Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
by Captain Cook, after the botanist aboard the Endeavour . To Cook, the then
tenuous connection of the Peninsula to what were later to be the 'Canterbury
Plains' was not apparent from offshore. Today it is one of the more richly textured
landscapes of the South Island, a finely grained mosaic of small settlements, farms,
sheep pastures, exotic trees and regenerating bush worked into the steep slopes of
the worn-down calderas of Akaroa and Lyttelton harbours (Figure 5.1). It is a
landscape that is largely silent about the conditions of its own production, but one
that well illustrates the result of accumulation by dispossession and the attendant
practices of enclosure, improvement and biotic exchange.
The pattern of land acquisition by Europeans from Ng¯i Tahu, the iwi (tribe)
who hold mana whenua (tribal authority) over much of the South Island, is complex.
It reflects the meeting of two different political orders, uses of space and tenure
systems (Stevens, 2013). The M¯ori relation between people and land was based
on use value expressed in customary, multifunctional rights that often overlapped
both socially and territorially. It was a system presented in narrative form rather
than one represented through an object or text, such as a map or land title. Rights
did not reside with proprietary landholders, but were invested more widely through
tribal structures (Christensen, 2013). There was limited appreciation of these
differences by representatives of the British Crown in New Zealand, who were
instructed to obtain signatures in the South Island to the Treaty of Waitangi in
1840. The Crown land purchases that followed, codified in sketchy maps, treated
M¯ori territory as tabula rasa , while M¯ori understood the rich detail of oral
FIGURE 5.1 Banks Peninsula: location and place names.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search