{"story":["Under the Maori Affairs Act 1953, Māori owners whose shares in land were worth less than £25 could be forced to sell them to the Maori Trustee, a process known as conversion. A 1967 amendment, passed despite opposition from prominent Māori, extended compulsory purchase to interests worth less than $50. Conversion was abolished by the Maori Affairs Amendment Act 1974, led by the Minister of Māori Affairs, Matiu Rata. In the 1970s urban groups such as Ngā Tamatoa, formed in 1970, led protest about the loss of land and culture. In early 1975 the Te Rarawa leader Whina Cooper convened a hui at Māngere Marae which launched Te Rōpū Matakite o Aotearoa ('Those with Foresight'). It grew out of concern over the historic sale of Māori land and the desire to keep control of land still in Māori hands. Cooper had been elected foundation president of the Māori Women's Welfare League in 1951, and in 1974 she had told the Auckland Star that her public life was over. Now she proposed a march from Te Hāpua in the far north to Parliament in Wellington, to dramatise Māori determination to retain their land and culture.","Fifty marchers left Te Hāpua on 14 September 1975, Māori Language Day, led by the 79-year-old Cooper. She took the first steps holding the hand of her mokopuna (grandchild) Irene. The marchers' demand was that 'not one more acre of Maori land' should be alienated. As the hīkoi approached towns and cities, local people joined to offer moral and practical support. The marchers stopped overnight at different marae, where Cooper led discussions about the purpose of the march, and signatures were gathered for a petition to Parliament. The route ran through Kaitaia, Auckland, Ngāruawāhia, Te Kūiti, Taumarunui, Whanganui and Palmerston North, among other places, and the march took 29 days. NZHistory gives the distance as 1,000 kilometres; Wikipedia gives about 1,100 kilometres. Along the way the march grew from about 50 people to about 5,000.","On 13 October around 5,000 marchers reached Parliament grounds. According to Cooper's entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, she presented a memorial of rights from 200 Māori elders and a petition signed by 60,000 people to the Prime Minister, Bill Rowling; Te Ara's entry on Māori protest movements describes a single memorial of rights signed by 60,000 people. The memorial asked for the repeal of all statutes through which Māori land could be alienated, with remaining tribal land to be invested in Māori in perpetuity. Rowling promised that steps would be taken to address these concerns, but some protesters were not happy with his response. Against Cooper's wishes, about 60 of them stayed at Parliament for the next two months as a tent embassy. Three days before the marchers arrived, on 10 October, the Treaty of Waitangi Act had set up the Waitangi Tribunal, but the tribunal could not consider historical claims. The submissions Te Rōpū Matakite made to parliamentary select committees were undercut when the group split into competing factions.","Te Ara notes that the march led to alliances between many Māori organisations, including the Kīngitanga, the New Zealand Māori Council, Ngā Tamatoa and the Māori Women's Welfare League. NZHistory says the hīkoi raised public and official awareness of Māori concerns and marked a new era of protest and reform. Occupations of land taken from Māori followed, the best known at Bastion Point in 1977–78 and at Raglan in 1978. In Michael King's reading, in his biography of Cooper for the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, the march was an eloquent tribute to Cooper's energy and mana and a potent symbol of the Māori cultural renaissance that gathered momentum in the years that followed. For the many New Zealanders who saw it on the roads or on television, King wrote, its most inspiring feature was the elderly woman at its head. Cooper was made a dame in 1981 and died at Hokianga in 1994, aged 98. More than a million people watched the live television broadcast of her tangihanga."],"sources":[{"title":"Whina Cooper leads land march to Parliament","url":"https://nzhistory.govt.nz/whina-cooper-leads-land-march-parliament","publisher":"NZHistory, Manatū Taonga"},{"title":"Treaty events since 1950","url":"https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/treaty-events-1950","publisher":"NZHistory, Manatū Taonga"},{"title":"Whina Cooper","url":"https://nzhistory.govt.nz/people/whina-cooper","publisher":"NZHistory, Manatū Taonga"},{"title":"Cooper, Whina – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography","url":"https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5c32/cooper-whina","publisher":"Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand"},{"title":"Ngā rōpū tautohetohe – Māori protest movements – Land protests","url":"https://teara.govt.nz/en/nga-ropu-tautohetohe-maori-protest-movements/page-3","publisher":"Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand"},{"title":"Te tango whenua – Māori land alienation – 20th-century developments","url":"https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-tango-whenua-maori-land-alienation/page-9","publisher":"Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand"},{"title":"Māori – Urbanisation and renaissance","url":"https://teara.govt.nz/en/maori/page-5","publisher":"Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand"},{"title":"Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975","url":"https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1975/0114/latest/whole.html","publisher":"New Zealand Legislation"},{"title":"Māori land march","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_M%C4%81ori_land_march","publisher":"Wikipedia"}]}