Waitangi Treaty Grounds

On 6 Feb 1840 New Zealand’s founding document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, The Treaty of Waitangi was signed. Today we visited the signing house and grounds. We had a guided tour and got to see a Maōri dance performance. There was also a group rehearsing the Haka in preparation for the Waitangi Day celebration. A brief history of New Zealand: The New Zealand land mass is quite young geologically. At the base is a microcontinent Zealandia that broke off from Gondwana 85 million years ago. But most of New Zealand’s current land mass comes from the uplift from volcanoes at the convergence of the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. New Zealand was the last large, habitable land mass to be discovered by humans. The first people to arrive in New Zealand were Polynesian ancestors of the Māori, between 1200 and 1300 AD. The distinct Maōri culture was formed. In 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to sight and record New Zealand. The name New Zealand comes from the Dutch ‘Nieuw Zeeland’, the name first given by a Dutch mapmaker. The Englishman Captain James Cook arrived here in 1769. European whalers and sealers then started visiting regularly, followed by traders. By the 1830s, the British government was being pressured to reduce lawlessness in the country and to settle here before the French, who were considering New Zealand as a potential colony. On February 6, 1840, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed by the British Crown and over 500 Māori chiefs. The treaty was an agreement between that established British sovereignty over New Zealand, while guaranteeing Māori rights to their land and culture, essentially serving as the founding document of the country and laying the foundation for a bicultural society; however, the treaty's interpretation remains complex due to discrepancies between the English and Māori versions, leading to ongoing debates about its meaning and implementation throughout New Zealand's history. These differences lead to the New Zealand Wars of 1845 to 1972. In 1907, New Zealand became a dominion within the British Empire. New Zealand gained full independence from Britain in 1947 but is still part of the commonwealth.