Allegiance to One's Origins: The Consequences of Belief

A paper delivered to the Sea of Faith Network (NZ) Conference
"Beyond Belief—Putting Faith Into Practice"
Havelock North, 8 October 2000

It is, perhaps, drawing a long bow to put what I want to say this morning into the context of the theme for this Conference. But I'll draw it anyway. The broad query I want to raise is "who do Pakeha people believe they are? What is the nature of their culture? How does that culture relate to the land of Aotearoa New Zealand? And how does it relate to the tangata whenua culture, that of Maori?"

Depending on the answers to these questions, which of course are questions of belief, one then asks "what are the consequences of those beliefs. How might behaviour reflect them, or how ought it do so?" And this, I submit, puts my topic directly into the "Beyond Belief" theme which frames this gathering.

I propose addressing these questions because they have arisen from a particular journey which I have made in Aotearoa New Zealand. In the course of that journey, some odd juxtapositions have occurred, some unexpected insights been sparked, and I have witnessed a great deal of discussion, and sometimes conflict, generated by the topic.

A second reason relates to why I revised and republished last year a book I had originally written nearly two decades earlier: Being Pakeha. In the introduction to the new edition I said that the first book arose from what I saw twenty years ago as a need to make Maori preoccupations and expectations intelligible to Pakeha New Zealanders; to make it clear why I believed that Maori had every right to be Maori in their own country, and to expect Pakeha to respect and support them in that mission.

Two decades on, however, at the beginning of the twenty-first century A.D., I noted a rather different but equally pressing need: to help explain Pakeha New Zealanders to Maori and to themselves; and to do so in terms of their right to live in this country, practise their cultures and values and be themselves. And I was impelled to move in this direction by a variety of stimuli, including the anguished cry of children's writer Jack Lasenby, who asked in a Landfall essay, "Does belief in pluralism mean one must betray one's own civilisation for another's?" And that question was provoked by a fear that he could value the restored place of Maori culture in our national life only by devaluing, or condemning the role of his own culture, which had been that of the colonisers of the tangata whenua.

These are the circumstances, then, which conditioned my choice of topic. Let me now address that topic by saying a little more about the first version of this book called Being Pakeha.

Some people, some of the reviewers of the book and others who commented on it on radio and in the print media, characterised it as the work of a sickly white liberal sucking up to Maori culture and begging to be let into its inner sanctum. The grossest expression of this view came in a letter I received from a Hamilton reader who told me that I was known in the United States as a "nigger lover", and that I had betrayed my own culture and people.

To my mind, needless to say, this is a caricature of that book's approach and content. I had been intent on describing my experience of coming into contact with what used to be called "things Maori"—in the belief that that was a kind of encounter that would eventually be shared by all Pakeha New Zealanders; and that all Pakeha New Zealanders ought to be prepared for it.

But at the time I had that experience, from the mid-1960s to the early-70s, I felt very strong in my own sense of identity, as a Pakeha New Zealander with Irish-Catholic antecedents. I felt very much in accord—and still do—with both my living culture and my culture of origin. While we all, if we are healthy human beings, remain open to the influences and the richenss of new experience, I was not, and am not, an empty vessel waiting to be filled up with, and consoled by, somebody else's culture.

What I did feel, however, and tried to convey in the book, was a welcome congruence of some of the inclusive qualities of tikanga Maori and taha Maori with aspects my own Irish-Catholic experience: a love of language and eloquence; how much the function and the customs of tangihanga resembled those of the Irish wake; an easy resort to song and story to convey the substance of a culture and to express group solidarity and mutual support; an enjoyment of physical as well as emotional closeness.

This was in no way tantamount to saying I was Maori, or wanted to be Maori—because I couldn't be Maori and had no wish to be. It was rather something we all take consolation from at some stages of our lives: celebrating those things that have resonance from one culture to another—those things that remind us that, in addition to being Maori and Pakeha, male and female, gay and straight, we are also human. And there are times when we need to be reminded of that fact, and to cross the bridges to one another with which experience provides us.

I was reminded recently of this primal need to find and sustain the humanity in each one of us by something which Janet Frame [a New Zealand author] said in a letter to a friend just after the death by drowning of her sister Isabel, almost ten years to the day after her older sister, Myrtle, had died the same way.

"We are such sad small people," she wrote, "standing, each alone in a circle, trying to forget that death and terror are near. But death comes, and terror comes, and then we join hands and the circle is really magic. We have the strength then to face terror and death, even to laugh and make fun of being alive, and after that even to make more music and writing and dancing. But always, deep down, we are small sad people standing humanly alone. Oh for the hands to be joined for ever and the magic circle never to be broken..."

I want now to turn to the subject of the nature of Pakeha culture as I perceive it; and to the question of how it relates to this land. Before I do so, however, I need to deal with definitions or descriptions of the terms I am using.

Culture, in the sense in which I use the word in this discussion, bears a close relationship to Janet Frame's "magic circle". It refers to the devices we develop to help us come to terms with the fact that we know we are alive; and we know that we are destined to die. Culture began when our ancestors started to tell stories to explain who they were and where they had come from and how they related to the world around them, seen and unseen; and to paint pictures on cave walls to illustrate the textures of those stories for the eye and the mind.

These devices in their twenty-first century forms can be challenging and character-building in the form of sport; they can be sheer digression in the form of entertainment (what T.S. Eliot was thinking of, perhaps, when he spoke of people being "distracted from distraction by distraction"); they can help to bring us into harmony with the natural world through activities such as gardening, tramping or camping; they can engage our spiritual faculties through membership of religious groups; they can have profound resonance in our consciousness and experience through the so-called High Arts of music, painting and literature. Culture can, as T.S. Eliot said, set the inner self into the most vigorous vibration; or it can simply provide the warmth of human companionship at the RSA club on a cold evening.

There are contours and textures in these activities which allow us to distinguish one form of culture from another, and to identify more closely with one kind than with another. As Arthur Schlesinger writes, "rhythms, patterns, continuities drift out of time past to mould the present and to colour the shape of things to come." But what they have most in common is that, at one end of the scale, they provide us with understanding of ourselves as particular people alive at particular places, at particular times; and at the other they simply distract us from realities we find too harsh to contemplate unrelievedly. Culture is, in the end, the sum total of what people do to enable themselves to cope with reality.

In using the word "Pakeha", I refer to those things that relate to New Zealand but which are not specifically Maori or Pacific Island in character. I refer, in other words, to mainstream New Zealand culture—which is not unaffected by "things Maori"; but which is not in itself Maori. And I prefer to use the term Pakeha because it is positive (as opposed to "non-Maori"); because it is an indigenous New Zealand expression; and because the words "European" or "Caucasian" are no longer accurate or appropriate (and the word Caucasian never was).

Pakeha is not a pejorative expression. It does not mean "long pig", "white flea", "turnip", or "bugger ya" — all of which have been cited as alleged meanings by those who find the term distasteful. It almost certainly comes from the expression Pakepakeha, a reference to the white complexion of the earliest non-Maori who stepped ashore here, whose main visible distinguishing feature was that their skin was paler than that of Maori.

In identifying my own culture as Pakeha, I do so as one who has always taken for granted that I belonged in this land. And choosing a New Zealand label for that culture, one that has no significance anywhere else in the world, is a way of emphasising that fact. It's true that there was, in my childhood, a notion that we could have been displaced Irish. But that receded as I grew up. My people, predominantly remnants of the Irish diaspora, came here to a country where the first indigenous people had made a treaty with the Crown that authorised colonisation and gave us those two streams of people with rights to be here: tangata whenua, by virtue of their prior occupation, and tangata tiriti (to use Eddie Durie's characterisation of them), those who came to settle here as a result of the signing of the treaty and the constitutional steps that that set in motion.

After several generations of my family's occupation of this land, my own sense of belonging to it—and hence the flavour of my own culture—includes the following ingredients: a strong relationship with the natural world intensified by living by the sea, boating, fishing, tramping and camping; an engagement with the history of the land, which began with my boyhood encounters with kainga, whaling and battle sites around Paremata Harbour; a relationship with the literature of this country, especially the writing of such people as Robin Hyde, Charles Brasch, Frank Sargeson, Eric McCormick, Keith Sinclair, James K. Baxter and Janet Frame; and a relationship with Maori people, Maori writing and Maori history, which affects my view of all the preceding elements.

My identification with Pakeha culture is also a consequence of an accumulation of other New Zealand attitudes, values and habits which accrue to one living here like iron filings to a magnet. I am referring to such things as the rugby culture, which absorbed almost all New Zealand males of my generation and those immediately preceding it; a willingness to have a go at any kind of job opportunity that presented itself, and to learn about the job on the job (I recall Stephanie Dowrick saying that in London publishing houses, an English staff member could edit a manuscript or tie up a paper parcel, whereas a New Zealander in the same office could do both); a concern for the underdog; compassion for those in need or in trouble; an unwillingness to be bullied, or to be intimidated by class or status; not undertaking to do something without seeing it through (what Dan Davin, in a very New Zealand metaphor, referred to as "a kind of power behind the scrum that was often lacking in one's more fastidious English colleagues").

Another ingredient in this equation is having New Zealand heroes and heroines and for me, they were such people I knew about from childhood as Cliff Porter, J.T. Paul, Denis Clover, Charles Upham, Suzanne Aubert, Francois Delach; and later, such figures as Robin Hyde, William Malone, Howard Kippenberger, Ormond Wilson, Frank Sargeson, E.H. McCormick and Janet Frame. There were also Maori who were part of my personal pantheon—Te Whiti o Rongomai, Te Rau-o-te-rangi, Huria Matenga, Te Puea, Sir James Henare, Whina Cooper; and, one would have to say, having access to Maori experience and Maori role models is one of the features that distinguishes Pakeha culture from its cultures of origin.

Pakeha culture shares some ingredients with its largely European cultures of origin: such as the English language, the Westminster Parliamentary system, the traditions and the conventions of the Open Society, in which every person is entitled to seek truth through a process of unfettered investigation and open disputation. But the forms and the proportions in which those imported ingredients have coalesced in New Zealand has made them somewhat different in character from their antecedents and hence characteristic of Pakeha culture rather than of European culture.

If anyone doubts this, they have only to travel abroad, to do the much-valued "OE", to discover that this is so. And what one discovers is that one may feel a sense of affinity in places such as England, or (in my case) Ireland, or Scotland. But that that sense of affinity is not the same as feeling at home. In fact no sooner is one separated for a substantial length of time from New Zealand voices, viewpoints or even the sense of humour, than one misses it, and knows oneself to be from and of New Zealand, and not from and of any other place on earth.

Travel overseas at the age of thirty confirmed and emphasised for me that it is New Zealand and its experience and traditions, Maori and Pakeha, that is in my bones; and that there is no other part of the globe in which I would want to live or could live with the same sense of belonging and enrichment.

Among the subsequent experiences that have sharpened that feeling for me are being informed by members of the Aahi Kaa group that I was in fact a tau iwi or foreigner in this land; and, just as offensively, listening to Cabinet Minister Doug Graham say that Maori people had spiritual feelings for lakes, mountains and rivers, and that Pakeha people did not. Doug Graham might not have those feelings: but I and my family have them, as have the thousands of other Pakeha people I have encountered in four decades of walking, tramping and camping on this beautiful land; and doing their best to preserve the contours and the character of Papa-tua-nuku from a variety of commercial interests which have sought to destroy that character by ill-considered development projects.

It is for all these reasons that I would say now what I did not go as far as to say two decades ago: that Pakeha culture can no longer be considered an imported culture; it has now been here long enough, in interaction with the land and the tangata whenua, to be considered a second indigenous culture. And it has become indigenous in the same way that East Polynesian culture became Maori culture in New Zealand: by turning the attention of migrants away from their land and culture of origin, and focussing their sense of commitment to this land.

Just one indication of how far Pakeha have moved in this direction in the course of two generations can be gauged from the New Zealand response to the Second World War. In 1939 a New Zealand Prime Minister could say, "Where Britain goes, we go; where she stands, we stand..." And 105,000 New Zealanders, including my father and two uncles, served abroad in response to that call to defend Britain, Europe and something called the British Empire. That cannot happen, and won't ever happen, in the future. New Zealanders would only ever take up arms again on that scale to defend New Zealand.

In the new edition of Being Pakeha, I go on to say that, as another indication of how far Pakeha culture has become indigenous, it is only right to see the macrocarpa and the wooden church as being as much emblematic of the New Zealand landscape and human occupation of it, as the meeting house and the cabbage tree.

In saying this, and in saying what preceded this, I am in no way taking anything away from the position of Maori as tangata whenua, the nation's First Culture. Maori were, are and will remain the tuakana or senior sibling in our whanau relationship with the land, with each other, and with the outside world. They remain the people who, by virtue of being here first, signed with the Crown a treaty that is still recognised as having moral and judicial force.

But having said that, I will not willingly allow anybody to demean or diminish the status of my culture in the process of establishing or elevating that of Maori. And that brings me to the relevance of the Jack Lasenby quotation I mentioned earlier. There are several grounds for resisting the notion that respect for Maori implies disrespect for one's own heritage, if that heritage can be seen to have disadvantaged Maori.

One is that I don't believe in the Old Testament notion that the sins of the fathers are to be visited on successive generations. That is a prescription for the kind of payback culture that has crippled such places as the Balkans and Northern Ireland for centuries. Further, if one accepted such a principle, it would also be a recipe for continued conflict between Maori and Maori as a consequence of the musket wars of the early nineteenth century. Then there are the potential difficult implications for those who are both Maori and Pakeha in descent.

It is in that latter circumstance, however, that we have a precedent for a way forward and out of a culture of revenge. In the pre-musket, pre-Contact years, when Maori iwi or hapu fought other iwi or hapu and one side achieved clear dominance, the descendants of both victor and vanquished were married, so that their descendants could whakapapa back to both sides. And that was a prescription for ending the distinction between victor and vanquished and thus removing grounds for future conflict. In this way did Ngati Mamoe absorb Waitaha in the South Island; and then were themselves absorbed by Ngai Tahu; and in this way too most Ngai Tahu descendants now trace their descent from all three iwi.

The "sins of the fathers" model also loses validity if one takes it literally, case by case. When North Island Maori were being attacked by Imperial and then colonial government forces in the middle of the nineteenth century, my immediate ancestors were grappling with the effects of the Irish famines; and my Tierney grandmother always asserted that we, with four hundred years of oppression of our language, our culture and our faith, had more reason to hate the English than those who had survived the decidedly more mild consequences of nineteenth century colonisation.

That is not to say that one should devalue or underestimate the effect on Maori of the British colonisation of Aotearoa. I have researched and documented the pain and the grief of that process in half a dozen books; and done as much as I can to make the negative effects of that colonisation visible to my Pakeha brothers and sisters; and argued forcefully that it created imbalances of opportunity in our national life than can and ought to be compensated for and remedied. Which is one reason that I am fully supportive of the Treaty-based claims process and applaud the fact that it returns economic and social resources to people who had had those things illegally or unethically taken from them.

But that is not the same as saying that Maori people or Maori culture are ethically or morally superior to Pakeha because of the European colonisation of New Zealand. That is a notion I wholly reject. The process of colonisa1ion is about the application of power on the part of those who have it, onto those who do not. And it is almost inevitably corrupting, as Lord Acton reminded us when speaking of the absolute variety. And it brings with it, as part of its baggage, notions of racial and cultural superiority.

Note that I say that it is the process that brings these things, not simply people of one kind of ethnic background or another. In pre-European Contact days, tribal Maori interacted only with each other. And those people, Nga Iwi o te Motu, while there were small variations in their language and kawa, recognised a broad tikanga that was intelligible to and accepted by people from Te Rerenga Wairua in the north to Rakiura in the south.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, individual iwi considered carrying their martial culture beyond the shores of New Zealand. At least three expeditions of conquest were planned: to Samoa, to Norfolk Island, and to the Chatham Islands, which did not become part of New Zealand until 1842. All these proposed expeditions were dependent on finding transport to those places: and that meant finding a European ship's captain whose vessel was available for charter; or it meant Maori commandeering a vessel for the purpose.

In the event there were no expeditions to Norfolk Island or to Samoa because the necessary transport was not secured. But there was an invasion of the Chathams Islands. Two Taranaki tribes then based in Wellington, Ngati Tama and Ngati Mutunga ki Poneke, hijacked a European vessel in 1835 and had themselves—a total of 900 people—delivered to Chatham Islands. There they takahi'd or walked the land to claim it; ritually killed around 300 Chatham Moriori out of a total of around 1600, and enslaved the survivors—separating husbands from wives, parents from children, forbidding them to speak their own language or practise their own customs, and forcing them to violate the tapus of their culture, whose mana was based on the rejection of violence.

Was this a superior form of colonisation to that imposed by European on Maori? Did it respect the dignity and customs of the colonised? Did it acknowledge the mana whenua of the tchakat henu or indigenous people of the Chathams? It did not. It was what might now be called an exercise in ethnic cleansing. When Bishop Selwyn arrived in the islands in 1848, it was to discover that the Maori called Moriori "Paraiwhara" or "Blackfellas"; and it was to report that the Moriori population continued to decline at a suicidal rate as a consequence of kongenge or despair. Moriori slaves were not released and New Zealand law was not established on the islands until 1862, twenty years after they had become part of New Zealand. And it is that twenty years of neglect of fiduciary duty on the part of the Crown that is the basis for the Moriori claim to the Waitangi Tribunal, heard in 1994, but still not reported upon.

The point in raising the Chathams experience is not to use it as a stick with which to beat Maori—especially in view of what I have been saying about not visiting the sins of the fathers, or mothers, onto subsequent generations. I draw attention to it in the spirit of a historian who says, Take care. The evidence of history is unanimous on only one point. It shows us that no race or culture is inherently superior or inferior to another; and we all have skeletons in our ancestral closets that represent instances of behaviour of which we cannot be wholly proud by today's standards of ethics and morality.

There is another issue which falls within the context of Jack Lasenby's quote about the respective balance between valuing and devaluing our major cultures. And it is exemplified most emphatically, I believe, by the behaviour of our National Museum, Te Papa.

This excellent institution made an early decision to recognise and provide access to Matauranga Maori — Maori systems of knowledge — alongside Western scholarly conventions; and by so doing to provide the country's indigenous and Pacific cultures with the major say in how their cultures would be presented in the museum's displays. Thus notices in the museum ask visitors to respect the values and protocols arising out of those cultures. Thus too those same visitors are asked to remove their shoes before entering the meeting house Te Hau Ki Tauranga. And thus, at the request of New Zealand Samoans, Tongans and other Polynesians, pictures of bare-breasted women taken by European photographers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not hung in Te Papa's Pacific section, because such images are offensive to the evangelical-Christian mores of the descendants of those same women.

So far so good. I have no grounds for wanting to challenge such a policy. But I am made uneasy by the fact that when an issue arose about the mores and sensibilities of a section of our Pakeha culture, Christians who venerated the Mother of Christ every bit as reverentially as Poverty Bay Maori venerated the carvings in Te Hau Ki Tautanga, there was no sign of mutuality of respect. The Virgin In A Condom was allowed to remain on display regardless of the offence that it gave. I was made even more uneasy when, at the very same time, the Waikato Museum of Arts and History decided to withdraw a Dick Frizzell exhibition on the ground that moko on the face of a caricatured Four Square grocer gave offence to Tainui Maori. The message that emerged from the exact conjunction of both episodes was that tangata whenua culture is to be respected by the institutions responsible for New Zealand art and ethnology; but Pakeha culture, our second indigenous culture, is not.

There was one further episode involving Te Papa that seemed to reinforce this message. Four professional historians (I was not one of them) wrote last year to Te Papa's Chief Executive Officer, Cheryl Sotheran, complainng that the Moriori exhibit made no mention of the Maori invasion of the Chathams, to which I have already referred. Defending Te Papa's representation of Moriori history, the museum's manager of research went on the Holmes [television] programme to say that "a revelation of the truth [in this matter] would constitute a return to a view of history which has overtones of racism."

Again, I was left feeling uncomfortable. This defence implied that aspects of the past ought to be suppressed if they gave comfort to rednecks. That, I would argue, is not a sound ground for misrepresenting history. And I'm not sure that I can think of any justifiable reason for doing so. The only healthy way to deal with the past and to understand it, is to have all the relevant incidents and episodes on the table and to be even-handed in the manner in which we deal with them.

This last episode raises the issue of whether or not, in an effort to compensate Maori for past injustices and misrepresentations, some of us are now presenting history slanted in such a way as to make Maori history and behaviour appear more virtuous than the behaviour and performance of non-Maori.

The Maori historian Buddy Mikaere has referred to a tendency on the part of Pakeha historians to depict Maori as, invariably, deeply spiritual beings who only ever act on the basis of high-minded principles; and Pakeha as unprincipled rogues or fools whose behaviour is always motivated by racial arrogance, greed and self-interest.

Mikaere made these comments with specific reference to The Story of New Zealand by Judith Bassett, Keith Sinclair and Marcia Stenson. But the imprint of the approach to history he identifies can be found in Anne Salmond's book Two Worlds, First Meetings Between Maori aud Europeans 1642-1772 (though interestingly enough not in its sequel, Between Two Worlds). It rests heavily on James Belich's series of television documentaries on the New Zealand Wars. And it is there in Fergus Clunie's recent writings on missionary activity in and around the Bay of Islands.

In the first instance, that of Anne Salmond, it is revealed in a determrnation to expose the more brutal features of seventeenth and eighteenth century European society without acknowledging comparable behaviour by Maori; and to judge every aspect of European activity in New Zealand in the harshest light, and every manifestation of Maori behaviour in the most benevolent and positive way.

Belich's documentaries highlight behaviour of the nincompoop variety, whilst potraying Maori as almost always making decisions that were admirable and strategically sound. And Fergus Clunie sees early missionary actions as being designed, not to give Maori the benefit of European technology in such areas as food production and house construction, but solely to make Maori dependent on the technology with a view to advancing the process of colonisation and parting them from their land.

It is true, as Belich remarks, that all the encounters referred to in each of these books result from European intrusions into a previously discreet indigenous culture; and that consequently, from a post-colonial perspective, Maori in the eighteenth and nineteenth century can be seen as always occupying the moral high ground, just as Moriori do in the context of their experience of colonisation. But it is also true, as Mikaere points out, that Maori too sometimes acted precipitately, unwisely, injudiciously; and that Maori historical narratives about themselves are as replete with fools and clowns and villains as they are with heroes and heroines.

One of the features that has always characterised the writing of history is an impulse to restore balance after an interval of perceived imbalance. Hence, like the workings of a clock, the forward motion of history is often generated by pendulum swings. And the examples of imbalance which I have offered are themselves the consequence of previous imbalances: Salmond's against a former inability or unwillingness to perceive the process of cultural encounter from Maori perspectives; Belich's against a tradition of military history that was both racially arrogant and culturally chauvinistic; and Clunie's against a literature on missionary endeavour whose major distinguishing characteristic was filial piety.

Having noted that, however, I would go on to say that the kinds of history that portray Maori as acting only with nobility, and Pakeha acting only with malice and self-interest, are as patronising and as offensive as an earlier generation of historical narratives which either ignored the Maori role in the national equation or wrote off Maori strategies as the ineffective antics of a savage people. Idealisation of Maori behaviour also builds up a paradigm in which it becomes difficult to accommodate other episodes in New Zealand history, such as the periodic cruelty of Maori to other Maori. Ultimately, historians have a responsibility to reflect all the variegations of human behaviour in these islands, to follow evidence wherever it leads, and not to write narratives that simply caricature one side or another.

So: Let me now try to steer this discussion towards some kind of conclusion.

What I am saying in summary about recognising the indigenising of Pakeha culture is also part of saying that there has to be a mutual acknowledgement and a mutuality of respect between our two cultures. No side is entitled to say "I insist that you respect my culture but I reserve the right to revile and demean yours." That is simply a recipe for unrelenting social disharmony and for violence. Nor should historians mistakenly try to raise the mana and the esteem of Maori culture by idealising Maori life and caricturing that of non-Maori.

I would also argue that a strong and confident Pakeha culture—one that actually knows its own history and feels positive about allegiance to its own origins—is more likely to deliver an equable and more equitable relationship to Maori. The people who rant and rave about Maori regaining lost ground at the expense of Pakeha, and who characterise the Treaty-based claims process as a form of apartheid, such as members of the One New Zealand Foundation, are for the most part people whose own cultural position is insecure. By contrast, it was no surprise to me that some of the conservatives who embraced the Maori cultural and economic revival with most enthusiasm, and helped give it further momentum, were the likes of Peter Elworthy, Doug Graham and Jim Bolger—Pakeha people who know and feel positive about their own history.

In saying what I have about Pakeha culture, about its right to be here, to belong, and to carry indigenous status, I seek to do two things: one is to reflect and articulate a reality that is evolving but not always acknowledged; the other is to accompany my Pakeha brothers and sisters towards a similar degree of confidence and security in their identification with this land as Maori have. And I seek to do this without guilt, and without apology.