'A Bloody Difficult Subject' by Bain Attwood

Author:Bain Attwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Keith Sorrenson, the Tribunal and the Treaty

The changes in the way that historians read Ross’s article and the way they interpreted the Treaty in turn in the 1980s and 1990s is writ large in writings other than Claudia Orange’s. I am now going to discuss just one of those historians — M. P. K. (Keith) Sorrenson (1932–) — to illustrate and explain this phenomenon.48 I have chosen his writings for several reasons. He was one of the most senior New Zealand historians writing about the Treaty at the time and so had a good deal of authority. His writings, for the most part, were not the result of any historical research that he had conducted, and they shed an unusually large amount of light on the influence that was being exerted by the work that was being done by the other players. Finally, all but one of the essays he wrote at this time were prepared for an audience other than academic historians, which means that they do much to reveal the public life that history was having in regard to the Treaty.49

Sorrenson has noted that his work took a new turn in 1986 when he was appointed as one of the Waitangi Tribunal’s members, first as a deputy member but subsequently as a full member. Yet one might doubt whether this did mark a fundamental departure in his life as a historian. He had long played a role in New Zealand public life: he had been a prominent member of CARE (Citizens Association for Racial Equality) and was a passionate opponent of the All Blacks touring South Africa and New Zealand hosting the Springboks; and most of the books he had written were aimed at audiences other than an academic one.50

Sorrenson’s appointment to the Tribunal occurred after it was granted retrospective powers to investigate claims about breaches of the Treaty dating back to its signing in 1840, which was a power that Matiu Rata had sought for the body originally. In these circumstances, the Tribunal assumed that it required the expertise of an academic historian and realised that Sorrenson would be ideal, given the research he had carried out previously on the alienation of Māori land. His involvement with the Tribunal brought him into contact with two of the most powerful strands of storytelling that were at work in regard to the Treaty — those of the law and Māori history — though he was already familiar with the latter as he had grown up hearing stories about the loss of his mother’s Māori land and this had played a role in his choosing to do his first substantial piece of historical research (in the mid-1950s) on the alienation of Māori land. This said, only a decade earlier, at the point Orange had expressed a wish to undertake her PhD on the history of the Treaty, he had been sceptical that there was anything much new to be said about the subject. The fact that he became a convert

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