Citation:

Samuel D. Carpenter, “Reconciling the Treaty/te Tiriti Through the Discourse of Civil Government/Kāwanatanga,” Journal of New Zealand Studies 39 (2025): 44-64, https://doi.org/10.26686/jnzs.iNS39.9892.

Link also here: Reconciling the Treaty/te Tiriti Through the Discourse of Civil Government/Kāwanatanga | The Journal of New Zealand Studies

Abstract:
This essay charts a middle course between the old, basically Pākehā orthodoxy that sovereignty was ceded by Māori in the Treaty of Waitangi, and the newer orthodoxy that Māori never ceded sovereignty to the British Crown. The essay argues instead that government was the main paradigm of the historic treaty: it was government or kāwanatanga that was ceded or agreed to by Māori. The Treaty, or te Tiriti, was designed to remedy the absence of a civil authority or government that could maintain public order amongst Pākehā settlers but also between tribes and settlers. Specific issues were external protection (from foreign powers) and internal regulation of Pākehā settlement, of major crimes, of the trade in land and goods, and of inter-tribal warfare. Internal tribal (hapū) regulation of whenua and custom (tino rangatiratanga) would be left largely intact. The essay is written against the background of the recent literature on legal pluralism in the British empire, but it primarily conducts a cultural-linguistic analysis of what civil government/ kāwanatanga in te Tiriti, article one, meant in British political tradition. It then argues that this core concept of government and other accompanying symbols or concepts, including monarchy and law (ture), constituted an emerging, hybrid (cross-cultural) political tradition during the 1830s-50s in New Zealand. This emerging tradition is reflected in both English and Māori language texts of the Treaty-te Tiriti, and thus, as an interpretive frame, also assists in reconciling the meaning of the two texts.