In what follows, we outline the historical and socio-economic landscapes of the tangata whenua of Te Waipā Awa (the Waipā River) before and immediately after the coming of Pākehā (New Zealand European ethnic group). It is, as with all historical works, just one history that can be told, interpreted, and retold in numerous other ways, and which is always partial and subjective. One part of this history resides in Te Ao Māori (the world of Māori), and the other part lies in Te Ao Pākehā (the world of Pākehā aka the settler world) and associated cultural identities (Parsons et al. 2019; Salmond 2017). Although Māori and Pākehā who lived (and continue to live) in the Waipā catchment share commonalities in their respective engagements with their environments, their understandings of and relationships with place are based on diferent understandings of the environment (ontologies) as well as diferent modes of living and environmental management practices (epistemologies). Te relationships between iwi (tribes) and the Waipā River were/are a complex network of metaphysical and physical connections (see Fig. 3.1). Te Ao Pākehā, on the other hand, situated the Waipā River as a resource or commodity that could be controlled and used to further human prosperity and development activities.

#### **Te Ao Māori (The Māori World)**

Te catchment of the Waipā River was home to Māori people for many hundreds of years before when Pākehā frst began their visits to Aotearoa (Barrett 2012; Collins et al. 2012; Ellison et al. 2012; Tauriki et al. 2012). Whakapapa ties successive generations of people in the Waipā catchment to Tainui waka (canoe), which was one of the frst waka to bring Māori to Aotearoa from their homeland of Hawaiki, in the South Pacifc. Early Pacifc migrants explored, named and storied, cultivated, settled and defended the lands and waters from Tāmaki Makaurau (modern-day

**Fig. 3.1** Map showing different iwi and hapū within the Waipā River catchment

Auckland) in the north to the Poutama and Whanganui in the south. In the east and the south, they met and intermingled with people from other waka (including Tokomaru, Aotea, and Te Arawa) (Tauriki et al. 2012; Te Hurinui Jones 1995). Tribal oral traditions tell of ariki (paramount chief) and rangatira (chief or high rank) who represented and maintained the mana (power, authority and prestige) of their people (within their iwi and hapū—sub-tribes), and whose lives were recorded to include remarkable journeys, signifcant battles, marriages and familial bonds.

After the Tainui waka made landfall at Tāmaki Makaurau, its leaders made expeditions around the new lands and waters; some by land, others by sea. Many leaders (including Rōtū, Hiaroa, and Rakataura) journeyed south on foot and traversed the Waikato River valley and along the Waikato coastline (Ellison et al. 2012; Tauriki et al. 2012; Te Hurinui Jones 1995). Hoturoa brought the Tainui waka to Kāwhia Harbour, which was its fnal resting place. He and his wife (Whakaotirangi) established their home at Kāwhia where Whakaotirangi planted the frst kūmara (sweet potato *Ipomoea batatas*), which she had brought with her from Hawaiki. Rakataura and Kahurere travelled through the interior lands, journeying up the mountain Pirongia and southwards along the Waipā River and the ranges to the east of the river. Tey encountered an environment far colder than their tropical island home in the South Pacifc, and many of the crops (such as breadfruit and yams) they brought with them could not grow. However, what the new land provided in abundance was far more space than in Hawaiki. Between Wharepūhunga and Pirongia, Rakataura and Kahurere discovered fat area—the wetlands and foodplains of the Waipā River—and further south the dense forest of Te Nehenehenui, which at the time of their arrival was flled with moa (*Dinornithiformes*) as well as other smaller species of birds, bats, and edible fora. Te foodplains and forests were linked by a mosaic of streams, rivers, and lakes in which a plethora of diferent types of fsh, shellfsh, and waterfowl lived. Tese watercourses also became the region's transport network, for Māori. Te Tainui leader Rōtū settled with others besides the Waipā River at Whatawhata (Collins et al. 2012, pp. 49, 55; Tauriki et al. 2012, pp. 94–97, 110–112; Torne 2011, pp. 47–49). Te Tainui peoples were not alone in their new lands; they lived alongside others—including fairy people (patupaiarehe) and fair-haired people (urukehu)—who lived on the slopes of the mountains of Pirongia and Kakepuku, and in the forests of Tūhua and Pureora (Barber 1978; Cowan 1901; Ellison et al. 2012).

Descendants of Tainui waka initially lived in small family groupings and moved from location to location to allow them to access resources at diferent times of year (Anderson et al. 2012; Anderson 2002). For example, for hunting or fshing activities, harvesting berries, as well as the cultivation of kūmara and taro (root crops) (Bassett et al. 2004; Furey n.d.; Horrocks et al. 2008; Leach 2005). Initially, Māori hunted moa and other abundant fauna; however, unsustainable harvesting practices, rising human populations, loss of fora, and the introduction of rats resulted in rapid decline in moa numbers (Anderson 2003; Gumbley et al. 2004; Hogg et al. 2017; Worthy and Swabey 2002). Accordingly, the focus of the Māori economy adapted and diversifed, and included the year-round harvesting of fora (berries, fern roots) and fauna (fsh, eels, shellfsh, birds), as well as the cultivation of crops. Horticultural techniques used in Hawaiki were adapted to suit the colder and wetter conditions of the Waikato and Te Rohe Pōtae (Te King Country), where it was far more challenging to grow kūmara and taro than in warmer tropical climates. Over centuries, the social structure changed as individual families began to work collaboratively, probably as a way to share the division of labour (collecting foodstufs, defending territories). Tus, hapū were formed.

Early Māori settlement in the Waipā catchment following the landing of the waka Tainui established the tūpuna (ancestors) of the various hapū and iwi within today's landscape. Important events led to the appearance of one signifcant tūpuna: Maniapoto, after whom the iwi Ngāti Maniapoto is named. Te development of Ngāti Maniapoto as a separate iwi coincided with other groups (who traced their lineage to the Tainui waka) branching out to establish their iwi distinct from Tainui. Tese groups all continued to engage with one another but maintained separate rohe (tribal lands and waters) (Ellison et al. 2012; Tauriki et al. 2012).

Te principal socio-cultural and political grouping from the 1500s through until the 1840s was the hapū (Anderson et al. 2012; Anderson 2002). Hapū were made up of several diferent family (whanau) groups who lived nearby each other, were united by common ancestry, and who worked together under leader(s) (rangatira) for the beneft of all hapū members. Natural resources were managed communally, which included the production and sustainable harvesting of resources from lands and waters. Likewise, waka, pā whawhai (often shortened to pā, which are fortifed settlements used during conficts), and other things were communal property held by collectives rather than individuals. Nonetheless, rights overlapped between hapū, with people living in neighbouring areas often related and able to assert their ancestral relationships within another hapū territory. Te nature of these territorial rights depended on the specifc connections, but usually included rights to seasonal visits or to occupy an area; seasonal or permanent rights to use particular resources (foods, water, cultivations); and rights to travel through space safely. Records highlight how the various hapū of Ngāti Maniapoto moved around seasonally to access the diversity of food sources within tribal boundaries (moving north and south, from inland to the coastal areas). Oral histories recount how people came from far and wide for the annual tuna heke (the migration of freshwater eels) as well as seasonal fshing trips. Te rivers and streams were crucial transport routes that allowed people to move around the area and transport themselves and their foodstufs around the region (see Fig. 3.2) (Tauriki et al. 2012).

#### **Knowledge, Values and Guiding Principles**

Pre-colonial Māori in the Waipā catchment, as elsewhere, held their distinct understanding about the origins of the world, how the universe operated, and the nature of all beings (both living and non-living) (Anderson et al. 2012; Collins et al. 2012; Salmond 2017; Tauriki et al. 2012; Waitangi Tribunal 2018). Tis understanding extended to their own identities, cultural traditions, and histories; their ways of governing, establishing and maintaining laws, assessing whether the behaviour was correct or incorrect, and systems of social organisation; their values, beliefs, and social norms; their approach to determining rights to resources (including land, water and biota); their approaches to managing their interactions with the environment; and their ways to deal with relationships between people (interpersonal as well as inter-whanau, hapū, and iwi). How Māori understood themselves and their position within the world centred on recognising that a host of diferent interacting human, biophysical, and

**Fig. 3.2** Photograph showing Māori canoe and bridge in a stream (somewhere between Te Kuiti and Te Awamutu) in one of the Waipā River's numerous wetlands circa 1890. The vegetation consists primarily of manuka that was cultivated and harvested by Māori for building materials, to make medicines, and to produce perfumes. (Source: Ref/1/2-045762-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand)

spiritual forces shaped the world, their environments, and their day-today lives (Mead 2016). At the heart of Māori ways of knowing and thinking (their ontology) is the connectivity of all things (human and more-than-humans). Te principle of whanaungatanga (which translates as kinship, relationship, and sense of familial connection) highlights this interconnection and holds that all things (animate and inanimate, living and dead, past and present) were (and are always) linked together (Haar 2009; Harmsworth et al. 2016). All the entitlements, obligations, beliefs, and values and the power to lead and make decisions, originated from the domain of ancestor-gods and fundamentally from Te Korekore (see Fig. 3.3: Whakapapa spiral). All relationships (social and environmental) were interposed through the spiritual realm.

**Fig. 3.3** Whakapapa spiral

Tainui oral traditions describe Te Korekore (also shortened to Te Kore), as the Void or original nothingness that existed before everything (including time) (Ellison et al. 2012; Te Hurinui Jones 1995). All of creation (including natural and supernatural beings) came out of Te Kore, which was powered by Io-matua-te-kore (the parentless one or supreme being) the ultimate energy and consciousness believed to be the constant, endless, and original parent of all things and knowledge.1 From Io and Te Kore came the two gods Papa-tū-ā-nuku (Earth Mother) and Ranginui (Sky Father), who were linked together in such a tight embrace that no light could get through (Salmond 2017). It was into this dark and cramped space that their children lived and some of them eventually conspired to prize their parents apart so that they could live in the light). Te children were ultimately successful and became the Atua (gods) of Māori and the progenitors for every part of the world. Tāne-mahuta (God of the Forest) became the atua of all aspects of trees insects, birds, and rocks, and all other aspects of forests. Haumiatiketike became the atua of the plants that could be collected as food for people, while Rongomātāne (the frst-born child) became the god of peace as well as cultivated foods. Tangaroa was responsible for governing the oceans as well as all aquatic life, Tāwhirimātea the winds, Rūaumoko the seasons as well as earthquakes and volcanoes. Human beings were the descendants of the god of war (Tūmatauenga). In Tainui oral traditions, however, the spark of life came from Hani (the male essence) and Puna (the female essence) who fashioned Tiki-i-āhua-mai-i-Hawaiki (Tiki-who-was-fashioned-in-Hawaiki) and Tiki-apoa from the earth (limestone clay) (Ellison et al. 2012; Te Hurinui Jones 1995).

1Tere is disagreement amongst scholars and Māori leaders alike as to whether Io existed in Māori societies prior to contact with Europeans. Some scholars point to the existence of Io in the oral traditions collected by Te Whatahoro Jury from two Wairarapa priests (tohunga) Nēpia Pōhūhū and Te Mātorohanga. Others, including Māori scholar Te Rangi Hīroa (Peter Buck), argue that Io emerged following contact with Europeans and exposure to Christian teachings. By establishing Io as the supreme god of Māori, Hīroa and others argue, tohunga (and other members of Māori society) sought to reconcile their own religious beliefs (which included a pantheon of gods) with that of Christianity's single god (Buck 1950, p. 526).

Tainui traditions tell the whakapapa of how the two ancestors (Tiki-iāhua-mai-i-Hawaiki and Tiki-apoa Whiro) begot Whiro, who produced the explorer Toi, and from Toi came Whatonga. At least 20 generations took place before the Tainui waka arrived in Aotearoa, and another 50 generations were said to have occurred since then. Te critical point is that Māori (both pre-colonial and post-colonisation) saw themselves and all parts of the world as being direct descendants of the gods, who in turn sprung from Te Kore (the Void) and the Io (the parentless one, supreme being and original energy) (see Fig. 3.3: Whakapapa spiral). Every part of the universe was, thus, interrelated, and all relationships were organised through whakapapa (lines or layers of genealogical progression). Every person was an envoy and assistant to all those who came before them both their human tūpuna (ancestors) and their ancestor-gods—back to their common source (Te Kore and Io); similarly, they were/are representatives and ancestors for future generations (Parsons and Fisher 2020).

Te holistic system of thinking and knowledge, commonly referred to as Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and tikanga Māori (laws and principles), established and maintained a matrix of kin-centric relationships between all living and non-living actors (Ataria et al. 2018; Hikuroa 2016; Mead 2016). Included in this web of connections and overlapping rights and responsibilities were both humans and biota, biophysical and metaphysical entities, gods and ancestors. Māori groups were directed by their system of law (tikanga), decision-making authority, and a suite of fundamental concepts (Mead 2016). Key Māori principles, including tapu, mana, whanaungatanga, manaakitanga, tikanga, utu, tuku, and kaitiakitanga, are outlined in Fig. 3.4.

Within their complex, dynamic, and principled society, which was governed by tikanga, Māori developed and sustained ongoing and substantive ties with te taiao (the natural environment) of their rohe, which included their whenua (lands), awa (rivers), maunga (mountains), and repo (wetlands). Māori worldviews (which were multiple rather than singular due to the tribal nature of society but shared similar principles) were holistic and kin-centric wherein all things were interconnected together through whakapapa. Tey were linked to every part of their local taiao (environment) through their whakapapa (Collins et al. 2012, p. 323). Each maunga, awa, roto (lake), repo, and other features of the

#### **Kaitiakitanga Manaakitanga**

**Mātauranga**

Spiritual embodiment (includes spiritual beliefs, capacity to exercise those beliefs, and maintain spiritual wellbeing). Wairua refers to spiritual essence that is carried within a person and other living beings. Wairua also refers to the unseen domain that connections people to the future, the present, and the past, and denotes a state of connectedness with the world. Wairua is governed by tapu (scared or set apart) with the mechanisms of tapu applied to places and Expectations and duties of hau (reciporcity) and care that based on recongising mana (power and authority) of others, reciprocal responsilitoes and duties to other whanau/hapu/iwi as well as other people not connected by whakapapa.

Guardianship or custodianship of the environment which is connected through whakapapa to mana whenua (people with spiritual authority over lands/waters). Māori commonly refer themselves as kaitiaki (guardians) of their rohe (tribal lans/waters). Ritenga (customs or protocols or laws of an area) is closely connected with kaitiakatanga. Concepts such as tapu (scared), rahui (restriction of access), noa (normal or unrestricted access) are employed by kaitiaki to manage people's use of resources. In addition, Ki uta ki tai (mountains to sea) approach is a whole-of-landscape approach used by iwi (such as

#### Spiritual embodiment (includes spiritual beliefs, capacity to enact tose beliefs, and maintain wellbeing). Wairua refers to spirit that is carried within a person.Sometimes more-than-human beings are said to possess wairua (such as rivers or supernatural beings). Wairua also can refer to the unseen domain which connects people to the future, the present, and the past, and denotes a state of interconnection and relationships with multiple worlds. Wairua is governed by tapu (scared, not ordinary, restricted) with the mechanisms of tapu applied to places and things (such as protection over a section of land or forest or waterways to ensure that it is not over-exploited by people). **Wairuatanga Rangatiratanga Whakapapa Kotahitanga Te Ao Māori Whānaungatanga** The authority of a chief, political authority and control, self-determination, sovereignty. Rangatiratanga is inter-related with mana (power, prestige, sovereignty) and ability to excercise decision-authoritty authority over one's rohe, act as kaitiaki (guardians) and sustain the mauri (life force) and wairua (spirit) of the people (whānau, hapū, iwi and others) and other living things Ngāi Tahu) in the present-day to manage interconnected eosystems and resources resources (such as protection over a resource to avoid over-exploitations). Genealogy, ancestral lineage, layers, or connections that connects humans with more-than-humans beings (including plants, animals, rivers, lands, mountains, and gods). Whakapapa is the basis on which Māori society is organised, which people's geneological connections with members of their whanau (extended family), hapu (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe) based lines of descent to particular ancestors (tūpuna) as well as to specific tribal areas (rohe). Kinship connections and the importance of relationships and networks, which are underpinned by notion of connectivity between all peoples and things. The principle governs relationships between māori (as individuals and members of iwi, hapū and whānau) and other people (including non-Māori). Collective unity of māuri as whanau (family), hapū (sub-tribe), and iwi (tribe), and supporting whanaungatenge, leadership and resilience.

**Fig. 3.4** Key principles and concepts of Te Ao Māori

landscape was a component of the web of whakapapa relationships that began with Io and Te Kore, carried on to the creation of the gods and all living beings, continued through the migrations of Māori ancestors from Hawaiki to Aotearoa, and maintained in every generation since then. Within the Waipā River catchment, as elsewhere in Aotearoa, the landscapes and waterscapes were also the source of people's cultural identities, and their collective health and wellbeing.

Just as Māori was linked to one another through their whakapapa, so too were they connected to whenua, bodies of wai (water), biota, and other parts of the taiao. Whenua was the source of identity and life, with whakapapa creating a sense of place wherein each person lived and felt a sense of belongingness to their rohe. Bodies of wai were similarly crucial to Māori lives, livelihoods, and identities, with ancestral connections to specifc rivers, streams, lakes, springs, wetlands, lagoons, estuaries, and seas forming essential parts of people's embodied waterscapes which sustained their lives (providing them with drinking water, foodstufs, medicines, and other vital resources) but also their identities. When the people left the Tainui waka and travelled the region giving names to the physical features of lands and waterways, they were making claims to those areas and establishing their authority over it (in this way, naming was the equivalent of the European custom of raising a fag to take possession of a foreign land). Each subsequent generation of Māori re-articulated their ancestors' relationships and established their ones, which were transmitted down through names, songs (waiata), sayings (pepeha and whakataukī) and other kōrero that linked their tribal territory to those of important tūpuna (Belgrave et al. 2011, p. 59; Collins et al. 2012, pp. 109, 114; Durie 1994, pp. 61–63; Tauriki et al. 2012, pp. 120–121).  Moreover, they were able to understand the complex network of occupation and usage rights they (and their whanau and hapū) possessed, and how the diferent parts of their landscapes and waterscapes needed to be managed (according to tikanga and the various principles, most notably kaitiakitanga).

#### **Waterscapes of the Waipā**

Te Ao Māori and ways of life for diferent Māori communities, before British colonisation, centred on the use of resources within their fsheries (freshwater, estuaries and marine) and forests, as well as horticultural cultivations (climate-dependent) (Anderson 2002; Anderson et al. 2012; Stokes 1988). Te population, living as whanau and hapū, were concentrated along rivers and river mouths, beside lakes and estuaries—in environments that provided a myriad of fora and fauna to harvest.

Water plays a central role in Māori cosmological accounts. In one waiata (song), for instance, water materialises when Papa-tū-ā-nuku and Ranginui are coupled together in an embrace. When their son, Tane Mahuta disconnected Papa-tū-ā-nuku and Ranginui, they cried for one another and expressed their loss and sorrow at their separation. Te tears of Ranginui fell onto the land and created the lakes and rivers, which included the Waipā River (Salmond 2017). Te tears of Papa-tū-ā-nuku rose as mists. From this cosmological account, freshwater was not something singular but rather dual. Water as groundwater, aquifers, and springs (which emerges from the ground) was classifed as wai mā (clear and pure waters) and was used in practices to cleanse or purify (tapuraising practices/procedures). Water as rainfall was identifed as something distinct as wai mangu (dark waters). Tese two waters together were known as wai rua (meaning two spirits or waters) that provide the life force for all living beings. Oral traditions tell how female and male ancestors' relationships were characterised by periods of intimacy and connection, and confict and division. Teir descendants could similarly take care of or undermine the hau ora (the energy or 'breath of life') of living beings (both physical and metaphysical), which includes both lands and waters (Salmond 2017, p. 300).

A wealth of historical, Māori oral traditions and archaeological studies demonstrate how the wetlands of the Waipā River catchment (and other freshwater systems around Aotearoa) were key locations where Māori whanau, hapū and iwi lived, gardened, fshed, and sought refuge in times of confict (Cromarty and Scott 1995; W. Shawcross 1968; Tauriki et al. 2012). Oral histories from Māori who afliate to the iwi of Ngāti Apakura and Ngāti Maniapoto, whose rohe includes the area surrounding Te Awamutu, recount how their ancestors lived, managed and cultivated specifc wetland-centred waterscapes. In addition to extensive kumara and taro cultivations, local hapū lived in kainga (villages) and pā located within the wetlands. Ngāti Apakura elders describe how their ancestors created Lake Ngāroto in the mid-eighteenth century through damming streams to create the vast expanse of water (Belgrave et al. 2011; Borell and Joseph 2012; Tauriki et al. 2012). Teir ancestors built the island in the middle of the lake using large logs as the foundations (secured to the lakebed), over which they laid bundles of tree (mānuka) branches and reeds (rāupo), and soil. Over generations, the soil was slowly built up over the one-acre, until it formed a large mound that became the home of 200 people (Borell and Joseph 2012; Tauriki et al. 2012). Archaeological studies support these oral traditions and identifed at least fve pā located around the lake edge as well as those constructed on an island (Cassels 1972a; Internal Afairs Undated; Pick 1967; W. Shawcross 1968). Signifcantly, the island pā site was, archaeologists, suggest, continuously occupied by Māori from its creation until residents were forced to fee during the 1863 invasion (Belgrave et al. 2011, pp. 36–41; Tauriki et al. 2012). Te continuous occupation was notably diferent from typical Māori practices of using pā only intermittently (seasonally or during times of warfare) and highlights the capacities of the lake and surrounding wetlands to provide consistent supplies of resources (which did not require them to relocate to other places to access food resources as was the standard practice amongst Māori communities). Archaeological evidence from elsewhere in the Waikato region records the existence of numerous wetland pā, artefacts including waka, buildings, and horticultural tools, which demonstrates the continued occupation and resource usage within the area (Boswijk and Johns 2018; Hogg et al. 2017; Lorrey et al. 2018; Pick 1968).

Wetlands like Ngāroto were signifcant resource extraction spaces, not limited to mahinga kai (food gathering sites) (Anderson 2016; Cassels 1972b; Kennedy 2017; Robb 2014; Tāne 2017, p. 47; Tauriki et al. 2012). A diversity of fora was harvested: harakeke (*Phormium Tenax*— New Zealand Flax) was used to make rope, baskets, mats, and clothing; kuta (*Elochiris sphacelata*—bamboo spike sedge) used for insulating and weaving; raupō (*Tayphia Orientalis*) for thatching, construction, and food (the pollen could be used to make a form of bread); besides, other sources of food included the berries of Kahikatea and Matai trees, fungi, and fern-roots (Forster 2012, pp. 39, 121–145; Parsons and Nalau 2016; Pond 1997). Numerous fauna were also harvested from wetlands, notably prized tuna (*Anguilla spp*.—short and long-tailed freshwater eels), inanga (*Galazias spp*.—whitebait), and koura (freshwater crayfsh—*Paranephrops planifrons*), as well as numerous fsh, shellfsh, and aquatic bird species (Barrett 2012; Collins et al. 2012; Downes 1918; Tauriki et al. 2012). Crops were grown on higher areas of land; traditionally taro (*Colocasia esculenta*) and kūmara, and later with the arrival of Pākehā, wheat, potatoes, and other crops.

Ngāti Apakura also describes how Lake Ngāroto was the home of the atua Uenuku (god of rainbows), who was brought on the Tainui waka on its journey from their ancestral home of Hawaiki to Aotearoa in the form of stone (Borell and Joseph 2012). In Ngāti Apakura, Ngāti Maniapoto and Waikato/Tainui oral traditions, Uenuku was also considered the god of food gathering (Borell and Joseph 2012; Davidson et al. 2011; Ellison et al. 2012; Marsden 2003; Smith 2011; Taumoefolau 1996; Tauriki et al. 2012). Ngāti Apakura elders recalled how historically (prior to 1863) before anyone undertook fshing activities they would seek to satisfy Uenuku. Te frst eel or fsh caught would be given to Uenuku as a way to ensure the health and wellbeing of themselves (and their whanau and hapū) as well as their environments (to maintain the mauri or life force of all beings that made up their rohe) (Borell and Joseph 2012).

Māori from the Waipā catchment describes the wealth of food sources that their tūpuna were able to access from the lands and waters (Waitangi Tribunal 2018, pp. 43–44). Te network of land, water, and wetlands of Waipā Valley (where the Waipā River join with the Waikato River) was known as the "great food bowl". Similarly, Te Kawa wetlands were referred to as the "pātaka kai" (food store) of tangata whenua (Waitangi Tribunal 2018, p. 44). Pureora Forest (east of Te Kuiti at the headwaters of the Waipā River) and other forested areas were essential sites for harvesting berries and birds, and all the rivers, streams, and lakes of the region provided plentiful supplies of tuna (Belgrave et al. 2011; Cunningham 2014; Tauriki et al. 2012).

Te capacities of people to take care of freshwater and land, sea and wetlands, people and other living beings depended on their whakapapa relationships to specifc landscapes and networks of exchange between whānau, hapū and iwi. During diferent times of the year, groups travelled across the land, along the rivers, and sea, and followed the pathways of their ancestors (Anderson et al. 2012). Teir knowledge of their ancestors allowed them to harvest specifc biota in specifc places at particular times of the year; indicators of seasonal change such as cloud formations and phenological signs (fowering and fruiting of plants, the behaviour of animals) were used to inform people's livelihoods (digging fern root, planting and harvesting taro and kūmara crops).

#### **Waste and Water: The Two Should Never Mix**

Historically, Ngāti Maniapoto communities (like those of other iwi) within the Waipā River catchment relied on their ecosystems for their physical and spiritual wellbeing (as we outlined in Chap. 2). Tey harvested food to eat and collected water to drink from their local environments, and therefore those resources needed to be both healthy and plentiful. As the size of communities grew (during the Classic Māori period the 1600s-1800s) and fortifed settlements (pa) became more commonplace, Māori developed a range of comprehensive governance and management strategies, which were designed to regulate and mitigate the negative impacts of human activities on the environment that included material and metaphysical (more-than-human) actors (Anderson et al. 2012; Ballara 1998). Strategies included: rāhui, a temporary restriction placed by a chief on people accessing and using a particular area, which included a prohibition on harvesting activities (could be placed following an accidental death or because a need to conserve resources); as well as practices surrounding tapu (sacred, prohibited, to be set apart, not ordinary) and noa (usual, ordinary, safe, not subject to restrictions) (Bambridge 2013; Best 1904; Mead 2016). An array of regulations were rigidly enforced about how each diferent types of waste products (food, human, animal, and other material waste) were dealt with, which depended on the source of the waste (shellfsh middens, wood shavings from carvings, human efuent, hair and nail clippings, disposal of the dead and so forth). Early Pākehā (explorers, missionaries, and researchers) noted that Māori did not use any type of manure on their cultivations and missionary attempts to use "such substances on their kitchen gardens [Māori] bought against them … a charge of high opprobrium" (Best 1931, p. 131). It was subsequently reported (by Firth) that Captain James Cook praised the way Poverty Bay Māori managed waste products and contrasted it to European practices at the time (Firth 2012, pp. 94, 312–314). Traditionally, then, Māori kainga, marae, and pa complexes ensured that there were strict zones of activities designed to uphold Māori values (tapu and noa) and protect people and their wider environment (including their more-than-human kin) from harm caused by contamination of waste products. Māori waste management practices centred on the physical separation and designation of certain areas for specifc waste products (human waste like faeces, urine, and menstrual waste, the washing of clothes and bodies, food waste) (Mead 2016; Pauling and Ataria 2010; Waitangi Tribunal 1993).

Areas for waste disposal were kept spatially segregated from important spaces related to sustaining the community (such as food cultivation and harvesting, food preparation, and the collection of drinking water supplies) as well as signifcant activities and people (Mead 2016; Pauling and Ataria 2010). Traditionally, this was done by ensuring that the toilet, kitchen and living areas within a Māori settlement were physically detached from one another, as well as the deliberate placement of a toilet on sloping land or beside a clif, and by demarcating diferent areas of waterways for bathing, harvesting kai, and collecting drinking water (Ataria et al. 2018; Marsden 2003; Mead 2016; Pauling and Ataria 2010).

Te vital principle of tapu underpinned waste management strategies. Tapu translates into English as something sacred, prohibited, special, not ordinary, and something that needs to be set apart; the antithesis of tapu is noa that refers to normal, ordinary and unrestricted. Tapu was (and still is) of a temporary (such as a rāhui or temporary ban on harvesting) or intrinsic nature (such as a burial ground and human waste products). However, all things in the world are considered to possess tapu, inherited from atua and holding considerable (spiritual) power (Mead 2016). Tapu provides the spirituality and metaphysical connections between people, plants, animals, whenua, awa, and taiao. When diferent types of tapu interact, the results can be destructive (such as illness or death). So, systems of control are designed to manage these interactions to achieve positive outcomes (maintaining good health of a community). In the case of human waste and body parts (which are considered very tapu) waste management practices are designed to protect the tapu (sacredness) and mana (power) of human beings, awa, and whenua. However, following colonisation, the established system whereby Māori managed waste products were no longer disrupted and displaced, as communities were dispossessed, migrated (voluntary or forcibly or a combination of both) to new areas, and new modes of living adopted. Yet, Māori understandings of waste and the need to ensure the principle of tapu were maintained persisted into the twentieth and twenty-frst century. In the second half of the twentieth century, as we later examine in Chap. 5, Ngāti Maniapoto iwi members campaigned against local government authorities practices of discharging treated human waste (from town sewage treatment plants) into the Waipā River and its tributaries on the basis that human waste (even if handled by scientifc methods) was still tapu. Accordingly, all water became polluted once it was in contact with human waste, and iwi fought for alternative modes of waste disposal to be implemented (which were more in keeping with their tikanga).

#### **Te Ao Māori at the Time of European Contact**

Broadly, Aotearoa New Zealand history, over the last two hundred plus years, is refective of broader processes of European imperialism and colonialism around the globe, which involved phases of contact, colonisation (using military, socio-cultural, legal, and ecological mechanisms), and development. Te frst recorded contact between Māori and Pākehā occurred in 1642 when the Danish explorer, Abel Tasman, gave the islands the name Nova Zeelandia (New Zealand). In 1769, nearly 130 years later, an English explorer (Captain James Cook) and his crew's supposed 'discovery' of Aotearoa heralded the frst wave of European imperial activities from the 1790s onwards; sealers, whalers, and traders arrived (namely from the Australian colony New South Wales) seeking new resources to exploit (see Fig. 3.5).

Pākehā encountered a socio-cultural landscape made up of heavily mountainous terrain with a temperate climate, extensive and dense forests teeming with birdlife, and a vast indigenous Māori population (estimated to be number 80 000 in 1840) (Stokes 2013). Te vast majority of Māori lived in the northern half of Te Ika-a-Māui (North Island), which possessed a climate that was warmer and better suited for Māori horticultural techniques and plants. In addition to the cultivation of kūmara (Bassett et al. 2004; Unknown Author 1902), Māori living in warmer regions with access to sufcient freshwater supplies were able to grow taro (Ban 1998; Irwin 2013; Matthews 1985), which included Māori hapū

**Fig. 3.5** Timeline—Lead up to colonisation

living in foodplains of the Bay of Plenty and the Waikato (Best 1930, 1931; Hargreaves 1959; K. Shawcross 1967).

When Pākehā frst began to visit, trade, establish relationships with and make homes with and alongside local hapū in the Waipā (like elsewhere in Aotearoa), they did so under the watchful eye and with the explicit permission of local rangatira. Waipā iwi initially engaged with new arrivals (most notably new biota, knowledge, and technologies) with enthusiasm. It sought to incorporate new plants and animals, agricultural production technologies (four mills and ploughs), clothing and trading relationships. Māori subsistence-based horticultural operations were extended and modifed to engage (to some extent) with the capitalist marketplaces of Pākehā, all. At the same time, Māori sought to maintain their values, knowledge and reciprocal relationships (based on whakapapa and occupancy) with their whenua, awa, maunga and other taonga. Hapū along the Waikato and Waipā Rivers became the major suppliers of agricultural product to the fedgling Pākehā settlement, Auckland; Māori was well on their way to being agricultural entrepreneurs as they shipped their crops and other goods by sea to settlers living in towns in Aotearoa, the Australian colonies, and California.

**New Zealand's founding document: Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840.**

Troughout the frst three decades of the nineteenth century, in addition to the arrival of sealers and whalers, there was a growing demand for fax (the fbre of which was used to make rope and sales) and timber (for shipping masts) from Pākehā who were visiting Aotearoa's shores, including Britain's Royal Navy vessels (Belich 1996; Anderson et al. 2014, pp. 179–181; Petrie 2013). Tese activities brought clusters of Pākehā (sailors, traders) to stay in Aotearoa for months or years at a time, near Māori settlements located along the coast of both islands, including in the Waikato (at Kāwhia and Waikato Heads) as well as the Bay of Plenty (Whakatāne, Maketū, Matatā, Ōhiwa, and Tauranga) (Boulton 2007; Cummins et al. 2004; Anderson et al. 2014, p. 180). Māori was rewarded for their involvement in procuring fax and timber, which was often physically demanding and sometimes dangerous work. Work was typically organised along hapū lines, as was the majority of Māori economic activity in this time period. Te rangatira acted in the role of the subcontractor, who agreed to the terms of work relationships with Pākehā, supervised the work, and received payment, which was distributed amongst the hapū members (Adams 2013; Petrie 2013). While Pākehā presence was restricted to the coastal areas of the Waikato and the King Country in the 1830s, hapū from Waikato and Waipā catchments were harvesting fax that they transported to the coastal kainga of Kāwhia, and Waikato Heads to trade with Pākehā. Te fax trade continued to be a feature of the Waikato economy until the start of the twentieth century (Francis 2011).

#### **Divergent Understandings of Land: Rights Versus Ownership**

Tere was no concept of owning land, water, or any other resources in Māori society, in marked contrast with European cultures. When Māori engaged in land transactions with Pākehā, they did so through their cultural lens. Rights to land, water, forests, and other resources were, in Māori culture, collective and highly fuid. Individuals could inherit usage rights to certain areas of land or a river through their parents (both paternal and maternal lines). Rights were shared between diferent whanau, hapū, and iwi; usage rights often overlapped, with groups able to visit and harvest resources but only from a particular area or at a specifc time of year. Often there were disputes between hapū, which created confict. Te fuidity in defning and policing boundaries was further complicated with the arrival of Pākehā, who frst sought Māori timber and fax, and later land. Pākehā brought with them their ways of thinking about and managing land, which was premised on the idea that all land boundaries were fxed and fnal, and that land could be owned (and by extension bought and sold).

In the late 1820s and throughout the 1830s, Pākehā began to seek to purchase land from Māori including in the western harbours of the Waikato region and the river mouths and concentrated on identifying one person who was the "owner" of the land and who could sell them the land (Cummins et al. 2004; Cunningham 2014; Hammer 1991; Luiten 2011; Schnackenberg 1935). In doing so, Pākehā overlooked (frequently deliberately) the complex and dynamic layers of Māori rights to land and resources and imposed their own cultural and legal traditions. Māori similarly engaged with Pākehā for their ends using their worldview. An organising principle of Māori society was the pursuit of mana, whereby people (specifcally rangatira) sought to gain and maintain mana through actions. When a Pākehā found to form an agreement (for trade, land or other resources) with one chief (and associated hapū) it served to enhance the mana of that rangatira (and hapū) and diminished rival rangatira and hapū who were not a party to that agreement. Accordingly, many rangatira signed written documents (deed of sale), which transferred ownership (a concept that had no equivalent in Te Reo Māori) of areas of land and received small payments (often in the form of goods). For hapū, the provision of land to Pākehā was based on the understanding that missionaries and merchants would form long-standing and mutually benefcial relationships with Māori. Broader historical scholarship on Māori-Pākehā highlights how, in the period prior to the Te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi (1840), Māori communities throughout Aotearoa made land available for Pākehā to live on and use in the context of continuing reciprocal relationships (Brookes 2016; Wanhalla 2015, 2017).

Rangatira expected that Pākehā traders, for instance, would give regular gifts to them (such as weatherboard houses, small boats, tools, and clothing) in return for rangatira giving them the right to stay in the chief's area of authority. Diferent interpretations of these arrangements existed between Māori and Pākehā. For instance, whaling stations were on land that Pākehā perceived they had "purchased" from Māori. In contrast, rangatira generally interpreted that Pākehā had given them a tuku (gift) in exchange for the rangatira allowing whalers the right to occupy their tribal territory (Anderson et al. 2014, p. 181). Te gifts were similar to a form of rent paid to rangatira in return for rangatira giving whalers the right to occupy land as well as supplying labour for whaling operations. Similar arrangements existed for embryonic timber, fax, and horticultural activities (frst in the Bay of Islands, and later elsewhere in Aotearoa including Waikato). Vast supplies of food (specifcally potatoes) began to be grown by Māori for barter and trade with Pākehā, which generated food surpluses (which were previously not common) and diferent rangatira organised large hui to display and demonstrate their mana (Anderson et al. 2014, p. 181).

Māori communities, particularly on the western harbours of the Waikato and King Country, were able to expand the quantity and diversity of goods (fax and food) which they could produce and ship to expanding towns (such as Auckland and New Plymouth, and Sydney and Melbourne) and in doing so generate wealth and enhance their mana. When intimate relationships between European men and Māori women resulted in the growth of "half-caste" children, many hapū simply viewed the land on which each family lived remained entrusted to the Māori community (Grimshaw 2002; Paterson 2010; Stevens and Wanhalla 2017). Te rights to occupy the land would transfer from the Māori woman to her children. Adequately, the community considered that the Pākehā man held only a right to use the land so long as he stayed in the community (Boulton 2007). Such rights could not be transferred to someone else outside the community; Māori was determined to retain their mana and rangatiratanga. Despite their engagements with Te Ao Pākehā, they remained thoroughly connected and living within Te Ao Māori (Petrie 2013).

Customary Māori governance arrangements were collective and involved diferent people within hapū acting together through tribal structures, which included rūnganga (tribal councils) and hui (Ballara 1998; Mead 2016). Members of hapū were infuenced by the views and decisions of their rangatira; however, people did not restrict their views to what their rangatira thought. Indeed, while rangatira possessed the ability to shape any agreements reached within and between hapū, they did not have cohesive power over their people (that is "the ability to make and ensure compliance with unilateral decisions") (Anderson et al. 2014, p. 182). Rangatira was required to gain the support of their hapū members, and decision-making for Māori was a collective rather than individual process (Ballantyne 2012; Belgrave 2017; Belich 1996; O'Malley 2017). Implicitly, there was an expectation that all signifcant decisions and agreements would be made following in-depth discussions within the home (amongst whānau members) and on the marae (between members of the hapū) (Salmond 2018). Once a decision was made, it was rangatira who were held responsible for the choice and its consequences (be it good or bad). Accordingly, when taking part in negotiations with Pākehā, rangatira often added a requirement that they needed to take the proposal or decisions back to their hapū for their agreement (Anderson et al. 2014, pp. 180–182).

Christian missionaries began to establish mission stations around the western harbours of the Waikato region (Whaingaroa/Raglan, and Kawhia) and along the Waikato, Mokau and Waipā Rivers in the mid-1820s. In 1834, missionary John Morgan arrived at Mangapouri, located where the Puniu River joined the Waipā River and took up residence. In January 1841, John Morgan took over the mission station at Ōtāwhao (present-day Te Awamutu), which he headed from 1841 to 1863. Morgan saw the rise of Māori economic development by local hapū (O'Malley 2013, 2016). In 1863 (in the lead up to the Waikato Wars), just before the British invasion of the Waikato, Morgan fed after it became known by Māori that he was spying on them on behalf of the British.

Te spread of Christianity complicated political mechanisms and tikanga because becoming a Christian (a mihinare) meant Māori were required to observe new rituals and worship a new atua. It also required taking up new codes of personal and inter-personal behaviour that differed from traditional forms of confict management (such as the practice of taking utu—revenge—which was discouraged under Christian teachings) (Anderson et al. 2012; Waitangi Tribunal 2018). Te advice of missionaries was sought for how to resolve confict and regulate conduct within and between individuals, whanau and hapū (such as who should pay for damage to crops and what the punishments should be imposed if someone committed adultery). As more and more Māori became Christianised in the 1820s and 1830s, missionaries sought to ensure that their congregations followed their codes of conduct (law—ture) and rangatira tried to ensure that new laws were balanced with old (tikanga) (Ballara 1998). For rangatira for the presence of Pākehā visits and economic activities brought numerous gains to them and their hapū, but also brought with them new infectious diseases. Tese diseases included measles, infuenza, syphilis and tuberculosis, which contributed to a sharp demographic decline amongst the Māori population in the mid-tolate nineteenth century (Pool 2015).

#### **Lead up to Colonisation: 1830s**

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British government in London showed little interest in Aotearoa as a colony after the costly experience of the American colonies revolt (Anderson et al. 2014; O'Malley 2013; Orange 2015). Te empire was already substantial, and the British government was determined to maintain and guard its colonial rule of the Indian sub-continent, parts of the Caribbean as well as the newly created Australian colonies. Tus, British wealth could be better ensured by "free trade" rather than by acquiring more colonies in the Pacifc. Indeed, fve decades earlier, Britain rejected Aotearoa as the site of a convict settlement due to the perception that Māori culture was too warlike and likely to violently oppose any British intrusions (leading ofcials to establish the convict settlement in Botany Bay, Sydney, New South Wales). However, as British subjects were continuing to visit and move to Aotearoa, the British government increasingly recognised in the 1820s and 1830s that it could not ignore Aotearoa entirely.

After years of individual Māori and missionary protests to British colonial ofcials about the bad behaviour of Pākehā in Aotearoa, the Governor of New South Wales decided that British authority in Aotearoa needed to be strengthened by sending a colonial ofcial. Te "British Resident", James Busby, arrived in the Bay of Islands in 1833 with the instructions to cultivate infuence amongst rangatira and promote a "settled form of government" and a system of law that would allow Māori courts to manage conficts (Anderson et al. 2014, p. 184; Stirling 2016). Te shift in British Crown policy from 'free trade' to the formal colonisation of Aotearoa can be traced back to (in part at least) the work of Busby and the creation of the Declaration of Independence (He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Irene).

#### **Declaration of Independence**

*James Busby sought to foster cordial relationships between the British Crown and Māori (specifcally those in the Bay of Islands region) and prompted the idea of a centralised Māori government (more alike to those of Britain). He drafted the Declaration of Independence of the United Tribes of New Zealand (He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Irene), which was translated into te reo Māori by missionary Henry Williams, in the hope it would form the building blocks for a formal Māori government (beginning with rangatira in the Bay of Islands). On 28 October 1835, thirty-four rangatira signed the declaration and signatures continued to be collected until 1839; most signatories came from chiefs in the Bay of Islands; however, Waikato rangatira, including Te Wherewhero (from Ngāti Mahuta hapū part of iwi Waikato-Tainui) also signed (*Harris et al. 2014*;* Orange 2015*;* Waitangi Tribunal 2014*). Busby prompted the idea that the British Crown could protect Māori interests and take care of external problems (such as British or French traders who came to Aotearoa and breached Māori rules). Te declaration stated that sovereign power rested with rangatira in collective abilities and that rangatira looked to the English King (then William IV) to protect them against any attempts (such as French imperialism) to challenge their independence. Te document also (in the te reo Māori version) requested that Britain act as a parent ("matua") to their infant Māori political state ("to matou Tamarikitanga") (*Harris et al. 2014*;* O'Malley 2017*;* Waitangi Tribunal 2014*). Te declaration probably contributed to the emergence of Māori*  *participants' (who took part in discussing and signing the document) sense of being a collective cultural and political grouping (rather than individual hapū and iwi) (*O'Malley 2017*); however, for most Māori living within the Waipā catchment and elsewhere around Aotearoa (in 1835 and for the proceeding next decade or so after), their daily lives and the very nature of political decision-making within communities continued to be centred on long-standing tribal and hapū identities, values, and practices. Te 1835 declaration did not provide any legal basis for British rule or facilitate British immigration or settlement in the country (*O'Malley 2017*;* Stirling 2016*), yet this was precisely what many Pākehā living in New South Wales, Britain, and Aotearoa wanted*.

By the late 1830s, there were rising tensions between diferent groups of Māori and Pākehā within Aotearoa (specifcally in the Bay of Islands) over land and authority. Land dealings of individual Pākehā and individual rangatira caused confict within and between hapū (particularly in Northland) as diferent rangatira sought to maintain and extend their mana through signing land deeds with Pākehā (Anderson et al. 2014, pp. 188–189; O'Malley 2017). By the end of the 1830s, many rangatira (particularly in North Island) began to express concerns about Pākehā land dealings with Māori. In addition, wealthy entrepreneurs in Europe were attempting to purchase Māori land and establish private colonisation schemes (most notably the New Zealand Company led by Edward Gibbon Wakefeld).

Busby and missionaries petitioned the British Colonial Ofce to incorporate Aotearoa into the British Empire, and in August 1839 the British Secretary of State for the Colonies (Lord Normandy) sent a government ofcial to do just that. Lord Normanby issued detailed instructions to the ofcial—Captain William Hobson—as to how he was to proceed, which included Maori approval for the cession of their sovereignty, the broad outline of the need for a treaty to be signed with Maori and the way in which existing purchases by Europeans were to be dealt with (Lord Normanby 1908) Te instructions included a requirement that Hobson convinces some (but not all or even a majority) of Māori chiefs to sign a treaty, and that eforts were taken to protect Māori rights. Normanby's instructions drew on the language of the mid-nineteenth century British humanitarian movement, which sought to regulate the behaviour of settlers, protect Indigenous peoples from the worst excesses of colonisation (which was seen to include violence, alcoholism, gambling) and assimilate Indigenous peoples into British culture. Britain already employed such treaties in its dealings with some North America Native American and First Nations peoples (Attwood 2001, 2014; Belich 2009; Jones 2016; Parsonson 2017).

#### **Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi)**

Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Te Treaty of Waitangi) was signed by the representative of the British Government (Captain Hobson), various English residents, and more than 500 Māori rangatira in 1840 (Orange 2015). Signatories included rangatira from Waikato-Tainui and Ngāti Maniapoto iwi. (Anderson et al. 2012; Orange 2015). Not all rangatira representing the hundreds of diferent hapū and iwi in Aotearoa signed the Treaty. Te majority of rangatira who did sign the Treaty placed their signatures on the Māori language version (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) rather than the English version (the Treaty of Waitangi). Te Treaty recognised both the British Crown and Māori rights in the new colonial order, but there was a lack of clarity about what precisely both sides were signing.

Tere were signifcant divergences between the two versions of the Treaty (Fig. 3.6) (Jackson 1993; Orange 2015; Waitangi Tribunal 2014). Both versions of the Treaty contained four parts: a preamble, three articles, and a postscript (see Fig. 3.6). Te objectives of the Treaty were outlined in its preamble: the British Crown was to establish a government to protect Māori and Pākehā interests in Aotearoa and centred on the overarching principle (in both Māori and English language versions) on a partnership between the Crown and Māori iwi (and by extension two cultures: Pākehā and Māori) (Tawhai and Gray-Sharp 2011). In Article Two of the Māori version of the document, rangatiratanga (chiefy authority) was acknowledged, and the Crown gave an assurance that it would be secured under the new partnership arrangement. From a Māori perspective, the Treaty kept chiefy authority well-maintained, with the inclusion of British laws and institutions added onto Māori tikanga (rather than the other way around) (Healy et al. 2012; Jackson 1993; Orange 2015; Waitangi Tribunal 2014).

#### **Different articles, different interpretations**

#### FIRST ARTICLE

Article 1 outlined the nature of British Crown's authority in Aotearoa. This article that was (and continues to be) the source of ongoing disagreements between the Crown and iwi Māori. In the English version Article 1 explicitly stated that Māori agreed to cede their sovereignty to Britain, whereas in the Māori language version they gave Britain the right of kāwanatanga (governorship): no mention was given of Māori relinquishing their sovereignty rights (mana and rangatiratanga). Questions arose whether the British Crown ever actually acquired sovereignty from Māori. Te Tiriti outlined a form of shared authority between Māori and the Crown that was always qualified by rangatira retaining their tino rangatiratanga (chiefly authority). Since Māori political governance was centred on kinship groups and decision-making authority was held locally and centred on a rangatira being able to convince their kin (who comprised their hapū) to agree to their decisions and acknowledge their mana (power), Te Tiriti's arrangement of shared authority between Māori and the Crown was consistent with Māori governance structures. Tikanga and the concept of tino rangatiratanga allowed for the acknowledgement and the assertion of shared authority (alike to the contemporary co-governance and co-management arrangements discussed in chapters 5 and 6) between multiple groups (whanau, hapū and iwi) and therefore it was not necessary under Māori tikanga that many rangatira cede their mana (their sovereignty) to Britain (or anyone else).

#### SECOND ARTICLE

Article II, in both versions, acknowledged Māori decision-making authority and guaranteed Maori would retain possession of their land, waterways, forests, and other resources. In Te Tiriti, the second article guaranteed that rangatira and hapū would retain their "tino rangatiratanga" and the protection of "o rātou taonga katoa" by the British . The term rangatiratanga assured Māori that they retained conrol over their own affairs as well as all their taonga (including whenua/land, awa/rivers). Recognition of rangatirangta seemed to Māori to mean that rangatira and the Crown would govern collaboratively and continue to work together to build a nation and extend the long-standing history of alliance and friendship between the Crown and northern Māori. The English version refers to Māori abilities to retain only their property rights ("their full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties"). However, the Māori word taonga extended beyond the ownership of land and other natural resources and extended to include socio-cultural and spiritual possessions. Under Article II, the Crown also gained the exclusive right (pre-emptive) to purchase property directly from Māori (with no land sales to other parties allowed). It is unlikely in 1840 that Māori who signed Te Tiriti understood what this section of agreement meant. Within Māori tikanga, it was not possible to permanently alienate land because land was not owned, and was tied to people's identities. Rather it was more likely that Māori understood the provision to be in regard to the allocation of usage rights (which were also shared and conditional rather than absolute and inalienable) and not a permanent severing of the connection of a hapū to its whenua.

#### THIRD ARTICLE

Article III extended Māori the same rights and protections as British citizens. One of the key aspects of the Treaty for Māori was that it created a reciprocal and ongoing relationship between Māori and British; Article II assured Māori ongoing capacities to access European knowledge and technology and to (supposedly) afford them protection from scrupulous Pākehā settlers.

Sources: Jackson, 1993; Mutu, 2011; Healy et al., 2012; Orange, 2015; Waitangi Tribunal, 2014; Barnes & McCreanor, 2019; Mead, 2016; Feint, 2017; Jackson, 1993; O'Malley, 2013b; Parsonson, 2017.

**2**

**2**

**1**

**3**

**3**

As pointed out by legal scholars, since the British Crown provided both English and Māori versions of the Treaty/Te Tiriti then the legal doctrine of *contra proferentem* (in use in 1840 and to the present-day) should be applied (Orange 2015; Suter 2014). Te doctrine *Contra proferentem* (also known as the "interpretation against the draftsman") is a contractual interpretation which considers that, where an agreement, promise or term is ambiguous, the preferred meaning is the one that works against the interests of the party (the British Crown) who provided the vague wording (Chan and Fan 2018; Grammond 1994; Suter 2014). Accordingly, the correct meaning of Te Tiriti/Te Treaty would be the Māori rather than British interpretations.

Te Treaty presented to rangatira at Waitangi laid out a general statement of intentions and left the exact details of the nature of the partnership arrangements between Māori and the Crown undefned. Te records of the oral discussions that took place during negotiations are few and far between. Since Māori society was traditionally a verbal rather than written culture, and important decisions were made by debates and discussions amongst rangatira (and hapū members), the absence of accurate records of what was said by rangatira about the Treaty and how Hobson and other British responded means we lack a full understanding of how Māori interpreted the Treaty. Te limited, highly incomplete, records (written by missionaries, ofcials and local Pākehā settlers) indicate that Māori rangatira who met on 5 February clearly understood that they were faced with an important decision. Many rangatira spoke of their fears that they would lose their independence and be nothing more than slaves of the Governor (some reportedly stated that they did not want to end up like Australian Aboriginal peoples "having to break stones on the road") (Anderson et al. 2015, p. 203). Other speakers raised the issue of land dealing. Tey demanded that British Resident Busby and missionaries in the Bay of Islands return to the land they had initially purchased from Māori as they never intended to lose their land rights permanently.

While growing debates occurred within and between Māori and Pākehā communities about how and where British law and order was to be introduced, how it reconciled with "rangatiratanga", and what the new arrangements for the government were to be, for many Māori such debates were removed from their daily lives. Within the Waikato and Waipā catchments, Māori communities enjoyed a period of growing prosperity and productive trade with Pākehā. Indeed, for much of the 1840s and early-to-mid 1850s Pākehā settlers (notably the growing settlement of Auckland) depended heavily on iwi from the Waikato and Waipā river catchments for their necessary supplies.

#### **Historical Context: The Invasion, Raupatu (Confscation) and Alienation of Whenua 1863–1885**

While the Te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi, signed by representatives of various Māori iwi and the British government in 1840, was meant to guarantee the protection of Māori land and natural resource rights, colonial ofcials did not honour the terms of the Treaty. Te settler-led colonial government actively sought to appropriate Māori land and limit the abilities of Māori to exercise rangatiratanga over natural resources using the military, fnancial, and legal mechanisms (see Fig. 3.7: Timeline of key historical events). Colonial ofcials and settlers repeatedly expressed their desires to acquire the whole of the foodplains of the Waikato and Waipā rivers for Pākehā settlement at the same time as various Waikato Māori iwi and hapū were forming a pan-tribal alliance (the King Movement—Kīngitanga) that opposed selling land to Pākehā and sought to retain Māori political authority (rangatiratanga) over their whenua, awa, and other taonga including the wetlands. Te Crown considered such eforts as acts of rebellion against the British Crown and used military and later legal mechanisms to undermine Māori political sovereignty, land tenure arrangements, and relationships with their whenua and awa (New Zealand Government 1865; Unknown Author 1864).

In the Waikato district, the appropriation of Māori land and waterways came frst through military actions. Between July 1863 and April 1864, British military forces, (consisting of 12,000 imperial troops, 4000

**Fig. 3.7** Timeline of key events in Waipā 1860s–1880s

colonial soldiers and several hundred Māori tribal allies fghting against 5000 part-time Kingite soldiers), invaded and occupied the Waikato district (Belich 2015; O'Malley 2016). Te result of the Waikato War was the death of approximately 1700 people, as well as the destruction of Māori economies. After the war, villages and crops were ruined, four mills were burnt, and livestock looted. In 1865, the colonial government announced the confscation of 485,000 hectares of land from Māori communities in the Waikato, including a large portion of the lower reaches of the Waipā River. Te confscated lands were allocated to Pākehā settlers. Members of Waikato-Tainui iwi (who supported the Kīngitanga movement) sought refuge with their kin, Ngāti Maniapoto, in the area south of the Pūniu River, which became known as Te Rohe Pōtae. Te Rohe Pōtae remained under the rangatiratanga of Ngāti Maniapoto until 1882 when iwi rangatira (leaders) (see Fig. 3.8: Photograph of Ngāti Maniapoto chiefs) agreed to allow the colonial government to begin to

**Fig. 3.8** Group of Ngāti Maniapoto rangatira (chiefs) photographed at whare komiti (committee meeting) at Haerehuka, Rohe Pōtae (King Country) on 4 June 1885 by Alfred Burton. The meeting was to discuss whether to allow the Crown to construct a railway through their territory. Back row, from left: Rewi Maniapoto, Tawhana Tikaokao, Taonui Hikaka, Hone Wetere Te Rerenga. Front row, from left: Te Rangituataka, Te Naunau Hikaka. Source: Alfred Henry Burton (photographer), PA7-36-30. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

construct a railway line (the "Main Trunk Line") through the area, which resulted in the area being 'opened up' to Pākehā settlers (Belgrave 2017; Waitangi Tribunal 2018).

With the commencement of works to construct the railway in the middle and upper reaches of the Waipā River, the loss of Māori land, access to resources, and accompanying decision-making authority occurred insidiously and cumulatively through the mechanisms of the settler-colonial law (legislation and the judiciary) rather than through acts of war (see Table 3.1: Land loss within Te Rohe Pōtae district) (Belgrave 2017; Williams 1999). Both military and legal means achieved the same ends: to severe the links between the Indigenous people and their rohe. One adopted abrupt and apparent methods to obtain it, the

**Table 3.1** Land loss within Te Rohe Pōtae district

other used slow insidious but still violent means. In particular, the operations of the Native Land Court (which commenced operations in Ngāti Maniapoto territory in 1886) involved blocks of Māori land going through a legal process to convert them from communally held (wherein usage rights were shared between whānau and hapū) into individualised land titles. Te activities of the Native Land Court efectively continued where the land confscations of 1863 had left of; for more details about the Native Land Court (defned by one scholar as an "act of war") see the works of historians including Judith Binney, Richard Boast, and David Williams (Binney 2001; R. Boast 2008; R. P. Boast 2017; Williams 1999). Once converted to individualised titles, Māori were frequently forced to sell their land due to fnancial necessity (to pay the high prices of court fees, government taxes, and costs of living). Te central government acquired the majority of Rohe Pōtae land in this manner; the government were able to purchase Māori land heavily reduced prices and then on-sell the land to settlers at far higher prices.

On top of that, successive acts of parliament gave central government departments and local government bodies broad-ranging powers to acquire or fundamentally alter the characteristics of land and waterways in the name of 'development' and 'improvement', which included the drainage and destruction of the extensive wetlands of the Waipā River and its tributaries. Local government bodies (empowered by central government) authorised water- and land-scape remaking activities (draining wetlands, realigning rivers, building railways and roads, and removal of native vegetation). In doing so, government ofcials (deliberately and incidentally) ignored the rangatiratanga of iwi over their awa and whenua, and their responsibilities as kaitiaki (environmental guardians) to care for and maintain the mauri of the river, land, biota and their people. Te concerns of iwi and their refections back to the invasion, confscations, and breaches of the Treaty illustrates a critical aspect of the Indigenous environmental justice theorising, which recognises the connection between past and present injustices.

# **Conclusion**

In this chapter, we provided an overview of the histories and values of iwi and hapū living within the Waipā River catchment before and immediately following colonisation. Te chapter presents the building blocks for readers to later understand the consequences of the settler eforts to radically remake Māori waterscapes and landscapes, and the negative impacts of those changes for iwi, hapū and whānau. Such historical analyses are often engaged to explain the emergence and signifcance of environmental injustices on Indigenous peoples and their traditional lands and waters (Clark 2002; Hooks and Smith 2004; Harris and Harper 2011) (Boone and Buckley 2017; S. Harris and Harper 2011; Hooks and Smith 2004; Vickery and Hunter 2016; Wakild 2013). Such historical perspectives, as we demonstrate through the next examples of wetland drainage, fooding and water pollution, ofer essential insights into how environmental injustices accumulated over time and that historical injustices are in fact at the heart of the present-day environmental justice issues facing iwi in Aotearoa. Moreover, some scholars argue that without an appreciation of histories, contemporary issues (be it freshwater degradation, climate change, biodiversity, poverty, discriminatory policies) are open to misinterpretation. As Lord and Shutkin wrote in 1994: "To approach history casually and complacently is to evade history's inevitably multiplications facts and to mask the many meanings the facts could support" (Lord and Shutkin 1994, 5) (Lord and Shutkin 1994, p. 5). Te deliberate or incidental disregard of histories presents signifcant implications for not only how people perceive Māori or Aotearoa New Zealand histories but also their understandings of environmental justice (Lord and Shutkin 1994).

In the specifc context of Indigenous environmental justice, an everexpanding body of Indigenous and decolonial scholarship demonstrates the interwoven relationships between colonialism and environmental injustice (Curley 2019; Dhillon 2020; McGregor 2014; Whyte 2018; Winter 2019). In the next three chapters, we highlight how settler colonialism is not confned to the past and continues to be acted on and evolve; it is thus, critical to consider settler colonialism as an ongoing process that continues to shape Aotearoa New Zealand in the twentieth century. In the next chapter (Chap. 4) we provide an in-depth exploration of settler-led eforts to remove the wetlands of the Waipā River, and how those ecologically transformative acts resulted in a litany of environmental injustices for generations of Maori who whakapapa to the waterscapes of Te Awa o Waipā.

#### **References**

*the New Zealand Journal of History* (p. 143). Wellington: Bridget Williams Books.

by Captain Cook's Expedition. *Journal of Archaeological Science, 35*(9), 2446–2464.

**Open Access** Tis chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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# **4**

# **Remaking Muddy Blue Spaces: Histories of Human-Wetlands Interactions in the Waipa¯ River and the Creation of Environmental Injustices**

Tere are a diversity of wetlands within Aotearoa New Zealand and a variety of ways of classifying them. Troughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europeans used the term "swamp" to refer to all Aotearoa's wetlands. However, technically the term swamp relates only to an area consisting of pooled water and some vegetation cover (Park 2002). Wetlands, from a western scientifc perspective, are now broadly defned as "lands transitional between terrestrial and aquatic systems where an oversupply of water for all or part of the year results in distinct wetland communities" (Ausseil et al. 2015; Clarkson et al. 2013, p. 193). Scientists classify wetlands in diferent ways, including freshwater areas with emergent plants (palustrine), saltwater estuaries and lagoons (estuarine), and freshwater lakes (lacustrine); as well as coastal, interior and riverine; and swamps, bogs, and mires (Clarkson et al. 2013; Parsons 2019). Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) classifes wetlands using diferent terms, including roto (lake) and moana (lacustrine), poharu (palustrine), manga (creek) and awa (riverine), and muriwai, wahapῡ and hāpua (estuarine). All the main types of wetlands are found in Aotearoa, in this chapter, we adopt the terms wetlands and repo (wetlands) to refer to the diversity of wetland types within the Waipā catchment (Denyer and Robertson 2016; Phillips et al. 2002).

For many commentators, this loss of wetlands is simply a footnote in the broader story of colonial settlement and modernising development; an inevitable consequence of economic and social progress that all societies undertook. Yet Aotearoa's fgures are amongst the greatest extent of wetland reduction in the developed world (Clarkson et al. 2013; Park 2001). Less than 10 per cent of its original (pre-human) wetlands remain (as of 2015 fgures), with 16 per cent of wetlands retained in the South Island, while less than fve per cent remains in the North Island (Ausseil et al. 2015; Clarkson et al. 2013). In the Waikato region, only 8.9 per cent of the wetlands remain (see Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). In comparison, since European colonisation commenced, wetland loss in other settler-colonial states range from a 50 per cent loss in Australia to 53 per cent in the United States of America, and between 65 to 80 per cent in Canada (Davidson 2014; Denyer and Robertson 2016; Mitsch and Gosselink 2000; Park 2002; Parsons 2019). During the same period, the wetlands of European nations were likewise being reduced. France recorded a small reduction (10 per cent reduction). Whereas Netherlands (famous for its extensively re-engineered waterways and dykes) and Britain (where drainage works began in East Anglia from the sixteenth century) both registered a decrease of 60 per cent. In comparison, since European colonisation, the United States has lost 53 per cent of its wetlands, Canada between 65–80 per cent, and Australia 50 per cent (Davidson 2014; Denyer and Robertson 2016; Mitsch and Gosselink 2000; Park 2002). Tus, while many countries drained wetlands and converted them to grasslands and urban areas, the amount and speed of wetland loss in Aotearoa were particularly pronounced in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

In the present-day, increased concerns are being raised about that the state of rivers, including issues of pollution, degradation, and water scarcity, yet wetlands seldom feature in discussions of river health (Azarnivand et al. 2017; Chetty and Pillay 2019; Flint et al. 2017; Hemming et al. 2017; Kansal 2018; O'Donnell and Macpherson 2019). Indeed, a wealth of scholarship examines the plethora of freshwater issues (including river management, drinking water, water allocation) facing Indigenous

**Fig. 4.1** Map of pre-human wetlands in the Waipa¯ catchment

**Fig. 4.2** Map of wetlands in Waipā catchment in 2016

peoples; however, wetlands receive only cursory mention (Bradford et al. 2016; Durette et al. 2009; Hanrahan 2003; Hemming et al. 2017; S. Jackson 2018; Morris and Ruru 2010; Patrick 2011; Poelina et al. 2019). Te lack of explicit focus on wetlands is refective, we suggest, of the privileging of settler-colonial histories, knowledge, values, and ways of conceptualising freshwater geographies. In this chapter, we document how the physical and discursive removal of wetlands, from waterscapes and landscapes, were manifestations of settler-colonial domination. We suggest the need to re-focus (decolonise) freshwater histories to encompass wetlands as an integrated and essential part of historical (and future) healthy and productive waterscapes and landscapes. Accordingly, in this chapter, we challenge the collective amnesia about wetlands in accounts of academic and practitioner dialogue about river health and management and through a historical case study demonstrate how wetland reduction (erasure) was a constitutive part of the mechanisms of settlercolonial domination. We argue that wetland loss was (and is still) an environmental injustice that had specifc implications for Indigenous peoples due to their material, socio-cultural, and spiritual connections.

Te incremental actions taken by individuals and institutions over decades beginning with the invasion of the Waikato in 1863 and continuing into the frst three decades of the twentieth century amounted to ecological transformations of Māori waterscapes (outlined in Chap. 3). Colonialism and capitalist exploitation were tightly bound together, with Māori livelihoods, natural resource management and land-tenure arrangements, and governance structures all radically disrupted by the introduction of new materials, biota, technologies, peoples, policies and institutional structures (Whyte 2018, p. 135). By seeking to establish ongoing environmental injustices for Māori communities (distributive, procedural, recognitional, and cosmological injustices). We focus on the context of settler colonialism within Aotearoa New Zealand and how wetland drainage works strategically undermined Māori resilience, which encompassed the health and wellbeing of Māori communities as well as their more-than-human relatives (including their rivers, wetlands, lakes, and biota). Countless relationships that link settler colonialism, environmental injustice, and wetland drainage (as acts of environmental violence). In the previous chapter, we explored how Māori principles of mauri (life force) and whakapapa (genealogy) were essential parts of how Māori conceptualised and interacted with their waterscapes and constitutive elements of Māori collective continuance across generations of occupation. In this chapter, we examine the disruption and destruction wrought by settler colonialism on Māori communities and waterscapes within the Waipā. One avenue by which settler-colonial violence committed environmental injustice against Māori communities was by strategically weakening Māori health and wellbeing and their collective continuance through the destruction of Māori relationships with their awa (rivers) and repo. At least two forms of environmental injustices (misrecognition and procedural) were a product of settler colonialism and the eco-violence that occurred as a consequence of colonisation. In particular, we highlight how specifc government policies, decisions of the courts, and government departments and settler society's failure to recognise Māori relationships with, values attached to, and rights to use and practice rangatiratanga over wetlands, waterways, and lands (supposed guaranteed to Māori under Article Two of the Treaty of Waitangi) formed the basis of cumulative and ongoing environmental injustices.

Te structure of the chapter is as follows; we frst provide a brief of historical events that coincided with and in some instances directly feed into settler-led operations to drain the wetlands. Next, we explore white (Pākehā) settlers' perceptions of the wetlands of the Waipā River and neighbouring river systems as hazardous and unhealthy spaces. We locate settler conceptualisations of wetlands as hazards as part of broader settlercolonial narratives about what was considered socially, economically, and morally acceptable waterscapes and landscapes for settlers to live and work in (as opposed to Indigenous and non-Indigenous non-white peoples). We then move onto discussing the strategies that were employed to reduce and replace wetlands by the settler state as well as individual settlers; this includes the extensive use of poorly paid non-white workers (both Māori and non-Māori non-Pākehā) who undertook the physical labour of draining the wetlands. Lastly, we highlight how Māori communities (as individuals and members of whānau, hapū and iwi) sought to challenge settler-colonial domination through spontaneous protests, legal cases, and political negotiations to conserve wetlands.

#### **Settler Imaginative Geographies of the Waipa¯ : 1850s–1860s**

In the decade before the invasion of the Waikato, colonial ofcials and settlers repeatedly proclaimed their desires to acquire the whole Waikato and Waipā River foodplains for Pākehā settlement; this aim confict with the aims of the Kīngitanga movement (the King movement) and individual iwi to retain their rangatiratanga (authority) over their whenua (land) and retain their mode of life centred on their tikanga (laws) and mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge). Indeed, settler imaginative geographies of the Waikato discursively dislodged the presence of Māori and their repo in the district even before the actions of the armed forces. Troughout the 1850s and early 1860s, colonial media and government ofcials' writings depicted the environs south of the growing Pākehā township of Auckland as a wild and fertile landscape, home to the rapidly depopulating and soon to be erased native population. Te Waikato delta was, one journalist reported in 1859, dotted with the "remains of Māori villages" in a state of "fast hastening … decay", which imparted an "air of picturesque and rustic beauty" to the landscape that was in desperate need to Pākehā settlement (Unknown Author 1859). Te Waikato region was imagined by Pākehā commentators to be lying in a state of unuse awaiting the "Anglo-Saxon race" to transform it into a thriving and prosperous region, despite the operations of extensive Māori horticultural operations.

A central part of the settler-colonial project involved the discursive erasure of Māori agricultural success and economic development in the Waikato before and after the 1863 invasion. With the coming of the Pākehā, Māori hapū and iwi within the Waikato and Waipā catchment quickly embraced new knowledges, technologies, plants and animals (Unknown Author 1846) and by the 1840s iwi and hapū were growing diverse cultivations, which included kumara, potatoes, taro, corn, wheat, peaches and apples, as well as other goods (fax and timber) for their use as well as to exchange and trade with other groups (see Fig. 4.3: Illustration of peach orchards along the Waipā River) (Unknown Author 1859, 1864b). In addition to food, hapū (sub-tribes) along the Waipā and

**Fig. 4.3** The drawing shows houses at the village of Whatawhata on the banks of the Waipā River (located 12 kilometres west of the present-day city of Hamilton). On the left of the drawing, several houses are visibly located in front of peach trees in blossom. Figures are shown descending the hill, and a Māori man is in a waka (canoe) is going across the river. British soldier Joseph Osbertus Hamley made the drawing in 1864 (many of which were copied from his superior offcer) during the British military invasion of the Waikato. (Source: Ref: E-047-q-013. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand)

Waikato rivers operated 50 four mills, with individual hapū constructing their mills to grind their wheat into four that was exported to settlers living in rapidly expanding urban areas in Aotearoa (Auckland, New Plymouth, Wellington) and Australia (Sydney and Melbourne) (Grey 1849; Hursthouse 1861; Morgan 1849; Unknown Author 1854, 1859). As a consequence of the success of Māori agricultural and economic activities in the 1840s and 1850s, Pākehā journalists dub the Waikato-Waipā Delta "the Garden of New Zealand" (Unknown Author 1854) and the "Granary of North Island" (Hargreaves 1961, p. 72). Yet, rather than acknowledge Māori agricultural operations of Waikato Riverine Māori as evidence of Māori skills as farmers, settler-colonial government ofcials, travel writers, and journalists chose to ascribe agricultural development to the region's fertile soils and good climatic conditions (R. P. Hargreaves 1959; Hargreaves 1961).

By the 1850s settler-colonial discourse narrated that Māori communities living within the Waipā River catchment (and elsewhere) were making poor use of their lands. As one settler journalist wrote regarding the Waikato:

We have been accused at home 'of coveting Naboth's vineyard,' when we have looked with [a] wistful eye on the extensive plains and rich alluvial fats retained by the natives, which they have never cultivated nor ever will! Surely there is no analogy! Naboth's vineyard1 was cultivated, or it would not have been a vineyard at all; and I deny that any right-minded man covets the miserably cultivated clearings of the natives. (Unknown Author 1863)

Such narratives—that Māori did not make productive use of their lands and was doomed to extinction due to their racial defects—were used to justify government actions to dispossess Māori of their whenua (through military, legal, and economic measures) (New Zealand Parliament 1858). Te writings of one journalist from September 1863 ofers insights into how settlers perceived the Waikato-Waipā delta and the ways in which the discursive erasure of Māori economic activities and physical presence in the district served to justify settler state interventions to dispossess Māori:

Te most painful feeling is produced by the sight of rich plains of immense extent, capable of proftable cultivation, with comparatively little trouble and expense, lying waste and unoccupied, while thousands of ready hearts and hands in the old country [Britain] are wanting the means of subsistence. (Unknown Author 1863)

He argued that mass migration of "thousands, and tens of thousands, of industrious and necessitous [English] country-men into the fertile

1Naboth's vineyard is a biblical reference to the Old Testament (Book of Kings), the bible story tells of Naboth was a citizen of Jezreel who was executed by the Queen so that her husband could take possession of Naboth's vineyard.

plains of the Waikato" would ensure that the remnant Māori population would soon be "swamp[ed]" and the lands "rapidly brought into cultivation" (Unknown Author 1863). Such narratives, which linked together race-based theories (that Māori and other Indigenous peoples were "doomed" to extinction) with the socio-political and economic agendas of settler-colonial capitalism, positioned the land as lying unused awaiting the arrival of hardworking white settlers (specifcally white men) to prune, plant, and develop the land, waters, and resources. Such settlercolonial stories of undeveloped landscapes, told and re-told in settler societies (including Aotearoa Australia, Canada, the United States), were notable for what they were missing, with the presence of Indigenous inhabitants often only mentioned in regards to their former presence, their depopulation, and failures (be it to cope with civilisation, to manage and develop resources) (Edmundson 2019; Ellinghaus 2006; Kelm 2005; McGregor 1997; Wolfe 2006).

Colonial media and government ofcials' writings increasingly imagined the Waikato lowlands as a future agricultural arcadia for settlers (not Māori), a so-called "Britain of the South", with no room in these accounts for mention of wetlands (Hursthouse 1861). Prior to the invasion published or unpublished records of settlers, missionaries, or colonial ofcials did not prominently (if at all) make mentions of wetlands (peat, mire, swamp, bog) (Hammer 1991; Howe 1970; Morgan 1862, 1864; Unknown Author 1859, 1867). Sometimes Pākehā travellers recounted how during their journeys along the Waikato and Waipā rivers how their canoes (waka supplied by their Māori guides) became stuck in muddy areas and they (following the lead of their Māori guides) were forced to wade through water and mud (Unknown Author 1859, 1862; Von Hochstetter 1867). However, these were brief interludes to narratives that focused on the ample natural resources that awaited Pākehā occupation and the seemingly limitless potential for agricultural development. As one visitor wrote the land around Te Awamutu reminded him more of "England that any part of the colony I have seen: the level plains and gently sloping rises, … add beauty to the would, if all under cultivation, be a second Leicestershire" (Unknown Author 1864b). Such descriptions were often tantamount to wishful (one cannot say hopeful) imaginative geographies. Tey were (and are) a mode of envisioning landscapes and waterscapes that underpinned the entire history of settler-colonial projects (S. Dench 2011).

Te representations of the Waikato and Waipā foodplains as being unoccupied and unproductively used land epitomises the settler-colonial gaze. It was (and is) a vision, on the one hand, that dismissed the legitimacy of Māori occupation, livelihoods, and way of life (see Fig. 4.3). On the other hand, they saw an entire settler-colonial body politic to come, which included the establishment of townships, infrastructure, and institutional arrangements, and everyday practices associated with colonial governance and the built environment. Tus, a settler-colonial polity to come was being imagined and projected onto the visual feld of the Waikato in 1863–1864 as warfare in the Waikato was still ongoing. Te map of Queenstown (later renamed Newcastle before reverting once again to its original Māori name of Ngāruawāhia) attests to how the settler gaze frst erased. Indigenous wetlands, places, names, and bodies on paper even before the physical process of removal was completed (via the military invasion, confscation of Māori land, drainage of wetlands, and construction of new township).

Te surveying, naming, and roading layout of the township of Ngāruawāhia, located where the Waipā River joins the Waikato River, is a case in point. Te location was (and remains still) the centre of Kīngitanga movement and is the traditional lands (rōhe) of Waikato-Tainui iwi (see Chap. 3, Fig. 3.1: Map of the location of hapū and iwi). During the invasion, the site was used as a military encampment, and later the area was carefully laid out by surveyors in the shape of the Union Jack (see Fig. 4.4: Map of Queenstown). Te inscription one of the most obvious symbols of British sovereignty on an area of profound cultural, political, and spiritual signifcance for Waikato-Tainui Māori and other groups afliated with the Kīngitanga movement was an assertion of colonial power. It was part of wider eforts to erase Māori history, values, and rights, and more specifcally to erase Waikato-Tainui rangatiratanga (which breached article two of the Treaty/Te Tiriti). Te roads were laid out in neat, straight lines and given names that refected British (in keeping with Anglo-Saxonism discourse) colonial power. On the map there is no sign of wetlands nor Māori (past, present, or future) presence; just as Māori was rendered out of place in the settler-colonial order of things, so

**Fig. 4.4** Map of Queenstown (Ngāruawāhia) showing allotments for sale in 1865. (Source: Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections NZ Map 4498-22)

too were wetlands. Yet, the straight, fxed, and well-defned lines on a map did not accord to the reality of life on the muddy, swampy, unstable, and porous ground of the newly confscated lands. Just as the wetlands did not simply disappear because of colonial displeasure so too Māori presence within the area was not erased despite colonial violence and confscation, both the continuation of mud and Māori created continued anxieties amongst Pākehā. Such maps both were a product of and reinforced settlers' imaginative geographies of the Waikato. Maps and surveys, as the works of historians' and geographers' demonstrates (Brealey 1995; Byrnes 2001; Cameron 2011; S. J. Dench 2018), were (and still are) modes of envisioning landscapes and waterscapes that formed a critical part of settler colonialism. While wetlands were absence from preinvasion accounts of the plains, British military ofcials did note the presence of wetlands in the Waikato-Waipā Delta posed difculties to soldiers and drew maps that indicated the presence of wetlands (see Figs. 4.5 and 4.6).

**133**

**Fig. 4.5** Sketch Map of Waipā and Waikato Rivers showings some of the wetlands in the lower section of the Waipā River (note Ngāruawahia at the meeting point of the Waipā and Waikato Rivers). (Source: Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections NZ Map 4273)

### **Post-Invasion Realities: Life on/in the Wetlands**

In the aftermath of military invasion of the Waikato (1864 onwards), the land confscated from iwi was surveyed and subdivided into freehold blocks for lease or purchase by Pākehā settlers (either single or married men). And the extensive wetlands could no longer be overlooked as surveyors and settlers walked on and waded through the water and mud (Cowan 1928; Unknown Author 1865a, 1865b). British imperial soldiers were given the option of taking up a land grant (with the amount of land awarded based on rank and length of service); with three years of "good" service allowing rank and fle soldiers (privates) to obtain 50 acres of land in the Waikato (Hamilton 1968; McLellan 2017). Approximately 60,000 hectares were subdivided into land in and around the military settlements of Alexandra (Pirongia), Kihikihi, Whatawhata, Cambridge,

**Fig. 4.6** Showing details of Map 5 including part of Ruakuhia wetland (left), Lake Ngāroto (centre-left), Piko Piko as well as other Māori pā, and Otawhao mission is also recorded (centre-left). (Source: Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections NZ Map 4273)

and Kirikiriroa (Hamilton); other parcels of land was also sold to former soldiers. Te newly surveyed land, however, did not always accord to the previous agrarian utopian descriptions of missionaries, government ofcials, and travel writers, and most soldiers walked of their land declaring too swampy (McLellan 2017). In her memoir, Bernice Monrath Johnstone, for instance, recounted how her father purchased their family's 50-acre farm, situated alongside the Mangapiko Stream between Te Awamutu and Pirongia, in the late 1860s from former soldier "who was eager to get away from the close vicinity to Maori camps, settlements, and the King Country, and glad to pass it onto someone more courageous than himself" (Johnstone and Roberts 2004, p. 9). She recalled that both she and her mother found serious fault with the farm due to its isolated position (with few Pākehā farms in the vicinity) and it was "more waste land than farmed land—acres of swampy bush country, acres of fern, and acres of scrub". Te "sandy piece of land" was broken up by the "Mangapiko Stream [which] twisted and turned forming boundaries of narrow points and sharp bends … [with] more than half the farm … broken into by many swamps" (Johnstone and Roberts 2004, p. 14).

Many settlers similarly complained about their newly acquired lands with a litany of objections listed in letters to newspapers and politicians about the defciencies of sections they obtained (by grant, lease or purchase) from the central government. In contrast to the earlier depictions of fertile and prosperous lands by travel writers and members of the media, Pākehā settlers found "swamp or … springy fax fats", which were frequently impassable due to heavy rains (see Fig. 4.7) (Unknown Author

**Fig. 4.7** Horse and cart journey across the wetlands of the Waikato-Waipā delta (circa the 1880s). The area is probably located of the property known as the Broadlands owned by Hubert Valie (along Waikato River rather than Waipā). Still, it does give a good indication of what the landscapes/waterscapes looked like before drainage work. (Source: Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 2-V421)

1864a, 1864c, 1865b, 1865c). Some declared that they were being forced into "bastard system of farming" that was not "convenient nor healthy"; they narrated their eforts to farm on the swamp-flled grounds of the Waipā and Waikato rivers as alike to a battle against inevitable fnancial and physical ruin (Unknown Author 1865c). Te task of digging drains and removing the wastelands of "black, cold swamps" was something that was often declared by experts and settlers alike both as tiresome and potentially deadly and undesirable work for people (specifcally white men) to perform (Unknown Author 1887, 1909). One journalist declared only a special type of man, a "swamper", was capable of such work (see Fig. 4.8). Swampers, the writer declared, possessed the necessarily carelessness with his health to be able to withstand the process of transforming the wetlands into farmlands. Daily activities of "walking through the damp rushes" in "stinking water", "cutting and lifting masses of dripping peat" were all supposedly hazardous to one's health. Te men who worked to drain the wetlands were supposedly left physically drained of strength; their health eroded from working in the unhealthy (potentially malariaflled and miasmatic) atmosphere that left them with "rheumatism and sciatica" (Unknown Author 1887). Te smells of wetlands of decomposing vegetation, of sulphur (which indicates anaerobic processes), were not only of-putting for Pākehā but due to their sanitary and miasmatic understandings of disease-causation directly linked to ill-health and potentially death. Despite the discovery of bacteria and the emergence of bacteriological science in the mid-nineteenth century, most doctors and settlers in Aotearoa continued to believe that miasmas (bad airs) caused ill-health. Miasmas abounded in diverse and highly uncertain ways (through decomposing matter, foul air, strong odours, human and animal waste, stagnant water, factories, particular environments) (J. Beattie 2008; Chiang 2008; Flikke 2016; Halliday 2001; Kiechle 2017; Parsons 2019; Worboys 1994). Te stench of composting vegetation and animal matter, and peaty soils, all of which were found in abundance within the Waipā wetlands were read as persistent threats to one's health. Accordingly, settlers (or their descendants) increasingly sought to employ non-white people ("the Other" if we employ the theoretical concept from Edward Said's seminal work *Orientalism*) most commonly Māori but also sometimes non-Māori non-British people (including Croatian and Chinese)

**Fig. 4.8** Swampers digging a drainage canal through a wetland. (Source: Auckland Library Heritage Collections NZG-19100209-28-2)

to dig the drains and farm the swampy lands (Said 1978); as they (Other "races") showed an "aptitude for horticulture" (St. John 1873), was cheaper to employ, was unconcerned about the dangers of miasmas, and were supposed gravitated towards nomadic lifestyles (Johnstone and Roberts 2004; Jones 1996; McGovern 1986; Meyer 1996). Indeed, the canals, food levees and roads that now defne the Waipā foodplains were constructed on land confscated and/or acquired from Māori and built by Māori labourers; yet, Māori also actively opposed and mounted protests against such works.

At the same time as Māori were being employed to drain wetlands to facilitate settler projects to transform swampy grounds into pastures, doctors blamed Māori ill-health (with mortality and morbidity rates far higher from Māori than Pākehā) on Māori unhealthy practices of living and working on or near wetlands (AJHR 1875, 1885a). Tese ideas, as we outline in our other works, were infused socioeconomic, medical, and race-based theories that justifed Indigenous dispossession and drainage works. Such theories reinforced the longstanding prejudices that many settlers held about both Indigenous peoples and wetlands as being need to undesirable and an impediment to settler-colonial progress (Carlson 2010; Parsons and Nalau 2016; Parsons 2019) (Fig. 4.9).

Te abundance and vagueness of miasmas (with no clear boundaries between airs, lands, waters, and bodies) meant that miasmatic thinking about disease-causation continued to infuence settler-colonial understandings of wetlands throughout Aotearoa. In the Waikato, Pākehā doctors and government ofcials in the late nineteenth century sought to reassure the Pākehā public that their health and wellbeing was secure, despite the continued presence of large wetlands areas and neighbouring Māori communities within Rohe Pōtae (Unknown 1876). Race and environmental health were interwoven together, with Nevertheless, outbreaks of "typhoid fever and colonial fever" in the district in 1876 were reported by the *Waikato Times* newspaper as "due doubtless to the heavy rains of early summer, followed by great heat, generating miasma", with similar climatic conditions and fevers recorded in 1860 (Unknown 1876). Elsewhere in the country, high mortality rates were ascribed to building houses out of green timber, on undrained land, and climatic changes in the area. Te omnipresent dangers of "damp vapour arising"

**Fig. 4.9** Two Māori workers and a Pākehā boy constructing a road in the King Country/Rohe Pōtae (circa 1910). (Source: Auckland Libraries Heritage Collection AWNS-19101124-6-5)

were deemed "highly prejudicial to the health" of residents (AJHR 1875, p. 20). In 1875, for instance, the population of the township of Napier in the Hawke's Bay (North Island) experienced an outbreak of a "fever" (incorrectly labelled malaria) which was blamed by ofcials on the "noisome emanations from the swamp" beside the town (Unknown Author 1878a). Te "tepid swamps", it was reported, poisoned the "otherwise pure air" and ruined "health, retard[ed] settlement, and br[ought] hundreds to an early grave" (Unknown Author 1879). In total, the deaths of 140 people in Napier (out of a total population of 3000) were linked to the 1875 fever epidemic. In 1875, the New Zealand Parliament introduced the frst legislation that specifcally authorised wetland drainage. Te Napier Swamp Nuisance Act enabled local government ofcials to "fll in" (meaning to drain, establish levees, and build up the soil) any parcel of land deemed to be a muddy watery "nuisance" without the consent of the landowners (New Zealand Parliament 1875). While the 1875 legislation did not mention a specifc disease, the legislation and discussions surrounding it (in parliament and newspapers) highlighted Pakehā perceptions of wetlands as spaces of noxious airs, unruly waters, and unproductive fora and fora (Unknown Author 1879). Te Napier experience similarly infuenced perceptions of the wetlands of the Waikato-Waipā Delta and saw more calls from Pākehā for specifc local and central government support for wetland drainage works. Wetland drainage was not only meant to provide Pākehā with economic security but also with signifcant health benefts through the eradication of dangerous diseaseinducing miasmas (J. Beattie 2008; J. J. Beattie 2005).

Exotic tree plantings were, alongside digging of drainage canals, essential steps that settlers needed to take to eradicate the hazards posed by wetland living. In April 1876 a correspondent for the newspaper *Waikato Times* to praised the planting of "double rows of pinus insignus and eucalyptus" in Ngāruawahia (see Fig. 4.10). Te exotic trees, the unnamed commentator wrote, were not only aesthetically pleasing but also vital preventive health aids to purify the air from dangerous odours (Unknown Author 1876a). Te newspaper published follow up articles that promoted the planting of eucalyptus trees as to act as an "active purifer neutralising the miasma of the atmosphere and absorbing the superabundant moisture below the surface" (Unknown Author 1876b). Tese newspaper articles sought to encourage other Town Boards in Waikato to follow the example of Ngāruawahia and plant trees to improve the health. Women in the Waikato were likewise encouraged plant "the most odorous fowers" (Unknown Author 1875) including "lavender, musk, cherry laurel, clove, fennel, narcissus, heliotrope, hyacinth, and mignonette" that were supposed "endowed with health-preserving properties" that could remove miasmas from the air (Unknown Author 1873). Accordingly,

**Fig. 4.10** View of Aikens Street in Ngāruawahia (1910) showing a row of mature eucalyptus trees in front of the houses on the right side of the road. (Source: Green & Colebrook (Firm). Aikens Street, Ngāruawahia, 1910—Photograph was taken by G & C Ltd. Ref: 1/2-000256-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand)

the cultivation of fowers was deemed critical work that served to be "delightful and humanising in itself, but one which in a way … confers a positive beneft on society so great that it can hardly be overrated" especially in areas where there were much poisonous (miasma-flled) airs (such as in large towns and muddy swamps) (Unknown Author 1875). Every Pākehā woman, one author declared in 1873 (paralleling the sentiments of other writers), should surround her dwelling with "sweetscented fowers and plants", and who ensured "her rooms fragrant with their essences, [was] an angel of health to her family" (Unknown Author 1873).

While Pākehā men were (supposedly even if others overlooked who actually undertook the labour) responsible for ensuring that lands were cleared of Indigenous biota, drained, and remade into neo-British farmlands, Pākehā women were charged with the tasks of ensuring that homes and families were kept healthy through domestic hygiene practices (cleaning, cooking) and planting sweet-smelling home gardens (Unknown Author 1873, 1875, 1885). Such individuals actions to transform spaces from hazardous to healthy were, thus, narrated as an essential part of raced and gendered discourses that circulated within Aotearoa and other settler-colonial societies that emphasised that the Indigenous landscapes, waterscapes, modes of life, dress codes, and even bodies were defcient and needed to be fundamentally changed. One journalist in 1878, during a boat journey up the Waipā River, described his impressions of the Māori and Pākehā who lived at the small village of Whatawhata in highly racialised and gender terms:

Here … the two races dwell together in brotherly and sisterly love. Maori and half-caste gamins and 'young colonials' mingle together on the sand of the riverbank and vie with each other in [the] exercise of sound lungs. Tere a wahine [Māori woman] squats on the extreme verge of the precipice with her pickaninny [sic] carried on her back in a blanket watching her other 'young barbarians all at play;' and just far enough of to preserve pakeha [sic] feminine dignity, is a settler's wife attired in something that looks like silk, and sheltered under a parasol. … conveys a whole volume of testimony to its civilisation. (Unknown Author 1878b)

Te diaries, letters, oral histories, and published accounts (in newspapers, memoirs, and magazines) of Pākehā men and women, who visited and lived in the foodplains of the region, often recounted feelings of fear and despair; with concerns about their new wetland-flled homes intermingling racial, social, medical, and economic anxieties. Tey wrote accounts—in diaries, letters, memoirs, reports to government, letters to editors—flled with their fears of miasmas, the imagined threats posed by Māori (their resistance, return, violence), the economic difculties of land conversion, and the desperate need to progress the land and themselves onwards and forwards through acts of 'unwatering' the land and bringing civilisation (defned as "life" itself) to the stagnant lands and waters that surrounded the Waikato and Waipā Rivers (Henderson et al. 1994; Johnstone and Roberts 2004; Jones 1996; Kerry-Nicholls 1884; Savage 1847; Unknown Author 1878c, 1887; Westmacott 1977). As one Pākehā man wrote of the wetlands in 1887:

If I were to paint desolation, if I was to plant as dreary a picture as I could of lifeless gloomy colouring, I would depict the scene before me now. I am in the great swamp region of the Waikato, and before me stretches a wide expanse of stagnant water. (Unknown Author 1887)

Similarly, Margaret Macky, who grew up on a farm beside the Waipā River (near the township of Te Awamutu in the 1870s) recalled her childhood home as one: "with its lowland peat swamp terribly lonely and depressing" and "eerie … with the stumps of bygone forests covered with … rushes poking through the rain" (Henderson et al. 1994, p. 85) (See Fig. 4.11). However, she later recalled how the work of her parents and other "pioneers" transformed the "depressing" swamps into the "beautiful district is now ours" (Henderson et al. 1994, p. 85). Macky, like others, about employed the dominant settler-colonial narrative:

**Fig. 4.11** Woman standing beside one of the peat lakes within the wetlands of Waipā. (Source: Auckland City Libraries Heritage Collections, 2-V416)

settlers arrived in the wilderness; "battled" against nature (Indigenous); and ultimately created order (modernity, capitalism) out of chaos (nature and subsistence-based livelihoods) and in doing so created economically productive communities (Cumberland 1941; Guthrie-Smith 1969; Levy 1970; Parsons and Nalau 2016; Tomson 1867). Such a narrative was not only linear but also transformative in efect and emphasised the radical reconfguration of social and ecological communities.

Troughout these earlier accounts (by self-described "settlers" or "pioneers") of wetlands the overwhelming narrative employed by Pākehā settlers was one of detachment (rather than an attachment) to place and the ways in which the existing wetland environment was at odds to their understanding (and preference) of what constituted a healthy, productive, and secure lands and waterways to live, work and play in. Many individual settlers wrote about the enormity of the task they faced transforming "the dreary waste of rushes" into "anything beautiful". Beauty from the gaze of settlers (who often described themselves as "Anglo-Saxon") consisted of "verdant pasture" capable of bearing the "weight horses, cattle, and focks of sheep" (Unknown Author 1887). Settlers declared that "even this dreary wilderness" of apparently useless wetlands could be remade by hardworking (Pākehā or Anglo-Saxon) settlers "into a scene of smiling pastures and spreading felds" through drainage and planting works (Unknown Author 1887) (see Fig. 4.12). As one Pākehā settler wrote in 1883 that while the "original state" of the environment was a "sombre and disagreeable impression" actions could and were being taken by individuals to remove supposedly unproductive Indigenous vegetation and plant grains and grasses to "impart a pleasing beauty to the landscape" reminiscent of the best of England (Barugil 1883). Such imaginative geographies provided the emergent settler-colonial state in Aotearoa as well as individual settlers' with the belief that their actions (of invasion, violence, occupation and radical changes) were all morally justifable.

**Fig. 4.12** Sketch drawing of wetland "Ta Ringamotu" in Te Rohe Potāe (King Country) 1888. (Source: Ref/A-045-003. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand)

#### **Māori Engagements with Wetlands and the Settler-Colonial State**

In marked contrast, Ngāti Maniapoto and the Kīngatanga allies they were hosting within their rōhe, in the upper and middle catchment of the Waipā River (Rohe Pōtae), held vastly diferent understandings of wetlands that centred on their tikanga (customary laws) and mātauranga Māori. Māori conceptualised themselves as the kaitiaki (guardians) of their whenua, awa, repo and sought to practice kaitiakitanga (environmental guardianship) despite the slow violence of settler-colonialism. Local hapū continued to be responsible (under the customary laws of tikanga) for practising kaitiakitanga as a way to ensure the health (hauora) of all who lived there; this included the critical need to maintain the lifeforce—mauri—and wairua—spiritual integrity—of both human and ecological communities both now and for future generations. In addition to employing mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), many Māori sought to engage with Western knowledge and practices and attempted to use the British legal system as a way to practice kaitiakitanga and ensure their modes of life, mauri, wairua and tikanga were maintained despite the onslaught of settler-colonial domination and ecological violence.

In the 1880s, as part of negotiations between the Crown and Ngāti Maniapoto about the proposed railway line, Ngāti Maniapoto rangatira (chief or high rank) sought to ensure specifc agreements were reached to protect its wetlands and forests from damage. While both Māori and English versions of the Treaty of Waitangi included a provision (Article Two) that required the Crown to actively protect Māori land, forests, and other taonga (treasures), Ngāti Maniapoto leaders were well-aware by the 1880s that the Crown was not honouring its Treaty promises. Accordingly, its leaders attempted to implement a specifc accord that would ensure that the construction of the railway line through Rohe Pōtae would not negatively impact their wetland taonga. Rangatira Hopa Te Rangianini, for instance, demanded reassurance from the Native Minister (John Ballance) in 1885 that the railway would not destroy his mahinga kai (food gathering sites). Ballance reported this back to parliament:

He [Hopa Te Rangianini] owned a swamp, over which the railway would pass, and he obtained eels, which were his principal food in summer, from this swamp. He said he had heard that in England railways were taken over viaducts, and he asked that this might be done in this case, instead of flling up the swamp. (AJHR 1885b, p. 23)

Likewise, rangatira Aporo Taratutu argued that certain trees also needed to be conserved because of their importance as food sources. He informed government ofcials that only specifc native trees should be logged and used in construction work; they were permitted to use matai trees for railway sleepers, but kahikatea trees needed to be retained "because in summer he used the berries for that tree for food" (AJHR 1885b, p. 23). Minister Ballance informed parliament that the government would be constructing viaducts (see Fig. 4.13: Train over the valley)

**Fig. 4.13** Train crossing the Waiteti Viaduct, near Te Kuiti, circa 1890. Note the clearance of vegetation and the construction of roads and buildings below the viaduct, which indicates that the government's promises made to Māori to protect wetlands were completely disregarded. (Source: Auckland Libraries Heritage Collection, 4\_1078)

in Te Rohe Pōtae, but for reasons of modern engineering and travel-time efciency for rail journeys rather than in response to Māori demands.

Minister Balance dismissed iwi concerns about their so-called primitive food sources as nothing more than anxiety that would soon be erased by the money that would roll into the district alongside the trains.

I agree[d] … that the watercourses should not be interfered with; but … Something has been said about eating berries from trees, and so on; but let me tell you that the money will come to the people through the construction of this railway will be worth all the berries in the world, and the eels, too. (AJHR 1885b, p. 24)

Ballance's comment highlighted the fundamental diferences between Māori and Pākehā worldviews and modes of life. Te dominant values of Pākehā settler society (for which Ballance was a keen illustration) drew on longstanding European post-Enlightening binary thinking that sought to divide human and non-human and culture and nature and preached the sectarian gospel of Victorian technological advancement and economic development. Ballance, like many other colonial ofcials in Aotearoa and other settler societies, valued the accumulation of goods (including land and money) above all else. Te threats and acts of violence, committed by settlers against Indigenous and other non-European societies, were regularly downplayed as unavoidable consequences of the urgent necessities of 'progress', 'improvement' and 'development'.

Many members of Ngāti Maniapoto expressed their strong desires to maintain their modes of managing their taiao (environment), opposed the activities of the Native Land Court (NLC) to convert their whenua into European-style land titles, and actively challenged eforts to alter their relationships with their whenua, awa and repo. When the frst surveys were being conducted for the railway line through Rohe Pōtae in 1884, for instance, a group of Ngāti Maniapoto wahine protested against the Crown's intrusion into their territory by removing all the survey pegs and throwing the surveyors' equipment into the Waipā River (Unknown Author 1884, p. 2). By the 1890s, the NLC and the implementation of Europeanised land tenure arrangements began to cause ongoing tensions amongst extended kin groups (including whānau, hapū and iwi of Ngāti Maniapoto) in the middle and upper stretches of the Waipā River catchment. One Māori wahine and her whānau, after they received individualised land titles (after going through the NLC process) to land at Kakepuku (located between Te Awamutu and Otorohanga and including Te Kawa wetlands), erected fences around their newly surveyed and titled properties. However, other members of Ngāti Maniapoto challenged their claims of exclusive individual Pākehā-style land ownership (rather than Māori collective land rights) and removed the fences. Te fenceremovers argued that they needed (and indeed possessed the right under Māori laws or tikanga) to access the land (irrespective of who held the title) as they needed to access the waterways to harvest tuna (eels). Te owners, once again, chose to use the newly imported settler-colonial laws (rather than Māori laws or tikanga involving parties negotiating face-toface through hui—meeting) to support their land rights and issued a trespasser notice against other members of their iwi (Wilkinson 1892).

#### **4 Remaking Muddy Blue Spaces: Histories of Human-Wetlands…**

By the 1900s, Māori were already an ethnic minority group in Aotearoa. Decades earlier, in 1840, when rangatira from around Aotearoa met, discussed, debated, and signed the Te Tiriti o Waitangi. In again in 1885 when leaders from Ngāti Maniapoto and other iwi met with and reached an agreement with the government (the NZ Crown) about the construction of the railway, Māori were still numerically dominant within Rohe Pōtae. However, by the early twentieth century the infux of Pākehā settlers, capital, largescale Crown land purchasing activities, the operations of the Native Land Court (NLC), and the extension of the countless institutional apparatuses of the settler state saw this demographical structure change in Rohe Pōtae; as had occurred earlier in other parts of Aotearoa. Te world in which Ngāti Maniapoto tikanga, including their mātauranga, practices of kaitiakitanga and rangatiratanga, the cornerstones of life, were shifting on its foundations; if not a metaphorical earthquake, then a defnite muddy of waters (to draw on an allusion to the wetlands we are discussing) for Māori communities as they sought to address, discuss, negotiate, engage with and clash over the ontological and epistemological implications of settler colonialism.

#### **Government Responses**

In response to Pākehā perceptions of wetlands as problematic, hazardous, and unproductive spaces, a series of acts of parliament were introduced which created and authorised government institutions to systemically drain the country's wetlands. Te frst legislation was Napier Swamp Nuisance Act (1875), which was followed by the Drainage Act in 1881 (New Zealand Parliament 1881) and the 1893 Land Drainage Act, which allowed for the creation of drainage schemes with government subsidies (New Zealand Parliament 1893). In the frst decade of the twentieth century, a suite of diferent acts of parliament were introduced that established central government-led drainage schemes in the Rangitāiki Plains (Eastern Bay of Plenty) and Hauraki Plains (Waikato) (AJHR 1911, 1913; New Zealand Parliament 1908a, 1910) and local government drainage projects (New Zealand Parliament 1904, 1908b).  Each drainage board was to be made up of members who were elected by local ratepayers (landowners who paid local government taxes) (New Zealand Parliament 1904). Drainage districts, overseen by separate drainage boards, were quickly established in the Waipā River in the frst two decades of the twentieth century. At least twelve operated in the Waipā River and its tributaries; nine in the middle and upper Waipā catchment (Kawa, Kio Kio, Awatene, Mangaorongo, Waipa, Mangawhero, Orahin, Waitomo, Mangapu) and three in the lower catchment (Lower Mangapiko, Upper Mangapiko, and Tua Tua Moana) (New Zealand Parliament 1924; Simmonds 1938; Tua Tua Moana Swamp 1915a, b; Unknown Author 1935, 1970).

Drainage boards were responsible for undertaking extensive works to remove and remake wetlands. Activities included the construction of drainage canals (by hand and by machine) the construction of food levees (stopbanks), the realignment of watercourses so that each fowed in straighter lines, and the removal of pā tuna (eel weirs) and riparian vegetation. Troughout the late nineteenth and frst half of the twentieth century, the government's drainage policy, historian Geof Park observes, was underpinned by four main ideas: frst, that wetlands in their existing state were unproductive wastelands that were only valuable because of their potential to be developed into fertile farmlands; second, wetlands did not hold any scenic value and should not be preserved (unlike certain remnants of Indigenous forests, birds, lakes, and mountains); third, that legally wetlands were future parcels of land (Park 2001). Tis assumption (of wetlands as potential land) meant that Māori entitlements to wetlands (authority over and rights to access and use resources) were considered by both the courts and the government to transfer with land titles (once wetlands were "unwatered"). Fourthly, the transformation of wetlands into farmlands was declared of national signifcance that it necessitated both governments (central and local governments) and individuals to intervene and fund it to ensure that the process was a success (Parsons and Nalau 2016; Parsons 2019). Tese four tenets negatively impacted Māori who's ancestral and livelihoods ties were bound to the Waipā wetland ecosystems, and for whom the existing wetlands were of immense value (socially, culturally, spiritually, and economically) in their watered (undrained) state.

Te drainage schemes were essentially cooperative development ventures between the settler state and individuals, which relied on common (European/Pākehā) understandings of how land and water should be used. An essential part of this was the denigration of wetlands, Māori waterscapes (created and maintained by hapū and iwi for generations), and the resources associated them. Drainage and the replacement of wetlands with productive grasslands were positioned as part of the process of creating a civilised society. Māori who lived within and around Waipā River catchment, even if they held land titles, were given limited opportunities to assert diferent values and understandings of wetlands.

Given wide-ranging powers, drainage boards could acquire private land (specifcally targeting Māori land that was undrained), construct drainage works (even if local landowners opposed it), manage watercourses, and impose rates (taxes) on landholders (Parsons and Nalau 2016; Parsons 2019). Te various drainage legislation specifcally included provisions that targeted Māori land (including section 83 of Drainage Act 1904) and made Māori land eligible for local government rates (section 88(2) of Drainage Act 1904). Since the majority of land in Rohe Potāe was still Māori land in the early twentieth century, Māori landowners were liable for pay rates to whatever drainage board their landholdings were located in (which often included multiple boards). Māori encountered substantive difculties paying their rates (with few banks willing to give Māori mortgages on their properties or access any other fnancial assistance), and many were forced to lease or sell their parcels of land out of fnancial necessity; that is, to ensure they and their whānau were kept feed, clothed, and with a roof over their heads. Also, many took work as manual labourers tasked with clearing forests, draining wetlands, constructing roads, and cultivating lands on behalf of settlers. Te operations of the Kawa Drainage Board, which we will briefy discuss, demonstrate the diversity of ways Māori sought to maintain their ties to their whenua and awa, and the diferent tactics individuals chose to engage with settler colonialism.

#### **Te Kawa Wetlands and the Operations of the Kawa Drainage Board**