Contemporary Issues in Maori Law and Society the Tangled Web of Treaty Settlements Emissions Trading, Central North Island Forests, and the Waikato River

2008

Aniwaniwa is the title of an elite art exhibition selected for display at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Central to the work is the theme of submersion, as a metaphor for cultural loss. The name was chosen because it evokes the blackness of deep waters, storm clouds, a state of bewilderment, and a sense of disorientation as one is tossed beneath the waters, and it can also be a rainbow, a symbol of hope. Locally, Aniwaniwa refers to rapids at the narrowest point of the Waikato River by the village of Horahora, where artist Brett Graham’s father was born and his grandfather worked at the Horahora power station. In 1947 the town and the original dam were flooded to create a new hydro-electric dam downstream. Many historic sites significant to Graham’s people of Ngāti Korokï-Kahukura were lost forever, many of which have become the subject of a claim to the Waitangi Tribunal. This year will long be remembered for the flood of activity in the Treaty of Waitangi settlement landscape. This article, the fourth in a series that reviews and comments upon significant recent developments in Māori law and society, focuses upon a range of agreements that the Crown has entered into with Māori claimants who have confronted the Crown citing count- less breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi that have been left too long in abeyance. There have been many agreements, at varying levels of finality, and each claimant would consider their grievances, losses, and their ensuing settlement as the most important. Without wanting to detract from that, the greater part of this article appraises two particular settlements notable for their innovation, and

their consequences, in the context of a larger web of settlements. The two settlements, involving the Central North Island Forests and the Waikato River respectively, have been concluded following decades of unsuccessful earlier attempts to resolve. That they were concluded this year can be attributed to strong leadership, on the part of both the Crown and Māori. The theme of leadership permeates this article, and it seemed fitting to dedicate this article to a noble leader of great integrity and quiet strength, Monte Ohia, 2 whose sudden passing this year was heartbreaking for Māori across the nation. Firstly, this article turns to consider Māori responses to the Emissions Trading Scheme which was passed into law this year