Year 10 - Lesson 5

Curriculum level:
5
Programme focus:
Case studies.
Length of lesson:
45 – 90 minutes

Focus learning areas

  • Protest.
  • The Waitangi Tribunal

Achievement objectives

Students will gain knowledge, skills, and experience to:

  • Understand how exploration and innovation create opportunities and challenges for people, places, and environments.
  • Understand that events have causes and effects.
  • Understand how the ideas and actions of people in the past have had a significant impact on people’s lives.
  • Understand how the Treaty of Waitangi is responded to differently by people in different times and different places.

Learning outcomes

This programme will provide students with opportunities to:

  • Focus on their own feelings when things valuable to them are jeopardised and when they are treated unfairly.
  • Begin exploring what the Waitangi Tribunal is.

Suggested activities

Individual protest

Ask the students to reflect on a time when they have had something precious to them stolen or vandalised, or a time when someone has broken a promise.

  • How did they feel?
  • How did they express their feelings?

In many cases the students, responses will fall under the category of protest. It is important for students to realise that protest does not have to be marching down the main street carrying large banners and chanting.

Explain to the students that on many occasions Māori have had similar feelings to what they have just discussed.

Discuss examples of when Māori groups, or individuals, have protested in an attempt to have their concerns heard.

Information on Māori and protest can be found:

http://www.treaty2u.govt.nz/the-treaty-today/raising-their-voices/

http://www.treaty2u.govt.nz/the- treaty- today/te- reo- Māori/

Harris, Aroha

Hīkoi: Forty Years of Māori Protest

Huia Publishers, Wellington, 2004

The Waitangi Tribunal

This information is intended to be an introduction only. During the next lesson students will be asked to carry out further research.

Ask the students the following:

  • Who or where do they go to when they feel they have been treated unfairly?
  • Who or where can Māori groups go when feel they have been treated unfairly? (The Waitangi Tribunal.)

In the early 1970s, the government recognised that something was needed to restore good relationships between the Crown and Māori. In 1975, it established the Waitangi Tribunal a permanent commission of inquiry to start working through Māori concerns.

Claims

Māori are now able to lodge a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal for consideration, and recommendations for redress/compensation.

Claims are complaints that the Crown has breached the Treaty of Waitangi by particular actions, inactions, laws, or policies that have caused Māori prejudice (harmful effects) as a result.

  • Claims need to be comprehensive – that is, cover all the matters at issue between the claimants and the Crown.
  • Claims need to be proven – that is, supported by evidence of a standard that the Tribunal will find convincing.

In the next lesson students will learn more about the process of making a claim to the Waitangi Tribunal and they will work in groups to decide how they could convey the process.

Supporting information

Text of the Treaty
http://www.treaty2u.govt.nz/the-treaty-up-close/

Waitangi Tribunal
http://www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz/claims/

King, Michael

The Penguin History of New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Auckland, 2003

Orange, Claudia

An Illustrated History of The Treaty of Waitangi, Revised edition

Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2004