'Just be Māori, all day, every day'

In calling iwi to a hui in January, the Kiingitanga leader sent a powerful message to the new government. Aaron Smale looks at the legacy of the truck driver who ascended the throne.

- Aaron Smale

He was a truck driver from Huntly, but to meet him was to shake hands with history. I met Kiingi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII very fleetingly at a poukai, a hui specific to the Kiingitanga, at a marae in Te Kuiti. The marae itself had been carved by Te Kooti and his followers, who had sought refuge there. It was all saturated in a history that has and continues to shape our country, whether we're aware of it or not. Tuheitia's death sees the closing of another chapter of that history and the opening of a new one.

After the crown's 1863 invasion of Waikato, the Kiingitanga, in the person of Tawhiao, the second Māori king, withdrew into the territory of Ngāti Maniapoto in what would become known as the King Country. But the Kiingitanga wasn't just a person or an inherited title. It stood for something far bigger.

The genesis of the movement started with rangatira Wiremu Tamihana, who was disgusted at Māori being excluded from the newly formed Parliament. When he travelled to Auckland around 1855 to present a petition to Governor Thomas Gore Browne for Māori to be included, he was made to wait outside for two days while Pākehā filed past him. He later told a missionary: "We are treated like dogs - I will not go again. I then went to Mangere and I said to Pootatau - go back to Waikato and let us consider some Tikanga for ourselves."

Māori activist Moana Jackson once said to me, "Never mind tikanga; the crown can't even follow its own laws." It certainly hasn't ever been able to honour the Treaty of Waitangi that it claims to derive its authority from. It was that failure that led to the Kiingitanga. It is that ongoing failure that continues to haunt our political discourse.