Fifty years on, New Zealand’s tribunal upholding Māori rights faces a turning point

Māori tribe Ngāti Whātua’s occupation of Bastion Point in 1978. A decade later, the Waitangi Tribunal found the tribe had been wronged and the government eventually returned the land with compensation.
Photograph: Courtesy of the estate of Robin Morrison

In the 1980s, New Zealand’s department of Māori affairs set aside money for language groups to spend on projects as they saw fit. When Wellington teacher Huirangi Waikerepuru received his group’s share, he used it to challenge the government.

He took his complaint to a relatively new body called the Waitangi Tribunal. Formed in 1975 amid a wave of protest, it was designed to address Māori grievances by determining whether the meaning of the country’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, was being adhered to.