John Campbell: I've been to Waitangi countless times - this time was different

OPINION: John Campbell moved through the unprecedented crowds at Waitangi hearing different answers to the same question: "Why have you come here today?"

Photographs: John Campbell

News is often a form of repetition, made new by its human roll call. Most things that happen have happened, in some form, before.

I’m not sure how many Waitangi Day dawn services I’ve been to. But yesterday’s felt bigger, more animated by a shared purpose, more alert to its larger significance, than any I can recall.

“Where are you from?”, I asked a couple who were standing amongst the thousands in the gently softening dark.

“Wellington.”

“Why did you come?”

“To be here.”

It seems like such an obvious answer. But it contains something declaratory – a mobilisation, an act of effort.

Theirs isn’t the presence of politicians, who come because duty, role and history demands it.

This is the story of the people I met for whom being at Waitangi, being there, was an act of kotahitanga (unity). Māori are iwi based. Transcending tribal affiliations (is “transcending” the right word? Is it “harnessing”?) speaks of a large and compelling purpose.

“The overwhelming connection reignited among Iwi, Hapuu and Whaanau on display at Waitangi is a gift not to be wasted”, Kīngitanga said, on Monday afternoon. “We owe it to our mokopuna to use it wisely.”

Maryann Vogt has been a Māori Warden for forty years. She has no idea how often she’s come to Waitangi. “Many times, John”, she says. “But look around you. Don’t you love it?”

It’s mid-afternoon, it’s strikingly hot, and I do.

We are waiting for an historically large Kīngitanga delegation to arrive from Waikato. It will be Kīngi Tūheitia’s first Waitangi visit since 2009. And it follows Ngāpuhi travelling down from here to the King’s even more historic Hui-aa-Motu, at Tūrangawaewae, in January.

I was there, and I wrote about it. It felt like something big was happening. When Ngāpuhi and Kīngitanga travel to see each other, twice, in less than a month, mountains are moving together.

Maryann Vogt has seen unity and discord. She’s watched the tides of history wash over Waitangi, then sweep back out again. Iwi leaders. The prime ministers who’ve come. (How many has she seen?) Royalty. Foreign tourists who may never have heard of the Treaty, but understand, because you can feel it everywhere, that something extraordinary happened here, whatever its subsequent betrayals.

The Māori Wardens are standing in the shade outside Te Whare Rūnanga, the famous meeting house that was opened on 6 February 1940 – the first centenary of the signing of the Treaty.

I recognise a few of them from previous years. There are hugs. And laughter. We tease each other with flattering lines about how young and gorgeous we all still look.

“Who’s been doing this longest?”, I ask. And Maryann is thrust forward, smiling.

“What’s it like being at Waitangi?”

“It’s beautiful”, Maryann answers. Then giggles at her own good fortune.

“We stay here for probably five or six days. And we get all these people together.” She looks out over the crowds gathered. Then she sweeps a uniformed arm towards her fellow Wardens. “I’ve never met some of these people. For some of these other Wardens it’s their first time. This is their first Waitangi. But it’s everyone here. You see their faces, John. And their faces are telling you what’s in their hearts. Magical. And I think the wairua round here this year is totally different to other years.”

“Good different?”, I ask.

“Good different.” Maryann answers. “Really good different.”

Every boy of a certain age somehow reminds me of my son. Or of his mates. Or of the boys he played rugby with.

I say "boy", but they’re men now. Twenty, give or take. I often have to overcome a Dad need to urge strangers of that age to drive carefully, or to dare to aim high, or to drink a little less.

I’m walking behind Te Whare Rūnanga looking for a better vantage point, and there’s a group of young men, some my son’s age, some the age my son was not so long ago.

They’re from Te Puke, “in the Bay of Plenty”, they tell me, helpfully, in the fashion of people from towns they’re not sure anyone from a bigger place has heard of. We talk about what they’re doing there (they’ve been sent by the Ngā Kākano Foundation). About what being there means for them (a great deal, but expressed without fuss). And the weather. They are wearing the shorts they’ll paddle their waka in – and I am wearing a suit. (One of us looks ridiculous.)

Israel Hapi is “twenty-two this year”, which means he’s twenty-one. But boys always want to be bigger.

“I’m a rangatahi slash social worker, working at Ngā Kākano Foundation. I was actually sent up here for our leadership programme, and that’s run by Haimona Brown.

“This is actually my first time at the Waitangi commemorations. This means more than I could ever imagine, because I’ve not been raised in this sort of environment, so to be in it now is just a true blessing for me.”

“I wasn’t really connected to te ao Māori like all these young fellas were, so I feel like this is a chance for me to make that connection. Yeah. That just fills my heart.”

At this stage, Israel thumps his heart, twice. Later, transcribing our conversation, I could hear his fist hitting his chest. It sounded like the beat a heart makes when you listen to it through a stethoscope.

And I realised Israel did that because he meant it. That this wasn’t the gratitude of a polite young man sent on a special trip, but a kind of blooming of identity. A sense of becoming himself.

I ask Israel how he feels about the Treaty.

“I’m still learning about the Treaty. And I want to know more. But it’s bringing people together, and that’s beautiful, eh?”

Once, I think it was live on Breakfast, Pita Tipene, Ngāti Hine and chair of the Waitangi National Trust, walked me across the space between Te Whare Rūnanga and the Treaty House and explained the history and significance of both buildings. That kind of television requires choreography and precision. You start on one building, it disappears from frame, you have to talk your way through the empty space, then reach the discussion of the second building just as it appears in view behind you. I recall that Pita Tipene nailed it – as if we’d rehearsed (we hadn’t). But his life has been a form of rehearsal for moments like that. There can’t be many people who know this place better than him. Or who love it more. “Tell me about the Treaty that was signed here in 1840”, I ask him. “What does it mean in 2024?”

“Waitangi’s all about a promise,” Pita Tipene answers. “The promise that our ancestors made.”

“You know, when you ask your children to make a promise, or you make a promise, you really want to keep it. And there’s a lot of honour in keeping a promise. Our ancestors thought this was such a good promise that they signed their names to it. And we’re honouring that. We’re sixteen years away from the bicentennial of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Our responsibility is to remember what that promise was, and is, and to keep it.”

'It feels like this is the time to be here'

There were so many people coming and going, so very many, that my preference, which is to walk through crowds like my pants are on fire and I’m looking for a tap, had to give way to a pragmatic meandering. Chill formation walking. Like a slightly stoned marching team.

That’s how I fell in beside Rudy de Thierry.

Rudy is from Wellington, but he’s currently working in Waikato. He had the day off, so he drove up.

We chatted. Then I asked Rudy if I could record our conversation. “I’ve got a bit of stage fright now”, he said. But he overcame it.

“I was close to the area – although not as close as I thought! I thought it was only a couple of hours from Hamilton. And I came because of all the talk from the new government. I don’t understand all of it, but it feels like this is the time for me to be here, to be honest.”

So many people I spoke to echoed Rudy’s words. That they were here because it was important to be here. That at this moment in our history one thing they could do, having, in most cases, neither applicable power nor a significant platform, was to speak through the act of being present.

It was the same at Tūrangawaewae. Person by person – adding up to many.

As Kīngi Tuheitia said, on that extraordinary day in January: “The best protest we can do right now is be Maaori. Be who we are, live our values, speak our reo, care for our mokopuna, our awa, our maunga, just be Maaori. Maaori all day, every day. We are here, we are strong.”

Rudy was there that day, at Tūrangawaewae. He went there with his wife.

“She wanted to go. I’m not too good with crowds but I followed along with her, and I really enjoyed it. I didn’t know what to expect. This is mostly new to me. But as I’m getting older I want to learn more, and I want to think more about all of us, not just myself.”

Some of the surviving, founding members of Ngā Tamatoa were at Waitangi this year, as special guests.

If you don’t know about Ngā Tamatoa, this is a powerful watch. And the freeze-frame image they’ve used to illustrate just how other-worldly they were, how determined to speak truth to racism, to afflict the indifferent, to affirm te reo Māori and our collective duty to honour the Treaty, is of Tāme Iti. Young, wilfully wild and already in possession of his brilliant capacity to grab attention.

History eventually proves the most just among us right. It doesn’t usually do so by putting them on Celebrity Treasure Island, as it did, last year, with Tāme Iti, but you find your temples where you can.

At Tūrangawaewae, last month, Tāme Iti told me he was there to feel the “vibrations”. For more than half a century, he’s been causing them.

On Monday morning, the day before Waitangi Day, he led a hikoi of people carrying white flags to Te Whare Rūnanga. It was incredible.

Up the hill they came. The white flags against the blue sky, the blue ocean.

Tāme Iti told me they’d come up with the idea of the flags while in Whakatane, late last year, producing Tāwharautia Mataatua.

The white represents the newly created space and light, after Tāne separated Rangi and Papa (Ranginui, the sky father, and Papatūānuku, the earth mother). The blank canvas. The room to move.

And here’s how the world eventually catches up when it’s following an important and moral truth. In 1972, Tāme Iti was thrown off Waitangi for protesting. “Two police officers, two hefty guys, came and just lifted me up and carried me out. I was in my early twenties.”

He’s in his early seventies now. And his art unfurls across Waitangi like the wings of a giant albatross.

“I got thrown out. I got physically picked up and thrown out. And here we are today. I’ve smiled a bit about that.”

Shade was your friend at Waitangi. The skies were cloudless and the sun intense. Beneath some trees beside the Treaty House, I found a group of students (and teachers) from Tararua College, in Pahiatua, 45 minutes north of Masterton.

What a drive it was for them, to get to Waitangi. It should have been twelve hours, it was nearer fifteen. But look at them. They are alive with the wonder of being there. Of seeing the place where history was made – and where the present insists upon it being honoured.

Carmen Bidois is just beginning her Year 11.

“It’s my first ever trip to Waitangi. It’s really cool to see what it’s like and to be part of all the pōwhiri.”

“Can you speak the reo?”

“A little bit.” (Smiling at me.)

“What does it mean to you to be young, Māori and here?”

“I’m really proud. Proud to make my iwi happy, Te Āti Awa, and my family happy. Proud to be here with twenty-two people from my school. Yeah. Pride. That’s what we’re feeling today.”

Paroa Thompson and Kalesto Hohua feel pride, too. They were sitting on the grass in the afternoon sun and when they warmly said "kia ora" to me, I stopped to ask how they were going.

They are Ngāi Tūhoe, from Whakatane, but now living in Auckland.

“We drove up especially for the commemorations," Paroa tells me.

Why?

“To be with our people, really. People who are similar minded. It felt like the right thing to do. We just wanted to tautoko (support) everyone.”

That kotahitanga, again. Over and over. The act of being there as a physical expression of unity.

“It’s about identity," Kalesto tells me. “And pride. Pride in being Māori. It’s in me. You grow up with it. You inherit it, hopefully. It’s who you are. It’s who all these people are.”

Paroa is nodding as she speaks.

I ask them about the experience of being there.

Kalesto answers. “I reckon, even if you’re not Māori, come. Everyone should come. Even if you’re just like us, right now, and you get here and just sit on the grass – you’re here, you’re amongst it, you’re taking it all in.”

It’s so hot now that a few people people are suffering from sunburn and mild forms of heatstroke. Luana Brown and her daughter, Roviana, are seated beneath the shade of a tree while waiting to participate in a pōwhiri. Roviana is sixteen months old. She is wrapped in Ngāti Hine colours and deep asleep on her mother’s back.

What is happening here, what is happening now, will shape her future. What kind of message are we sending her?

Messages. There were so many of them. Some well received, some not.

The politicians have been well covered elsewhere. I wanted this to be the voice of people who mostly don’t get access to reporters.

But I was hitching a ride with 1News Māori Affairs correspondent, Te Aniwa Hurihanganui, on a golf buggy, when I saw the National Party politican and government minister Tama Potaka approaching us. I leapt out, doing my own stunts, like Tom Cruise (although Te Aniwa didn’t make that comparison).

How does a man who went to the famous Te Aute College, who speaks te reo Māori with genuine fluency, and whose former classmates include Julian Wilcox, one of our greatest orators, feel about being at Waitangi at a time like this?

And, more importantly, how does he view the Treaty?

The Minister of Māori Development gave me the following answer. “I view the Treaty of Waitangi as kawenata tapu, or sacrosanct. It’s the foundation document of our country. So, when we think about our past, present and future, it’s intertwined with Te Tiriti o Waitangi. And we’re in a kotahitanga (unity) moment, that moment is today. We’re also in an ūkaipō (origin) and manaakitanga (hospitality), and a tohungatanga (proficiency), and a whānaungatanga (sense of family connection) moment. But the main moment we’re in is a kotahitanga moment. So, I look forward to that manaakitanga and kotahitanga that the people of Te Tai Tokerau are renowned for.”

Artist Te Hori doesn’t think coalition government politicians should have been able to speak at Waitangi.

The Ōtaki based artist, also, but less often, known as Hōhepa Thompson, believes they’ve forfeited their right to assume access to such sacred spaces.

I bumped into him on Monday afternoon.

He was beside the Forum Tent, where speakers drew large audiences, and impassioned panel sessions took place.

He was preparing dozens of art-placards, each with the message Toitū te Tiriti (Honour the Treaty), each shaped like the famous “Waitangi sheet” of the Treaty, each individually splashed with paint.

The next day they’d be waved at government politicians as they arrived at Te Whare Rūnanga. Art as a protest, a recurring theme of this Waitangi Day.

I asked him what he was doing and why.

“This is a tono to te iwi Māori. Kaua e hōmai tēnei kāwanatanga kino tētahi atamira Māori, ki te tū, ki te kōrero i a rātou kōrero. (This is a message to Māori. To not allow this corrupt government to stand and talk their talk on a Māori platform.)”

He was sitting at what he called a Tī Pāti. With a porcelain teapot and cups and saucers. It felt faux Victorian. As if a parody, or a farce. Which may have been the point?

And this is what Te Hori told me.

“The whakairo is this. We’re asking Māori to stop giving this government platforms to stand and speak from. And we’re also asking Tangata Tiriti to not give these people a platform to speak from. They’ve shown their hand. And this is almost like a call to boycott. You know, we have this beautiful, amazing place, and we allow them to stand and speak in our special places, even after the things that they’ve said, and the things they want to do, to the Treaty and therefore to our people. Which is why we’re here today, to throw that tono out, for everyone to say ,‘not here’.”

Ataria-Jay Tahapeehi wants to be a photographer when she leaves school. And to study teaching or business at university. She is seventeen, she’s in Year 13, and she seems in possession of a strikingly centred sense of self.

Perhaps, in part, that’s her school, Ngā Taiātea Wharekura, in Hamilton, whose mission statement reads, “E Puta ki Taiātea: Our vision aims to ensure that Ngā Taiātea students are empowered by our past and present to lead in the future. The Manu Tāiko Taiātea graduate is committed to serve, uplift and lead our people.”

But what you notice about so many of the young people at Waitangi, is how grounded they are in te ao Māori, and how many of them have te reo Māori with a striking confidence and heart.

Whatever happens next, we will change because these young people will change us. And if we can’t keep up, they’re increasingly equipped to leave us behind.

“It’s awesome to watch our people come together and stand under one umbrella and figure out our response side-by-side”, Ataria-Jay tells me. “And then we can pass things down to the next generation”.

“I’m proud to be Māori”, she says. “It feels good.”

I was walking down from Waitangi, over the bridge, along the waterfront, back to the motel to write this, and there, standing in front of me, was Tāme Iti, with his son, Toi Kai Rākau Iti.

Tāme was standing in the middle of the road, which is closed to traffic on Waitangi Day morning.

He’s taking it all in. The man who was thrown off the Treaty grounds fifty years ago, and who has returned to it as an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate, celebrated and beloved.

When Māori win, we all win.

Remember what Pita Tipene said about keeping a promise.

Perhaps that’s why Christopher Luxon (whose speech, the previous day, had contained little more than low wattage, largely meaningless, Ted Talk homilies, some of them seemingly recycled from last year) read from Corinthians at the dawn service.

If you go the source you see the words sound a lot like kotahitanga: “So that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it.”

Will he lead us out of this?

Can he?

Does he want to?

Will he stare down the kind of populism I wrote about at the end of last year?

And if he doesn’t, do we understand the message that sends to Māori – and how united Māori are in their opposition to that?

Those words of Kīngi Tuheitia – “We are here, we are strong.”

I was taking Tāme Iti’s photo when a girl came over to me and said, “you should take my photo, too.”

So I did.

Hine i Kakerangi is 13, and a Year 9 student at Te Kura Kaupapa Māori O Te Hiringa, in Tokoroa. Another kura kid, full of possibility.

She was there with her grandmother.

How are you feeling about all of this, I asked them. Waitangi, everything that’s happened here, and starting secondary school at this potentially turbulent time?

As quick as a flash a single word answer came back to me.

“Excited.”

*There have been minor updates to this article for clarity