Reviews
A Long Time Coming is an important and judicious book. As the full title indicates, it covers the period, processes and personalities involved between the Waitangi Tribunal releasing the Ngāi Tahu Land Report in 1991 and Parliament passing the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement 1998.
In retrospect, because we know a settlement package was negotiated and given effect to, and we know Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu was established as part of this, these events appear inevitable, perhaps even orderly. In eleven short chapters, historian Martin Fisher shows that to be anything but true. Instead, as he notes at p.129, “it was a minor miracle that an agreement was signed when it was.”
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