Moving away from a colonial binary: Taking “race” out of thinking about te Tiriti o Waitangi
PUBLIC CONVERSATION WITH DAVID WILLIAMS
Wednesday 1 April 2026, 6pm – 7.30pm
Ellen Melville Centre
2 Freyberg Place, Auckland CBD
Professor Emeritus David V. Williams was appointed to the Waitangi Tribunal in 2023. Spoor Books invites you to a public conversation with David Williams, hosted by Balamohan Shingade.
“Romila Thapar in Voices of Dissent (2021) – a book I bought from Spoor Books – wrote, “One of the purposes of claiming a history is to claim legitimacy. Today, however, we require that the history not be a casual narrative, but be such that it draws on reliable evidence for supporting the claim.”
In this conversation, I invite us to inquire into claims made by the Court of Appeal judges in the SOE Lands case in 1987.
• The Treaty signified a partnership between races.
• The principles of the Treaty of Waitangi were the foundation for the future relationship between the Crown and the Maori race.
• The principles of the Treaty require the Pakeha and Maori Treaty partners to act towards each other reasonably with the utmost good faith.
The leader of the ACT party, David Seymour, cites these statements to justify his rejection of te Tiriti as a partnership. However, Dame Anne Salmond is likewise repelled by the judges’ reliance on the social construct of “race.”
I will suggest that the colonial binary in the judges’ statements is not a narrative that will help legitimate constitutional transformation based on te Tiriti o Waitangi. Salmond’s “Where Will the Bellbird Sing? Te Tiriti o Waitangi and ‘Race’” (2022) and Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native (2020) suggest to me that it is political relationships between hapū and the Crown, and community connections between hapū and tangata tiriti, that may provide better narratives for legitimacy than “a partnership between races.” Mamdani was a colleague of mine at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1970s, and I have long enjoyed having my thinking challenged by his copious writings.”
— David Williams
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Emeritus David V Williams comes from a sheep farming background in Hawkes Bay and Whanganui. He attended Whanganui Collegiate School. He has tertiary qualifications in history, law and theology from Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Oxford (where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College). His PhD is from the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. His university teaching and research career at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland focused especially on “law and society” and on “legal history.”
As an officeholder in the Citizens’ Association for Racial Equality [CARE] he was a political activist engaging with many issues affecting Māori and Pacific peoples during the 1970s and 1980s. From 1991 to 2001 he was an independent researcher specialising in historical research relevant to Treaty of Waitangi claims. He has worked with many hapū and iwi as an historian, and as a claims negotiator. He is also an ordained priest in the Anglican Church, chairperson of the St Isaac’s Retreat House Trust in the Hokianga, and was formerly Legal Adviser to Te Pīhopatanga o Aotearoa. Professor Williams was appointed to the Waitangi Tribunal in 2023.