Huia Come Home

An amnesiac, therefore, creates a self-narrative out of thin air, using the hipster narratives of the moment. Those who lose their creative memory are often at the mercy of the dominant cultural milieu.

Do we as the New Zealand Church know where we have come from, or are we living out of ideas that have no grounding in our landscape? Living solely from the left-brain creates stuffy theology and stifles prophetic intuition. Christians are widely regarded as dogmatic rather than creative, which is a sure sign of spiritual amnesia. Somehow, we’ve had a blow to our collective consciousness. The forces of history have been at work in us, though we have remembered them not.

Descartes’ defining moment in history came about, oddly enough, when he was commissioned by a Catholic Cardinal to unequivocally prove the existence of God.⁵ In his pursuit, he attempted to remove himself from all literature, histories, and from everything of the outside world. He locked himself away in what he called his “oven” — his thinking chamber — all alone. There, isolated from all of the world, he came up with his famous axiom “I think, therefore I am.” Attempting

We gobble up the latest and greatest fashion and film stories from America and Europe, while in our churches we feed an insatiable appetite for off-shore revivals and methodologies. In many ways, New Zealanders are fed by other contexts, as if the grass is always greener elsewhere. We are enamoured with the large chicken; portrayals of life and faith from contexts that are foreign to our own. This produces misguided expectations, along with nauseating conformity. Such expectations rely on the cultivation of intentional short-term memory.

But as an overflowing result of the enlightened exodus, spirituality ceased to be a defining element of humanness in the West. The baby was thrown out with the bath water. Enlightenment took the crown of authority from the Church and placed it on the head of the rationalism of the individual.¹¹

They believed that societies developed like a person. Infant society was animalistic, while childhood was savage. Once a society hit adolescence — with its fiery passion — it was barbaric, eventually coming to full maturity as a civilised adult.

rope maker to teach the methods of European life and trade.²¹ But Marsden assumed, like Captain Cook, that Māori were savages; children that must first grow up in order to understand what it meant to be a Christian.

To begin with, the technology of the book was received as a kind of magic; Māori were awestruck that one person could pen something, pass it to another, and have another decipher exactly what the first had scribbled. Māori considered this to be a superior magic and it created an insatiable hunger for books.

After waiting two more hours he eventually left, realising that no-one wanted to talk about the blind-eye injustice towards Māori. Walking out of the Governor’s office that day, he returned to Te Wherowhero in Mangere with the cemented idea that Māori needed a king in order for just laws to be established for his people. There was much discussion and a year later Wiremu Tāmihana anointed Te Wherowhero as the first Māori King. Tāmihana placed a Bible on the head of Te Wherowhero, anointing him not with oil, but with the Word of God.

Wiremu Tāmihana was a worthy bearer of our sacred huia feather. He was a man who graciously made room for our foreign ‘chicken’ ways only to have those ways grow to smother his cry for justice.

Taumata-a-Kura was implored to fight with his people against another tribe.⁵ Reluctant to fight, he was eventually persuaded, but only after he convinced his fellow warriors to “adopt a code of conduct which reflected Christian ideas of compassion towards enemies.”⁶

Taumata-a-Kura preached the gospel up and down the East Coast region well before the CMS missionaries arrived, planting the first expression of an indigenous church in New Zealand. It

Across the land missionaries sacrificed much, leaving their homes and families, interests and comforts, to serve Māori and build relationship with them. They were the bridge-builders and cultural translators, devoted to the people, who were asked to mediate a partnership between the Crown and Iwi.

Because of humanitarian and missionary involvement the British handled this treaty differently than any other. “This was the first time the British had accorded any indigenous race a document promising their protection and granting them British citizenship.”¹ ¹ The first time. This may not sound like music to Māori ears today because of what eventuated, but this was an unprecedented act for the times and revealed the hope the authors of the Treaty had for a genuine partnership.

The brothers knew that if the Treaty became just a form of words with no real meaning, then Māori would “naturally think that the missionaries deceived them for some sinister purpose.”¹⁵ This undoubtedly became the case. There seemed to be a systematic attack against the missionaries and in particular, the Williams brothers. Among settlers in New Zealand and politicians in England, the Wakefield brothers raised a defamatory voice against the Treaty and the missionaries. They called the Treaty “fiction” and mocked the missionaries as its authors and interpreters.¹⁶

began a karakia (prayer) which closed in the name of Ihu Karaiti.⁷ This is telling. There is a generation of professional Māori leaders (influenced by Ruth Ross’ argument) who are trained with an academic acumen to perceive Christianity as a deceitful and destructive force against Māori. But in spite of such attitudes towards Christianity, the effects of the early revival period are rooted in a generation of elders, which that moment of prayer created a very clear picture of.

Are you pursuing a type of justice that is restorative and mends relationship, or more of a vengeance type of justice?” He thought for a second and then responded, “That’s a good question, I haven’t really thought about it like that.” This was a response from one of the country’s best minds, working in international law. He hadn’t thought about the type of justice he was pursuing as a lawyer for Māori in Treaty claims. I found that to be quite telling. The Treaty partnership came about through trust and the negotiating abilities of the church and early missionaries, but the concern for a justice that is focused on genuine relationship and true partnership seems missing; no doubt it was misplaced through the process of deep and difficult pain. It is a justice that is not only missing at tribunal meetings, but has been lost in the conversations of everyday New Zealanders as we discuss what we think the Treaty is all about. Therefore, we need to help our country understand that true justice will always and only look like relational wholeness.

As is also emphasised by some scholars today, it is the spirit of the Treaty that matters most and that is supposed to override the ambiguities and difference of emphasis within the texts.⁸ I like that. It is the spirit of the Treaty, the spirit of agreement which means the most. Māori and the Crown (and every person and culture whom the Crown represents) entered into a special relationship that will forever need ears to listen, voices to dialogue, and noble hearts to understand.

But belief can also be misinformed, and the act of believing misplaced. Belief can stagnate as it is passed down to us from some other time. Such beliefs shape our identity, but we don’t always understand where our big belief-ideas came from. When we don’t understand why we think and act the way we do, such a belief system can become like a rickety overgrown trellis; a ghostly premonition of presumption. It’s like our believing can fall asleep at the wheel of our own dogma.