Te Tiriti o Waitangi is signed

By the late 1830s Aotearoa was independent and governed by its hapū, but it was also full of British traders, whalers and settlers whom no British court could reach. Speculators claimed to have bought huge areas of both islands, and the New Zealand Company was already sending shiploads of settlers to Cook Strait. In 1835 northern rangatira had asserted their own sovereignty in He Whakaputanga, the Declaration of Independence, eventually signed by 52 of them. London reluctantly decided to act in 1839. It sent the naval captain William Hobson with instructions to win sovereignty over some or all of the country with Māori consent. Hobson arrived on 29 January 1840. Over the following days he, his secretary James Freeman and the British Resident James Busby put together a draft. Henry Williams, a missionary, and his son Edward then translated it into te reo Māori in a single night.

On 5 February around 500 people gathered at Waitangi. Rangatira argued all day about what the document would mean for their authority, their land and their trade. Rewa of Ngāpuhi told Hobson that the chiefs were already the governors of their own country and needed no other. The meeting ended without agreement. That night rangatira talked it through at Te Tii, beside the Waitangi River, and on 6 February more than 40 of them signed, some drawing their moko as a signature. Copies then travelled the country for seven months, to some 50 further meetings, and in the end more than 500 rangatira signed, including at least 13 women. All but 39 signed the te reo Māori text. Some of the most powerful leaders refused, among them the Waikato rangatira Te Wherowhero and the leaders of Te Arawa and Ngāti Tūwharetoa. In Taranaki and Wairarapa, among other places, no signing meeting seems to have been held at all.

The texts were not translations of each other in any strict sense. In the first article of the English version, chiefs cede 'all the rights and powers of sovereignty'. In the te reo Māori text they give the Queen 'kāwanatanga', governance, while the second article confirms their 'tino rangatiratanga', the full exercise of chiefly authority, over their lands, villages and everything they treasured. Rangatira were told at the meetings that their own authority would stand, and many understood the agreement as one to share power. Both texts gave the Crown a special say over Māori land sales, though only the English made it exclusive, and both promised Māori the rights of British subjects. Hobson did not wait for the last signatures to come in. On 21 May 1840 he claimed all of New Zealand for Britain, the North Island on the strength of the treaty, and the South and Stewart islands on the grounds that Britain had discovered them.

For more than a century the English reading prevailed. Colonial officials worked from the English text, and in the 1860s the government sent troops into Waikato, confiscated land in several regions, and set up a Native Land Court that turned tribal land into individual titles that were easier to sell. By the 1870s most settlers barely knew the treaty existed. The turn came in 1975. That year Whina Cooper led a land march the length of the North Island to Wellington, and the Treaty of Waitangi Act became law, which created the Waitangi Tribunal to hear claims that the Crown had breached the treaty's principles. In 1985 the tribunal was allowed to hear claims going back to 1840, and its reports have since underpinned many of the Crown's settlements with iwi. Courts and dozens of statutes now invoke the treaty's principles rather than either text, which is itself an acknowledgement that the two never said the same thing.