December 13, 2023
Te Papa tiriti protest off course says Jones
Cabinet minister and former treaty protester Shane Jones says protesters who painted out the English text of a Treaty of Waitangi at Te Papa this week aren’t fighting for the same treaty he’s tried to advance.
He says the national museum is right to display both the English and the Māori texts of the treat, because it’s an expression of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s bicultural roots.
He doesn’t accept the treaty as only being a charter of indigenous or aboriginal rights.”The treaty changed irretrievably the trajectory Māori were put on. After that it created an indivisible citizenship and these are the things that we learned from Matiu Rata and that’s the creed that I’ve endeavoured to paddle my waka to in terms of the streams of debate on our marae,” Mr Jones says.
The battles he was part of were about winning back land rights and fishing rights, not about trying to create some sort of indigenous sovereignty.