Concluding Remarks

The post-war history of Crown–Maori relations can provide information and insights of use in New Zealand’s vigorous public debates about the actual and potential role of te tino rangatiratanga in state and society and the country’spage 293 current and desired ‘national identity’. This book does not, however, seek to apply history; instead, it provides interpretational history which can be applied if readers so choose. If it has any prescriptive contribution to make to the ‘nation building’ discourses of the present time, this would be to endorse the views of those who argue that if workable constitutional or other arrangements are to be developed to meet the durable Maori aspirations for state respect for rangatiratanga, informed, open-ended and prejudice-free dialogue and debate are required between all interested parties.

Solutions to the inherent difficulties of (re) incorporating Aotearoa into New Zealand under modern circumstances, of course, need to be generally acceptable to the great majority of the populace if they are to have any chance of long-term success. An anthropologist writing some three decades ago noted that ‘[i]f the Pakeha majority does not understand the implications of the Maori search for identity and if it reacts with hostility to the growth of Maori nationalism and remains blind to the growing necessity for cultural pluralism, then with the rise of Maori consciousness there will be a realisation of the limitations of passivity. More militant doctrines will take hold’. While no government in a democratic political system can move too far beyond the views of the majority, however, one which provided a lead that took ‘mainstream society’ to the edge of its comfort zone might be able to stake a claim to preside over a key turning point in the history of Crown–Maori relations in New Zealand.

Circumstances seem more propitious (or less unpropitious) for such an eventuality at the present time than at any point in the past. Before the end of the first decade of the new millennium, settlements of Maori historical grievances have become an integral part of the political and social landscape. Moreover, a finish point to this part of the Crown–Maori reconciliation processes seems substantially within reach in the foreseeable future. In many sections of state and society, there is growing acceptance that even the settling of the last of the major historical claims will not alter the need for both Crown and pakeha to recognise and respect the fundamental New Zealand truism that ‘the Treaty is always speaking’. While Maori aspirations for recognition of rangatiratanga have yet to be fully addressed, Crown–Maori relations, and the social attitudes which underpin them, have moved a very long way since 1950.¹⁹