the Institutions’: The Neotribal Elite and the Treaty of Waitangi. Published in Sites, New Series, Winter, Volume 1, No. 2 https://sites.otago.ac.nz/Sites)

The post Two Treaties of Waitangi: The Articles Treaty and the Principles Treaty appeared first on Open Inquiry.

A few months ago, with the sky lanes around New Zealand finally opening up again, I decided to book a trip to Niue. In preparation for my visit, I started to look around online for information about the remote Polynesian island, including its history.

One of the stories I kept seeing was that Captain Cook had given the island the name ‘Savage Island’ because he had seen some natives with a red substance on their teeth and assumed that it was blood (and probably human blood). In fact, it was a local variety of red banana (often referred to as the hulahula or fe’i banana).

Cook’s account

When I tried to chase the story up in the relevant section of Cook’s journals, though, I couldn’t find it. What I found instead in the entry in Cook’s entry for Thursday, June 16^th, 1774, was an account of two attempts to land on the island. (Cook’s party also surveyed the island from a cliff in between the two main landing attempts.) Cook’s account of the first landing attempts is as follows:

We landed with ease in a small creek, and took post on a high rock to prevent surprise. Here we displayed our colours, and Mr. Forster and his party began to collect plants, &c. The coast was so overrun with woods, bushes, plants, stones, &c. that we could not see forty yards round us. I took two men, and with them entered a kind of chasm, which opened a way into the woods. We had not gone far before we heard the natives approaching; upon which I called to Mr. Forster to retire to the party, as I did likewise. We had no soon joined, than the islanders appeared at the entrance of a chasm not a stone’s-throw from us. We began to speak, and make all the friendly signs we could think of, to them, which they answered by menaces; and one of two men, who were advanced before the rest, threw a stone, which struck Mr. Spearman on the arm. Upon this two musquets were fired, without order, which made then all retire under cover of the woods; and we saw them no more.

‘After waiting some little time,’ Cook decided to carry on along the shore ‘in hopes of meeting with better success in another place.’ Eventually he and his party ‘came before a small beach, on which lay four canoes,’ where they landed ‘with a view,’ Cook says, ‘of just looking at the canoes, and to leave some medals, nails, &c., in them; for not a soul was to be seen.’ Things soon changed, however. Cook’s account continues:

We had been there but a few minutes, before the natives, I cannot say how many, rushed down the chasm out of the wood upon us. The endeavours we used to bring them to a parley, were to no purpose; for they came with the ferocity of wild boars, and threw their darts. Two or three musquets, discharged in the air, did not hinder one of them from advancing still further, and throwing another dart, or rather a spear, which passed close over my shoulder. His courage would have cost him his life, had not my musquet missed fire; for I was not five paces from him, when he threw his spear, and had resolved to shoot him to save myself. I was glad afterwards that it happened as it did. At this instant, our men on the rock began to fire at others who appeared on the heights, which abated the ardour of the party we were engaged with, and gave us time to join our people, when I caused the firing to cease. The last discharge sent all the islanders to the woods, from when they did not return so long as we remained. We did not know that any were hurt.

In Cook’s telling, then, he and his party made two attempts to land on Niue. On both occasions they had peaceable intentions, something they tried to make clear on the first landing attempt by ‘making all the friendly signs we could think of.’ On both occasions they were attacked; on the second attempt Cook himself narrowly avoided being hit by a spear. Finally, on both occasions the British fired their muskets, though Cook stresses that he didn’t order anyone to fire during the first attempt; that he ordered his men to stop firing at a certain point during the second attempt; and that he was happy, in retrospect, that his own musket had failed to fire.

For our purposes, though, the most interesting aspect of Cook’s account is he explicitly tells us, soon after the end of the last passage above, that it was ‘the conduct and aspect of these islanders’ on the two landing-attempts he describes that ‘occasioned my naming it Savage Island.’ By ‘conduct,’ he seems to mean their attacks on him and his men; and his mention to their ‘aspect’ apparently refers to their fierceness during these attacks, though later he says that the Niueans ‘seemed to be stout well made men, were naked, except round the waists, and some of them had their faces, breast, and thighs painted black.’ Nowhere is there any reference to red teeth, mouths smeared with blood, or any inferences about the Niueans being cannibals.

     The site of Cook’s second landing at Opaahi, Niue. Source: niuepocketguide.com

The origins of the banana story

The lack of any mention of red teeth in Cook’s journals raises an obvious question: where does the story about the red bananas come from? The Wikipedia entry on Niue states that Cook ‘named the island “Savage Island” because, as legend has it, the natives who “greeted” him were painted in what appeared to be blood. The substance on their teeth was hulahula, a native red fe’i banana.’

The caveat that this is ‘as legend has it’ is appropriate, though bloggers are not always scrupulous in reproducing it. But Wikipedia also adds a reference at the end of this sentence that can help us get closer to the bottom of the story about red bananas.

The reference is to Tony Horowitz’s Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, a 2002 book in which the US journalist re-traces some of Cook’s journeys while reading and reflecting on his journals. In the relevant section of Horowitz’s book, he stumbles upon the name ‘Savage Island’ on an old map, and turns to ‘the index of Cook’s journal’ for an explanation. After a very brief summary of Cook’s account, Horowitz adds: ‘A footnote said that the warriors’ mouths were smeared red, as if with blood.’

Did Cook’s journals have an index and footnotes? I didn’t think so, but when I consulted the standard edition of Cook’s journals by J.C. Beaglehole in the library at Victoria University (where Beaglehole once taught), things started to make more sense. Beaglehole as editor added a number of footnotes to this passage, the most relevant of which begins as follows:

The modern Niueans, a cheerful industrious people, give a rather pained consideration to the name which Cook bestowed upon their island, and explain the whole matter as one of mistaken intentions.

Beaglehole then reports a local claim that the Niueans that Cook says attacked his men ‘were simply going through the ritual of the “challenge,” an essential though alarming part of any ceremony of welcome’ (a ritual Beaglehole compares to the Māori haka). Beaglehole adds that the modern Niueans also held that ‘the challengers had adorned their lips with a scarlet dye, the juice of the hulahula banana, and Cook flew to the conclusion that they were cannibals, dripping with the blood of their victims.’

Beaglehole himself thinks this story is ‘rather too obviously made-up,’ and that the tale of the red banana-juice, in particular, ‘is of course a bit of native mythology, “rationalization,” to make the story more persuasive.’ It’s also fair to note that that the local story does nothing to explain Cook’s report (supported, as Beaglehole notes, by the accounts of some of his crew) that his party had various missiles thrown at them.

One thing, in any case, should now be clear. The story about the red bananas is a local tradition that seems to have grown up in Niue in the generations after Cook’s visit. But Cook did not give Niue the name ‘Savage Island’ because he inferred that its people were cannibals from a red substance in their teeth. He gave the island the name ‘Savage Island,’ as he himself indicates, because its natives attacked him and his men in an energetic manner on both of the occasions that he tried to establish a foothold on the island.

Final thoughts

Given how clear Cook is about his reasons for calling Niue ‘Savage Island,’ and how easily his journals can now be checked online, what explains the continuing circulation of the story about the red bananas?

One important factor is clearly the story’s presence on Wikipedia, one of the most-viewed websites in the world and almost certainly the first port of call for travel bloggers keen to write up that short post on Niue. Tony Horowitz’s referencing slip in his book (mistaking Beaglehole’s note for one written by Cook) has also played a key role in the survival of the tale.

We might also wonder, though, why so many writers have apparently been so happy to pass on this particular story about Cook without putting in the tiny amount of work that would be required to check it.

If Beaglehole is right, the story about the red bananas emerged from modern, Christianized Niueans’ embarrassment at the idea that they would have attacked Cook’s crew so violently, even as they tried to make clear that they meant the natives no harm. From a broad anthropological perspective, that the Niueans attacked these strange-looking newcomers shouldn’t really come as that much of a shock. Whether traditional tribes have a tendency to attack any outsiders who stray into their territory as a default policy is the subject of some controversy; but violent attacks on newcomers certainly aren’t unknown, as the recent case of the American missionary who was killed after attempting to land on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean reminds us. Even so, most people nowadays, including both residents of Niue and visitors to the island, would probably prefer to believe a less violent story than the one Cook records in his journal.

But would they – would we – also prefer to believe a story that shows Cook in a more negative light? The banana story has Cook leaping to the conclusion that the Niueans were cannibals based on what seems like a rather basic misunderstanding of local conditions (or, at least, of native plant species). It also gives an origin story for the name ‘Savage Island’ that makes Cook’s choice of this pejorative label very hard to justify. All the Niueans did is eat some local bananas, the story tells us – and this celebrated European voyager and scientist decided this meant they were cannibals and savages!

Of course, nobody would now argue that Cook was right to give the island this frankly insulting name, whatever his reception. At the same time, the full account in his journals at least makes his choice of that name a bit more understandable. Cook might well have been killed had that spear passed slightly lower, and that will surely have had an impact on his state of mind when he wrote up the episode in his journal.

That episode is only one of the many fascinating episodes of first contact between Europeans and Polynesians that took place during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The whole set of these episodes make up a complex tapestry of interaction, one that includes both positive aspects (the beginnings of trade and other forms of collaboration, not excluding genuine love affairs) and negative ones (colonization, dispossession, and the introduction of novel pathogens).

It’s certainly not the burden of this short piece to argue that European colonialists never leapt to racist and incorrect conclusions about natives, nor even that Cook never did this himself (even if works like Gananath Obeyesekere’s 2005 Cannibal Talk surely go too far in seeing cannibalism as more or less entirely a product of Western discourses). What the truth about the story about the red bananas may remind us of, though – besides the perennial benefits of checking sources – is that the history of European attitudes to the Pacific isn’t always quite as unrelievedly dark as it might now seem. 

Postscript: How red are red bananas?

Niue Tourism board at Opaahi featuring a version of the banana story

The picture at the head of this article was taken in the village of Mutalau on Niue. A local guide told me that this was the type of banana that had been smeared on the natives’ teeth when Cook spotted them (according to the story). As you can see from the photograph, the outer peel of these bananas has a reddish tinge.

But is the fruit of red bananas really red? Though I’m no banana specialist, the more I’ve looked into this question, the more my doubts have grown. The fruit of the fe’i banana (which is usually said to be what the Niueans had been eating in 1774) seems to be yellow. This obviously makes the version of the story in which the natives had just been eating a local banana variety even harder to credit.

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that Beaglehole in his note speaks of ‘the juice’ of the banana. This may refer to the juice of the chewed-up fruit, or it may be consistent with another variation on the story (present on the official tourist information board pictured above) in which the islanders deliberately smeared their teeth with red sap from the banana tree in order to scare Cook and his men off. And the fe’i banana does seem to have a vermilion sap.

This story makes a little more sense, but is still completely at odds with the accounts of Cook and his men in a way that would need to be explained. In any case, it still seems clear that Cook did not call Niue ‘Savage Island’ because he had seen anyone with red (or vermilion) teeth. Readers with more experience of red banana species are welcome to get in touch – especially if that experience is more than skin-deep.

Cover photo: Author’s photo of some bananas with a reddish tinge to their peels, taken in Mutalau, Niue

The post Was Captain Cook Afraid of Red Bananas? appeared first on Open Inquiry.