Rising tide

Twenty years on from the foreshore and seabed hikoi, the issues behind it have not subsided.

- RUSSELL BROWN

This has been a really challenging story to tell," reflects Tamati RimeneSproat some way into Hikoi: Speaking Our Truth. "Because on one hand, I'm a journalist and I want to be completely unbiased. And on the other hand, I'm Māori - and what happened back in 2004 still affects me and my people to this day." In truth, one part of the story could not have been properly told without the other.

To merely relate the political events that preceded and followed the passsing of the Foreshore and Seabed Act would have been to ignore what roused thousands of people including a 10-year-old RimeneSproat to join the hikoi that arrived at Parliament on May 5, 2004.

The government's attempt to cut off the political risk posed by a Court of Appeal's finding that Māori rights in the seabed and foreshore of New Zealand had not been extinguished and could be explored in the Māori Land Court did not take place in a vacuum, either. Rimene-Sproat, who has previously been seen by the nation as the good-natured guide to te ao Māori in Hongi to Hängi, does a good job of explaining a political environment whose tensions have faded from memory and seem to be present again 20 years later.