Dame Claudia Orange: a lifetime of Treaty scholarship

Ask Dame Claudia Orange what has underpinned her decades-long scholarship on the Treaty of Waitangi  and she recites her Catholic faith’s call to action: “See. Judge. Act”.

“I try to understand the issues. I assess what I can do and then I do something about it.

“I am committed to social justice,” she adds. “I’m aware that communities are not always equally balanced. Therefore it is absolutely crucial that in some way we are our neighbour’s carer.”

For 40 years, Dame Claudia has researched and written on Te Tiriti o Waitangi. She has delved deeply into the circumstances surrounding the signing in 1840, with ground-breaking research uncovering nine sheets of the Treaty and naming Māori signatories: who and where they were at the time.

She has followed the Treaty as it has been interpreted, reinterpreted and evolved through successive governments, the Waitangi Tribunal, Treaty settlements, into the school curriculum and the creation in 2019 of Te Arawhiti, the office for Māori Crown Relations.

“Claudia Orange is an outstanding New Zealand historian,” says Associate Professor Aroha Harris, from the University’s Department of History. It was to this same department that a 30-year-old Claudia came in 1969, when she began her academic career as a ‘late starter’ and mother of three young children.

She enrolled in papers on colonial topics and wanted to study European colonial dominance in South East Asia. But when it came to her masters, adviser and leading New Zealand historian Keith Sinclair suggested she look at the Labour Government from 1935-49, a time when Claudia’s father, Monty Bell, had worked for the Gisborne Department of Māori Affairs.

Then, while on a research trip to Wellington, Claudia read a 1925 Labour Party paper proposing a Commission of Inquiry into Māori grievances.

It was an “eye-opener” and became the catalyst for her to embark on a PhD, “testing whether the Treaty of Waitangi was really the wonderful founding document many believed”.

She began her research combining it with three Māori language papers and support from Māori academics such as Ranginui Walker, Pat Hohepa and Sir Hugh Kāwharu. Soon she was listening to Māori voices that had signed petitions in the 19th century and uncovering a narrative of injustice, land confiscation and marginalisation.

It took eight years to finish the PhD.

“Keith Sinclair said it was the longest he’d supervised,” she laughs. It was another three years before Allen & Unwin published The Treaty of Waitangi in 1987.

In the years since, Claudia has been the general editor of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and a director of research at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She is a DNZM OBE and became a Distinguished Alumna of her alma mater in 1997.

But she has kept her focus on the Treaty through several editions of her book. The latest, an illustrated history, brings the Treaty narrative up to date and tells a more hopeful story than the one she first found.

“The vision of two peoples, each in their own way together forming one nation, has been moved forward,” she writes. “But it still has a way to go: it still asks for solutions in the Māori-Crown relationship that are acceptable to all involved, Māori and other New Zealanders.”

The narrative of the Treaty will continue to unfold and Dame Claudia will be there “asking, judging and acting”.

“I am not writing as Māori would about the same subject,” she says. “And that has kept me humble. You can never know it all.”