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Rahui

ĀteaOctober 5, 2020

What, really, is a rāhui – and can political parties enact them?

Contributing writer
Rahui

A conversation with waka hourua captain and Treaty educator Tāwhana Chadwick on what rāhui is, and who has the right to enact it. 

Rāhui is an indigenous science that has been gaining recognition in Aotearoa. More recently, political parties and people in government have taken to using the term to describe their policies. This has been met with resistance from community leaders within te ao Māori.

In this interview, I speak with Tāwhana Chadwick about rāhui and what he understands it to mean. Tāwhana is a waka hourua captain with 50,000 nautical miles of blue water experience. He is also a Tiriti educator with a passion for justice.

Laura O’Connell-Rapira: Kia ora, e hoa. Thank you for making the time. To start off, can you tell me a little bit about your background?

Tāwhana Chadwick: Nō Ngāti Kahungunu, Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Maniapoto. I grew up in kōhanga and kura kaupapa. Went to Victoria University. During that time, I was involved with the waka hourua and waka ama community learning about sailing, navigating and mātauranga Māori. Through that I met lots of other Pacific peoples and learned about our shared heritage and whakapapa. My mum is what they call a Pākehā Treaty worker and a lot of my whānau are teachers and so Tiriti work, facilitation and education are all passions of mine.

Based on your understanding, and the lessons that have been shared with you, what is your understanding of rāhui?

I think in its simplest form – without getting into the social, political, economic stuff – it’s a restriction or prohibition applied to an area, space or activity. For example, if it’s around kaimoana, it could be applied to a specific species, how you acquire kai, when and why.

The placement of rāhui is related to events and the whakapapa of that activity, area, species or mahinga kai.

The concept of a rāhui has been gaining traction in the national discourse. I hesitate to say mainstream, because that others us, but like a lot of our mātauranga it has been experiencing a resurgence in public consciousness.

Earlier this year, there was a bit of controversy around the Green Party describing lockdown as a rāhui. I’d love to get your thoughts on who gets to decide when a rāhui is enacted and how those decisions are made?

Bringing in some of my Tiriti knowledge here, my understanding is that governments can’t call upon or institute rāhui. It has to be through hāpori which is defined by me as hapū and hapū collectives, such as iwi.

Rāhui are decided under the mandate of hapū and instituted through rangatira or people who are given rights to be rangatira, by hapū, and so at the end of the day it’s hapū.

What is the tikanga around rāhui?

I think that it changes hapū to hapū, and that’s why this is difficult to answer. Because it’s hapū that decides to enact a rāhui it means the tikanga can be different.

For example, when someone died or drowned in our awa back home there was karakia and official announcements that there was a rāhui – not just through the kūmara vine, but through the media. There would also be an announcement made when the rāhui was lifted.

In modern times, we understand that when someone breaks a rāhui, they won’t be punished in the same ways they might have been. But what we miss is that rāhui are there for the person’s own protection because there could be, for lack of a better word, bad wairua around the area or activity. With kai, for example, if you eat all the fish then there won’t be any left so it’s a practical response.

Recently, the Māori Party have described their proposed ban on immigration as a “rāhui”. As far as I know this policy is not supported by any evidence from te ao Pākehā or te ao Māori. What do you think about the Māori Party using the term “rāhui” in this way?

It’s similar to how I see the Greens describing lockdown as a rāhui: A government institution can’t institute a rāhui. That’s for each and every hapū to decide in their rohe.

Rāhui are based on science and mātauranga. Informed consent by hapū is really important. Otherwise the intention and motivation for the use of this word rāhui gets really lost. Is it just to say that it’s not racist because it’s tikanga?

Given your experience as a voyager, and this policy around immigration, how do you think our tūpuna saw migration?

The first thing I’ll say is that not all of our tūpuna migrated. In the Hawke’s Bay, we have tūpuna who come from the ocean – not from the ocean in Hawaiki, but the ocean in Hawke’s Bay. We have tūpuna who come from this land, and maunga and awa here who are our tūpuna.

But talking specifically about those tūpuna who came from waka, I think they had really different ideas about whenua and moana. Nowadays there are these legal terms like ‘countries’, ‘exclusive economic zones’ and ‘foreshore and seabed’ that are used to define a piece of land, then the piece of land that’s in the tidal range, then the ocean that is within 12 miles of the coast, then the water that goes 200 miles beyond our ‘land borders’.

We don’t see whenua or moana like that. That’s why I talk about Aotearoa being land, not a country. Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa isn’t a body that has a border at all. It goes beyond borders. I think our tūpuna would have seen it that way.

We’re attached to these ideas of moana and whenua but not as a commodity.

One of the things that we do in Treaty workshops is talk about how our tūpuna saw migration. How they saw Pākehā migration to Aotearoa, and also the links we had with the Pacific, including South America.

Our tūpuna instantly perceived the benefits of forming relationships with other peoples, especially around trade. Trading kūmara for chickens, and different skills and artefacts that our tūpuna knew and received from those tūpuna of Peru for example.

Our tūpuna always saw the benefits of forming those relationships. I think we have to go back to the tikanga that are the bedrock of Māori society. Even through colonisation and language loss, some of the longest surviving things, even in the most marginalised Māori communities, are manaakitanga, kotahitanga and whakawhanaungatanga.

I think that works with the Māori Party’s ideas of tino rangatiratanga, mana motuhake, Te Tiriti and Whakaputanga. Those documents along with Matike Mai and our tikanga are ways forward for Aotearoa.

Is there anything else you would like to say?

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I think it’s important for us to keep dismantling oppressive systems. The government is a system of white supremacy that places some people on top of others in the ladder of life.

As long as these systems exist, we’ll always come back to these situations where people think it’s OK to debate the humanity of migrants and refugees but it’s not.

This interview has been edited for brevity and readability.

Keep going!
Māori Party co-leaders John Tamihere and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. (Image: The Spinoff)
Māori Party co-leaders John Tamihere and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. (Image: The Spinoff)

OPINIONĀteaOctober 3, 2020

My beloved Māori Party has let me down with its immigration policy

Māori Party co-leaders John Tamihere and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. (Image: The Spinoff)
Māori Party co-leaders John Tamihere and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. (Image: The Spinoff)

After meeting yesterday to address its unpopular policy that called for immigration to be halted, the Māori Party has made some concessions. It still isn’t good enough, writes former candidate Carrie Stoddart-Smith.

Like most people who become a core base supporter of a political party, we each have our story of why. Sometimes our story continues, and sometimes it ends. This is my story.

It began in 2014, when I was at the point of not voting at all. Part of that was based on the personal politics I held – mutualism, a form of anarchism. I’d taken a profound interest in Māori politics in the few years preceding that election. The child of an urbanised and relatively politically disconnected whānau, I didn’t grow up immersed in conversations about tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake, but I have come to cherish these concepts and what they meant for ngā Māori katoa. However, at the time I still lacked confidence in actively participating in te ao Māori.

Under the pseudonym of Ellipsister, I wrote a post about how the Māori Party was the party most closely aligned to my values. Then party leader Te Ururoa Flavell reached out on Twitter to tautoko me and my writing. We began regular Twitter exchanges and soon after, the party reached out to me privately. From there, I grew to understand more about the party’s founding and its aspirations from a perspective quite different to what I had access to in the media. For me, I’d finally found a kaupapa whānau where I felt my voice was valued and with whom I felt culturally safe, despite my personally limited confidence with te reo Māori and tikanga. I felt at home.

I soon became involved with the core party base and through those early interactions, I forged what I know will be some lifelong connections. I readily gave the party my vote in 2014, and I don’t regret that choice.

I continued to stay involved in the party as much as possible. Re-entering the public sector in 2015 had the effect of limiting the extent to which I could publicly comment on political issues or participate in public Māori Party forums. But I also saw how the machinery of government impacts smaller parties, the level of opposition they face and the concessions made on both sides. While I didn’t necessarily agree with all the policies the party had prioritised, I felt like it was making a tangible contribution because it was shifting language and attitudes across government. There was a visible uplift in agency commitments to exploring policy impacts on Māori and strengthening engagement protocols. While a lot of negativity continued to be shared about the Māori Party, in my experience, its tenure in government laid the groundwork for a more inclusive and culturally aware public sector than the Labour Party has been able to successfully build on. It’s still not perfect, but the work continues.

When I was invited to stand for the party in 2017, I accepted with pleasure. The support I’d received from its executive team and the party members had been an overwhelmingly warm experience. As the story goes, along the campaign trail things began to unravel for various reasons. And when it exited parliament after failing to reach the party vote threshold, or retain any of the Māori seats, I shed tears. Tears for the legacies that had potentially been lost and tears for the possibilities of what could have been. I decided to step away as a member, so I could fully reflect on what happened, but I remained a supporter at a distance.

While I had limited involvement early in the policy development phase, over the past few months, I’ve watched closely but still stayed at a distance as the party’s policies have been released. Time and time again, I’d been impressed. I was excited and even warming to all the candidates. But I wasn’t prepared for that heart-sinking moment of reading the immigration ban that formed part of the Whānau Build policy – a policy propagating a falsity that has been researched heavily and dismissed, including by our very own Māori housing and immigration experts.

I confronted a mix of emotions. A party I loved that had given me a home only a few years earlier became a party whose home I did not want to enter.

The campaign period provides ample opportunity to spotlight housing issues, such as the role of corporate monopolies in the construction sector and the failure of the Crown to address regulatory and tax issues that could have at least made some difference to Aotearoa’s housing futures. Instead, the party turned its gaze towards an old racist trope: that immigrants are taking all our homes. It’s a trope built inside the house of white supremacy. Therefore, it’s a policy that undoes the anti-racism work the party has championed for many years and a policy that undermines previous election commitments to advance an inclusive and cohesive Aotearoa. A policy that could have been easily retracted without pulling down the whole manifesto, and in effect that retraction would have served to strengthen the manifesto and demonstrate that it is a party that listens with its heart. A party that promised to do just that after its downfall at the 2017 election.

After meeting today to rethink the policy, which has become a barrier for many supporters of the party, rather than retraction, it has opted to change the wording to a “curbing” of immigration rather than a “halting”, and to make an exemption for refugees and displaced peoples. While the language has softened, the intent has not. Promulgating a false narrative serves to entrench the trope through confirmation of the original policy. That is, the party still considers immigration a cause of the housing supply issues in Aotearoa, revealing an unsophisticated and deeply populist understanding of what is and is not driving our housing crisis.

My politics is my person. There is much to admire with the broader raft of policy produced by the party for this election, and I wish them all the best on their journey back to parliament. But for me, a home that doesn’t welcome everyone is a home that welcomes no one.

Carrie Stoddart-Smith ran for the Māori Party in the electorate of Pakuranga in the 2017 general election.

Ātea