A Relationship of Many Chapters

Nā Jody O'Callaghan

Christchurch’s founders had high aspirations – to establish learning institutions comparable to those in Britain. In 1873 Te Waipounamu was already the place to go for a tertiary education, with the University of Otago founded two years before. But with no engagement with mana whenua – Kāi Tahu – the universities remained closed off to its people, despite promises made by the Crown when it finished purchasing 80 per cent of the island in 1864. This carried on for the University of Canterbury’s first 100 years.

The iwi was out of sight and out of settlers’ minds throughout the region until the late 1900s.

For Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha - University of Canterbury’s 150th anniversary, the office of treaty partnership pou whakarae Professor Te Maire Tau dissected the troubled history between the university and the iwi in its commemorative pukapuka – A New History: The University of Canterbury 1873–2023. He reflects on how that history, frankly, immortalised in the 28-page chapter, all stems from the fact that for Kāi Tahu, the university was always another face of the Crown.

When the Crown started purchasing land for very little money in the takiwā in the 1840s, many promises were made that it would build schools (and hospitals) in their villages. The settler in charge of land sales among the iwi on the island, Walter Mantell, noted that without promises made to build the assets “I could not have got their assent to the Cession of the land."

As early as the 1850s, after the land had been purchased, a Crown official wrote that Māori parents had wrongly assumed education was
a right when in fact education for Kāi Tahu was the government ‘conferring a favour’. Those promises were never met.

The iwi’s argument is that its rights and circumstances are unique to other tribes – one of the main mitigations offered to secure the land purchases in Te Waipounamu was “the promise that Kāi Tahu would have access to Western education.”

“Ngāi Tahu understood that to become part of the wider world change was needed, and that meant the adoption of new knowledge and technology as well as political and financial institutions,” Professor Tau writes. It also knew “universities and the mastery of knowledge were fundamental to the tribe’s survival.”

The University of Canterbury – considered to be the Crown entity responsible for delivering tertiary education within the takiwā – was the institute to fulfil Crown obligations. Professor Tau links Kāi Tahu and the iwi’s long-standing quest for knowledge back to the mid to late 1700s, when its people settled on the Canterbury Plains – on lands taken by right of conquest (rika kaha) – and created the largest fortified village, Kaiapoi.

Upoko-ariki (Senior leader) Tūrākautahi’s sole concern was the security of his people who had been under attack by his kin tribe Kāti Māmoe, that occupied much of Te Waipounamu and his homeland along the East Coast. Peace was slowly established with Kāti Māmoe through the process of tribal marriages, alliances, and agreements.

But occupying a land is not the same as being of the land, and Tūrākautahi was well aware he lacked knowledge of it, its ancestry and origins – its tapu.

There were kin tribes throughout Te Waipounamu who predated Kāti Māmoe and held ‘customary knowledge’ of the South Island.

Tribes such as Ngāti Wairaki (East Coast), Ngāti Whata (North Canterbury), Rapuwai (Arowhenua) and Hāwea (Ōtākou) were known as the takata whenua whose knowledge of the land came from the long absorbed Waitaha. To be of the land, Tūrākautahi recognised he needed to bend his knee to learn from the two tribal tohuka who had killed his brothers Tānetiki and Moki.

University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha library building.

Kāi Tahu traditions say while Tūrākautahi was one of only two who survived to return from Te Tai Poutini as a tohuka, his wife Hinekākai was the price for that ascendancy and died from sorcery cast by Ngāti Wairaki. But the knowledge was now secured to his iwi at Kaiapoi and passed down. When settlers arrived, Kāi Tahu never saw a division between its knowledge system and settler knowledge.

By the 1840s it was clear that Pākehā had brought with them knowledge that had value to them.

“I don’t think people understand how important things like iron is. That was introduced. And so was salt,” Professor Tau says. Technological innovations were the easiest and most immediate, such as the conversion from double-hulled canoes to whaleboats that “made it easier for them to be what they wanted to be,” he writes.

“In all this change, Ngāi Tahu was adopting technology not to become more Western, but to become more themselves.”

The iwi tested, adapted, and accepted knowledge and technologies as these evolved and developed. While still retaining traditional knowledge “because they hold kernels of truth that retain relevance to the world we live in.”

Professor Tau uses eels as an example. Today mana whenua accepts the scientific categorisation of both longfin and shortfin eels in Aotearoa, but they had learnt another important taxonomy.

The genealogy traces the descent line from tuna, that Kāi Tahu considers to be the original eel that represents the perfect idea – or form – of an eel, rather than a species of the genus Anguilla. The descent lines from there are an organisational system of the types of eels which are a major food source found in Te Waipounamu.

Tuna kouka were large eels that would koukou (bark) at night. Horehore-wai were larger mature eels found inland and usually avoided because of their high fat content and thick skins. Horepapa – green-coloured with a white belly – were taken in the spring. Tuna-ā-tai and hao were taken as they migrated out to sea and were cleaner.

Mata-moe were small black eels taken from the mud, and, like aroheke, were avoided because of their taste. All information important for survival.

Professor Te Maire Tau.

Rivers were ordered according to their characteristics, as were weather patterns.

All cultures started with their own anecdotal observations, and “science relies on observation and extends it,” Professor Tau says.

“There’s always a cultural base to science. Science doesn’t exist without culture. In the end all knowledge must be contestable.”

Water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, but “if you want to know the water types in the South Island … or the flora and fauna species and the landscape” then local hapū have that knowledge. The process of the university establishing a formal relationship with Kāi Tahu as takata whenua, and with Ngāi Tūāhuriri, mana whenua over the rohe around campus, began in the 1970s. But the decisive moves did not come until decades later. Taua used to visit high schools in the rohe and play a part in guiding rangatahi into careers, such as the Māori Trade Training scheme at Rehua Marae.

By the 80s, Kāi Tahu students were arriving at university. They saw lecturer Tā Tipene O’Regan, who flew down from Pōneke every Monday during the buildup to the iwi settlement, “breaking ground on teaching treaty history.”

“It fitted the zeitgeist of the era. He was an academic that Māori and Ngāi Tahu could identify as theirs. He was at the front end of the academic world for Māori.”

Students would attend settlement hearings at Tuahiwi where Professor Tau’s students would write submissions. The same was done recently when students assisted with the iwi’s claim in the High Court at Christchurch against the Crown in 2020 that it has rakatirataka over wai māori in its takiwā.

One of those students was water scientist Conor Redmile, a Kāi Tahu scholarship recipient who won a position at Oxford University – one of the British counterparts the university’s founders aspired to emulate.

“He will meet the tribal needs, he knows his stuff, is academically sound, and he won a position at Oxford. It is great,” Professor Tau says.

It was the 2010/2011 Christchurch earthquakes that gave a boost to iwi-university engagement. The university rebuild, $260m Crown payout was tied to its tribal performance – or the expectation it would be relevant to the tribe, Professor Tau says.

“The Crown said, ‘We’re going to give you this money, how is it going to be relevant to Ngāi Tahu Māori?”

But the two bodies still had communication breakdowns until finally establishing a treaty partnership in 2021. The tribe has expectations from universities within its takiwā to establish professional units that outline its requirements, then implement programmes to meet the tribal good.

This means producing lawyers, economists, historians, scientists, and engineers to support tribal goals.

Professor Tau does not like “race theories” and is uninterested in quota systems. But there is not equal opportunity, and the iwi and university have an obligation to ensure there is.

“I don’t like the idea that Ngāi Tahu is there because they’re Māori. We’re not there because of being a race, it’s a contractual relationship with the Crown.”

He’s not interested in universities taking on the “disembodied knowledge” of mātauranga with “lots of karakia and no content.”

“The term mātauranga implies a lot but no-one has really dug down to what it means.”

For the tribe, it’s very clearly rooted in the environment, and local knowledge that is relevant and an important asset to making tertiary education relevant to the community around it – a challenge they all face. At times they get lost in critical theory, but the value to the community is “questionable”. That is why science, engineering, and economics are important, he believes.

“If there’s a water problem, the tribe knows it. We’re only going to solve it with technology.

The university’s founding aspiration to emulate those in Britain is now setting itself apart as a Treaty university steeped in knowledge of the community around it. Now it is time to start earning the name it was gifted (Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha) and start delivering,” Professor Tau says.