The relationship between Hauraki Maori and the Crown from the 1830s to present day is discussed in two reports. Part One, which is this report, examines the first fifty years of that relationship from 1835 to 1885. Four major themes underlie the following discussion. Three of these themes concern different aspects of the material destruction of the Hauraki resource base: tribal loss of land; of ownership of minerals and of other natural properties of the land, most particularly timber; as well as control of the foreshore and rivers. The fourth theme concerns the declining position of the Hauraki iwi from one in which there were the seeds of a possible ongoing partnership in the usages of the law, the economy, and political structures, to one of the complete domination of tikanga by the common law and British legal precepts, economic impoverishment, and almost complete exclusion from the law-making institutions of the colony. Throughout the report, considerable emphasis is placed on disparity between the promises and the actions of the Crown, the calculated nature of much of the dealing of Governments, and the protests of Hauraki Maori at the deliberate undermining of their rangatiratanga over land, resources, and community.
The relationship between Hauraki Maori and the Crown from the early 1880s to the 1980s is analysed and summarised separately in Part Two. Both reports draw heavily on official published sources and on archival records, most particularly case files for the Old Land Claim Commission, correspondence to the Auckland Provincial Government, the Thames and Coromandel wardens' and resident magistrates' letterbooks held by the Justice Department, Mines Department files, papers tabled before Parliament and Select Committees, and the memoranda, registered and special block files of the Native Affairs Department. In addition, the two reports are intended as an overview and as such, incorporate the extensive work carried out by David Alexander for the Hauraki Maori Trust Board. This research is set out in the block histories contained in volume eight of the Hauraki claim before the Waitangi Tribunal.
Chapter I: Hauraki and the Crown, 1800–1850
The Hauraki robe and iwi
[pp. 29–33]The state of the Hauraki iwi in the years immediately preceding 1840 is described briefly. In the early nineteenth century the Hauraki people comprised the
9