LANDSCAPES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 69

negotiations, encompassing that which they wished to keep, to be the authoritative
contract. Cutting across this was the involvement of French colonizers, whose
interest had been piqued through Peninsula whaling operations in the late 1830s.
Underlining the epistemic and ontological distance between the parties, an
important link in the French claim was a blank sheet of paper signed by some Ng¯i
Tahu, upon which the French representative inscribed a written contract 'some
days later' (Waitangi Tribunal, 1991: 532).
An assessment of this process of dispossession was undertaken by the Waitangi
Tribunal in the 1990s in its statutory role of investigating M¯ori grievances arising
from alleged Crown breaches of the Treaty. One of the statements of grievance in
that part of the Ng¯i Tahu claim relating to Banks Peninsula was:
That the Crown has failed to ensure the adequate protection of the natural
resources of Banks Peninsula; that it has allowed the wholesale destruction of
the forests and other natural vegetation to the detriment of native fauna, water
quality and soil conservation, and that the resulting siltation of stream beds
and tidal waters has been to the detriment of fish and birdlife; that the Crown
has allowed excessive pollution of Wairewa (Lake Forsyth) so that this great
inland fishery and eel resource is now almost extinguished; and that it has
allowed the depletion of kaimoana in the bays, harbours and coasts through
pollution and excessive exploitation.
(Waitangi Tribunal, 1991: 527)
Here voice is given to the 'unsuppressed resistance' to the remaking of landscape
as imperialism's dream-work.
Several attributes of this statement of claim are worth comment. It is a relational
description of landscape, in which the loss of customary resources such as seafood
( kaimoana ), eels and birds is linked to the 'wholesale destruction of forests' and 'the
resulting siltation of stream beds and tidal waters'. The conditions necessary for the
maintenance of these resources would, in pre-European times, have been regulated
in specific ways through M¯ori social structures. This was critical as M¯ori subsisted
in a land without mammals. Regulation developed fluidly over time in response
to ongoing human impacts, both intentional and accidental. A quarter or more of
the forest cover had been destroyed before European arrival (Figure 5.2), and with
that about 30 bird species out of 100 vanished (Wilson, 2008). It is likely that M¯ori
used fire to clear land for horticulture, and to open up clearings to facilitate the
hunting of flightless birds.
The Tribunal statement is therefore a claim about the remembrance of M¯ori
environmental dependence. It also adopts a particular vocabulary, a notable word
being 'forests'. The New Zealand forests were often tall, tangled and dense com-
pared to the familiar woodlands of Europe. They represented both a discursive and
a practical challenge to the new settlers. A common response to the first was to
adopt a specific term, 'bush', which conveyed the sense of difference (Johnston,
1981). The second was important too, as trees were something other than living