Editorial: The legacy of Waitangi

OPINION: Today is Waitangi Day.

To many of you, those four words will mean little or, at the most, a little work around the house and a fair bit of lounging around afterwards.

To others it can be a call to action, an opportunity to remind others yet again that they believe there are wrongs that remain uncorrected, issues that are still unresolved.

To Prime Minister John Key it will probably involve more tight security, more tense jostling by potentially hostile crowds keen to push their point of view and press the flesh in uncomfortable ways.

To those whose passion about the day extends as far as raising a beer to the founding of our nation, it can seem a carnival, a circus, a charade.

But this year is a little different. This year, Waitangi Day not only marks 170 years since the formation and signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, it heralds another anniversary that provides some real meaning and context behind the occasion.

And it all centres on Taranaki – Waitara in particular.

In little more than a month, we will be commemorating the 150th anniversary of the start of the New Zealand Land Wars, which kicked off barely 20 years after the signing of the Treaty in 1840.

The first shots were fired in Waitara on March 17, and although hostilities in the small Taranaki town died down after about 10 months, the rest of the country would be caught up in the "civil" war for more than a decade.

Depending on where you stand in the argument, the aftermath of both the Treaty and the blood lost over it has brought us a strong alliance of two great cultures, an effective assimilation of one people into another's society, or an uneasy, tense standoff and struggle of wills and rights.

But the Treaty is by no means a dead document, as some would have us believe.

The ongoing tension and battle over Waitara's Pekapeka block and moves to settle Te Atiawa's claim are reminders that it may be 170 years old, and it may be 150 years since those first fateful shots were fired, but we are still living with the consequences of those actions and listening and responding to the echoes of war cries and muskets fired so many years ago.

This, our national day, may be a holiday, a day of rest and reflection, but the reality is that there has not been one day of rest or peaceful reflection in the last 170 years.

The battle may have started 150 years ago and lasted about a decade, but the war continues.

Soldiers live on for both sides. They have just put down the guns and picked up the placards, discarded the sword and reached for the pen.

- © Fairfax NZ News