The hikoi set off April 22 from Cape Reinga, a rural community at New Zealand’s northernmost tip. As it travels south to Wellington, marches, rallies, and meetings are being held in cities and towns along the way. A second hikoi, departing May 3, is traveling down the North Island’s east coast. A march on parliament will be held May 5 when the two hikois arrive in Wellington.

“The government is aiming to take away rights that have been ours for thousands of years,” Hone Harawira, one of the protest’s central organizers, told Militant reporters April 29. “They’re taking control of assets, which they can sell, exploit, trade in, without consultation with anyone.”

The May 5 protest in Wellington, the capital city, will coincide with the introduction in parliament of the Labour Party government’s Foreshore and Seabed Bill. The proposed legislation will confiscate the foreshore and seabed that are part of Maori coastal lands. But coastline areas in the hands of corporations and other “private landowners”—mainly non-Maori—will be untouched. At the same time, the legislation would overturn the right of Maori to have claims to ownership of foreshore and seabed addressed in court.

The Maori people, an oppressed nationality, are the indigenous people of New Zealand, numbering around 15 percent of the total population of 4 million.

The hikoi set off April 22 from Cape Reinga, an isolated rural area, with a march of 250. In between marches into and out of major cities and towns, teams of runners are traveling in relay to ensure the entire distance—some 700 miles—will be covered on foot.

Several thousand joined the protest as it arrived in Auckland April 27, in a march over the city’s harbor bridge. A similar number marched the next day through Manukau city in south Auckland.

After smaller turnouts in Huntly and Ngaruawahia the morning of April 29, some 5,000 took part in a midday march and rally in the center of Hamilton city. The April 30 march and rally in Rotorua drew 4,000.

In Hamilton, Maori students at Waikato University organized to feed the thousands of marchers, many of whom had traveled to the city from nearby towns. They arranged donations of food and spent the previous day collecting fruit off the ground from orchards. One of the students, Hariata Wehi, told the Militant that if the government legislation was passed then “Maori will be nothing. We will have nothing left.” Already, she said, “we have to pay to learn our own language.”

As the overwhelmingly Maori crowd marched along Hamilton’s main street, chants, songs, and the sound of numerous conch shells rang out amidst a sea of flags and banners. “Not one more bloody stone!” said one banner opposing the proposed land confiscation. “Government of thieves, established since 1840,” said another, referring to the year that marks London’s formal colonization of New Zealand. “Maori seabed, For shore!” read a larger banner at the front of the march, a slogan that was also a popular chant.

“We’re marching for justice,” Hone Harawira told the crowd at the Hamilton rally. Many high school students took part in the march. Some came with the permission of teachers, while others said they had decided to miss classes for the day so they could participate.

Asked why she was marching, Jynelle Northover, a 14-year-old high school student, said “we don’t want new laws imposed over our foreshore and seabed. We have the right to have guardianship over them.” Fayenza, who was marching with another group in their school uniforms, said they were “marching to protect our Maori land.”

Vanessa, who described her job as “home duties,” said she was marching because “enough is enough!” Ngawai King, a teacher, told the Militant she had traveled to Hamilton to march because, “If you don’t stand up you get stood on.”

A young printing factory worker said he had just found out that morning the march would be in town. He and a co-worker had persuaded their boss to let them off for a half-day to attend.

Buoyed by the numbers who had turned out, many marchers in Hamilton discussed among themselves if they could organize to go to Wellington for the march on parliament. “I’ve just found out we’re going!” said a retired train driver.

A carved marker pole—or pouwhenua—is being carried at the head of the hikoi. It is the first time this pouwhenua has been used since it was carried to lead the historic 1975 Maori land march, which also traversed the route from Cape Reinga to Wellington. That march heralded an upsurge in mass struggles by Maori for the return of land, for recognition of the Maori language, and other national rights.

The gains won through those struggles are now widely viewed by Maori as under threat, both by the Labour government’s legislation and other recent pronouncements, and by the policy course signaled by the leader of the opposition National Party, Donald Brash, who has called for opposing affirmative action and any separate national rights for Maori.

The Foreshore and Seabed Bill is the government’s response to a Court of Appeal decision in June 2003 that would have allowed Maori to claim ownership of areas of the foreshore and seabed. Maori tribes in the South Island’s Nelson-Marlborough region had gone to court saying that they had been denied licenses in the growing marine farming industry because of racist discrimination by the region’s local government. The Court of Appeal decision was a result of their efforts to redress this discrimination.

To justify robbing yet more land, government and opposition politicians alike demagogically asserted that should Maori win any claims to have rights over areas of foreshore and seabed, they would deny “ordinary New Zealanders” access to the beaches. Growing tracts of the coastline are in fact becoming private property through investment in private marinas, golf courses, luxury beachfront dwellings, tourist ventures, aquaculture, and the like. Most Maori, like other working people, have not benefited from this “development.”

Under its proposed new legislation, the government will limit Maori court claims for customary rights solely to traditional practices such as the protection of burial sites.

Labour arranged the support of the rightist New Zealand First party to garner enough votes to pass the legislation in parliament, after two Maori Labour members of parliament indicated they would not support it. One of the two, Tariana Turia, a member of the Cabinet, announced April 30 she was resigning from the Labour Party and parliament in protest and would stand for re-election in a by-election.

Janet Roth contributed to this article.  
 
 
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