Posted by Shaun Waugh
@culturewaugh on X here
Maui Pomare delivered this speech in the House on 9 December 1918—NZPD vol. 183, p. 1033—three & a half weeks after the Armistice. 🧵 [1/2] He was the first Maori doctor, Western Maori MP, later Minister of Health. His grandmother, Kahe Te Rau-o-te-rangi, signed the Treaty. That is the record, not a reconstruction.
Ka ao! Ka ao! Ka awatea! — Then they turned the lights back off.
In December 1918, with the guns barely silent, Dr Maui Pomare stood in Parliament and spoke as if New Zealand were one house. He opened in te reo, then translated himself so no one could pretend they had not heard:
“Come hither. Draw nigh. Give me the living waters. The old have slept badly, for night is when dark deeds are done. The tide of misfortune runs to oblivion. But now it is dawn. It is day.”
Then the unforgivable sentences, by today’s liturgical standards:
“Thank God the sun of peace reigns. Tell His Majesty our Emperor of our unswerving loyalty. If the call of Empire comes again we shall defend it to the death. If need be, as in the past, stand back to back with our white brothers of this Dominion to the last man.
Never again must any Polynesian be put under the heel of the despicable Hun. We know the Samoans, our kin. We know the Hereros. That is enough.
For seventy-eight years we have not been under the rule of the British, but taking a part in the ruling of ourselves.
The foundations of British sovereignty are liberty, equity and justice.
In the last fight of all, our house will stand together and its pillars will not fall.
Farewell. Bon voyage. Kia ora.”
That was not a footnote. That was a senior Maori MP, physician, minister-in-waiting, grandson of a Treaty signatory, speaking for chiefs he said he wanted to send as “an authoritative voice from the Polynesian race.”
He did not say partnership of two founding peoples. He did not say co-governance. He did not say the 1840 document created a permanent racial estate with a veto. He said one house, one Empire, one set of principles, and a readiness to die beside the Pakeha next to him.
A century later the inheritors of the same parliamentary seats treat that speech as if it were a colonial ventriloquist act.
The approved history now runs: the Treaty established a sacred partnership; the partnership was betrayed;
the only remedy is a thickening lattice of race-specific institutions, “principles” invented in the 1980s, and a politics that recodes every ordinary civic disagreement as colonial violence.
The imported software is obvious—Critical Race Theory’s original-sin ledger, anti-colonial theory’s settler/indigene binary, & a Palestine Liberation-Front habit of treating the majority as occupiers who must be made to feel illegitimate in their own country.
The local branding is “honouring Te Tiriti.” The product is the opposite of what Pomare described.
The hypocrisy is athletic.
The same tradition that produced a man who recruited Maori for the Pioneer Battalion so they could prove citizenship now produces politicians who treat citizenship as a consolation prize and “rangatiratanga” as a separate constitution. The same people who invoke 1840 as holy writ skip 1918 as if Pomare had been possessed.
They speak of alleged, not necessarily proven, historical wrongs as if the Waitangi Tribunal Union’s expanding jurisdiction were a court of first instance rather than a political commission whose findings become scripture. They demand race-based health authorities, co-governed water, and Treaty clauses in everything from resource consents to school lunches, then call it social justice when the numbers do not close the gaps that Pomare spent his life trying to close with sanitation, hospitals, & an end to tohunga quackery.
Pōmare’s own career is inconvenient. He believed many customary practices were killing his people. He supported the Tohunga Suppression Act. He extended conscription to Māori and was greeted in Waikato with the most extreme insult in the repertoire.
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On-line biographical….
Pomare, Sir Maui (1876–1930)