Treaty of Waitangi

The Treaty of Waitangi, known in Māori as Te Tiriti o Waitangi, is the agreement made in 1840 between the British Crown and Māori chiefs (rangatira) that opened the way for British rule in New Zealand. It was first signed at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands on 6 February 1840 and then carried around the country for further signatures. Because its English and Māori texts say different things about sovereignty, it has been argued over ever since, and it is now widely regarded as New Zealand's founding document.

By the 1830s missionaries, traders and whalers were active in New Zealand. In 1831 thirteen northern chiefs wrote to King William IV seeking British friendship amid fears of French annexation. Britain sent James Busby as Resident in 1832, and in 1835 thirty-four northern rangatira signed He Whakaputanga, the Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand, asserting that sovereign authority in the land lay with them. By 1839 the private New Zealand Company was dispatching settlers and buying land, and the Colonial Office instructed Captain William Hobson to obtain Māori consent to British sovereignty over all or part of the islands.

Hobson, with no draft from London, wrote the treaty over three days with his secretary and Busby, neither of whom was a lawyer. The missionary Henry Williams and his son Edward translated it into Māori overnight on 4 February. On 5 February it was read to a large gathering of chiefs at Busby's house. Some, such as Rewa, rejected a governor outright, insisting the land was still theirs; others, including Hōne Heke and Tāmati Wāka Nene, argued that British authority was needed to control unruly settlers and keep out the French. After debating late into the night, on 6 February more than forty signed, Hōne Heke first.

The English text has the chiefs cede "all the rights and powers of sovereignty" to the Crown, guarantees them possession of their lands and other properties, gives the Crown the sole right to buy their land, and extends to Māori the rights of British subjects. The Māori text, which almost all signatories signed, uses kāwanatanga, a borrowed word for governorship, for what was given up, while promising the chiefs tino rangatiratanga, full chieftainship, over their lands, villages and taonga, or treasures. The rangatira may well have seen the agreement as a sharing of power and authority, whereas the Crown has always regarded it as their consent to a cession of sovereignty. The land clause was also loosely translated, and many Māori apparently believed they were merely giving the Queen first offer on any land they chose to sell.

Copies then travelled to about fifty meetings. Some 530 to 540 Māori, at least thirteen of them women, signed the Māori text, and only 39 signed the English version. Several major groups never signed, including the Waikato leader Pōtatau Te Wherowhero and the Tūhoe, Te Arawa and Ngāti Tūwharetoa peoples. On 21 May 1840 Hobson proclaimed British sovereignty over the whole country, over the North Island by treaty and over the South Island by right of discovery, and New Zealand became a separate colony in 1841.

Disputes over land and authority soon followed, and contributed to the New Zealand Wars between 1845 and 1872, during which the government confiscated large areas of Māori land in Waikato and Taranaki. In 1877 a chief justice described the treaty as "a simple nullity", a view that long shaped the law, although Māori continued to invoke it in seeking redress.

From the 1960s and 1970s a Māori protest movement demanded that the government "honour the treaty". The Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 created the Waitangi Tribunal to investigate breaches; from 1985 it could examine claims back to 1840. Since the early 1990s the Crown has negotiated settlements of historical claims with iwi, and 6 February is now observed as Waitangi Day, a national holiday. Its principles remain politically contested in New Zealand.

Our 1815 map shows New Zealand before British annexation, and the 1878 map shows it as a colony of the British Empire.