The Treaty of Waitangi Didn’t Change Much
For years, the New Zealand colonizers and the Maori tribes were killing one another without any sense of law or justice. The Europeans wanted to take their land for themselves, and the Maori would not let them. In 1831, 13 chiefs of northern tribes got together to send a petition to King William IV, asking for an official set of laws to govern the country. Two years later, a man named James Busby was appointed by the crown to move to New Zealand and work out the legal issues.
Instead of assuming Britain’s total control over the land, Busby gave the tribes their own Declaration of Independence. While the Maori truly did own this land, this document made the ownership of their own land in New Zealand official by European standards. After a couple of years, 52 chiefs signed the declaration. This meant that each tribe now had an official property line, and they could sell their land to European settlers, rather than having to go to war and steal it, like most colonizers had done in the past. This did not settle all the problems, of course. Over the next few years, issues were taken into consideration, and in 1840, tribal leaders came together to sign The Treaty of Waitangi.
However, most of the tribal leaders could not speak English, so they did not fully understand what the treaty actually said. This made it easy for the Crown to declare their sovereignty over the nation at a later time, and deny that the Maori had equal rights to the Europeans.