Chris McKenzie:

‘We had two fundamental guidelines or principles for our negotiations. They were, anything we did needed to honour our tūpuna and the second overarching principle was anything we did must build a foundation for our tamariki mokopuna. Whenever we felt attacked or whenever the decision making got hard or whenever we didn’t know what to do, we would apply those two overarching principles and actually the decision making became easier.

I grew thick skin, let me tell you. I’m not use to people being rude to me or booting me off their marae or kicking me out of a tribe or writing a letter ‘kua takahi koe ki runga i te mana o tēnei iwi’. Through that process I’ve heard all of that, sworn at! spat at! I remember one time, it was deep in negotiations and we were a long way in and I hadn’t had a break for ages. I said to my team “I gotta get away for a couple of days.”

And there was nowhere I could get away to so I said to my wife “Let’s go to Aussie.” I said to my relation Nigel “we’re on the road, information rounds, you are the sensible one, so you keep the team on track. You make sure there is no problems because you know we’ve got a couple of claimants who turn up and try to stir it up and will try to be...maybe even be physically violent.”

And he said “you go have a break, it’s gonna be fine.”

I said “I know if your there, it’s gonna be fine, because you are the calm one, but some of the others in the wider team, they’re not gonna take it from this guy and since I’m not there to calm them down they might be liable to drag him out and punch him”. So Nige said “Don’t worry. Don’t worry”

So I’m over in Aussie...well I’m not even in Aussie cos my phone goes off as we are landing in Australia and I pick the phone up and its another team member saying “We’re at this meeting, this guy played up.”

And I said “oh, good, but Nigel’s there, how’s he going?”

“Nigel’s the one trying to drag him outside.”

I was thinking “you are the calm one, what did he say today that annoyed you?”.

Of course he said something highly and deeply offensive, but it was not unusual, that this role was not a lead negotiators role, this role was a hostage negotiators role sometimes.’

Nigel Te Hiko:

‘I said to Chris “ok, I’ll come in for a week, while you’re overseas in Hawaii”. So I was there for a couple of weeks, while Chris was away and I was sort of just ticking over the office making sure that things were still happening. When he got back he asked me if I would stay on and do this thing called CNI.

At that stage, none of us had an idea what this CNI thing was all about. In fact during that discussion I think we might have said “We don’t know what it is but we think we might get a million dollars out of it. If you have a look at that, just go along and have a listen see what its all about and come back and tell us what it is”.

On the 19 January 2008, members of the CNI came into the Raukawa Trust Board to convince the board that we needed to be members of the CNI. I remember that meeting very well because at that meeting was James Carlson from Ngāti Whare and the late Dixon Chapman from Ngāti Tūwharetoa. So they came in and tono for Raukawa to go into the CNI.

A week later, a group of us, kaumātua, trustees, me and one of the trustees, Thomas Smith, we went down to the CNI meeting. It was after that meeting that I actually realised that I had been seconded into the CNI to be the Raukawa representative into the CNI. Thomas and I were the original members to sit on the CNI in a watching capacity. So we were there just basically to gather information and take it back to the board and then the board would make some decisions.

It took me about three meetings to go back to the board and say “this is going to be more than what we originally thought and you need to consider taking this seriously.

As it was, at that time, CNI were looking at having 75% of the Kaingaroa forest basically distributed to...there was six iwi at that time. If Raukawa was to come on board, then the Crown would add a further 15%. So up to 90% of the Kaingaroa forests would go into the CNI Settlement.

CNI means the Central North Island Iwi Collective. What had been happening previously in that particular space was this thing called V.I.P. or Volcanic Iwi Plateau (sic). It was a ... V.I.P was an attempt to have the forestry settled in the central North Island.

What would happen was that an iwi would go to the Crown and say “we’ve got interests in this particular forests. You need to give us a settlement. They would negotiate with the Crown. They would get so far and then another iwi would come in and say “No. You can’t go any further because you need to talk to us as well. And then that settlement would fall apart.

This was happening, virtually, 20 years, they had been working on V.I.P. At that particular time, some of the iwi, lets put it bluntly, they got pissed off with how things were playing out. In fact they were so sick of the Crown they basically said to the Crown “Crown, you go have a seat in the corner, and we’ll come and talk to you shortly.”

They then said to all of their lawyers, and I mean ALL of their lawyers, “lawyers, get out of the room!” They kicked every lawyer out and it became a “kānohi ki te kānohi”, a “rangatira ki te rangatira” discussion. That’s the premise for the CNI Iwi Collective. That everything that we did, we were going to that together. We were going to make a consensus decision.

So lawyers were out of the room. Crown was sitting to the side, not involved in the discussion. We were battling it out between ourselves. We were negotiating, we were discussing things as rangatira should do to another rangatira.

It was an amazing time for me. To actually see something like this and be a part of something like this, I knew it was going to be special. And so my first report back to the board was “We need to change our approach in what we are thinking about the CNI because this is going to be something special and this was going to be something bigger than what we had even thought.”

The biggest challenge that we faced...the first challenge, apart from getting everybody together, the biggest challenge that we faced for the CNI came in January…no April…. April 17th, we got together at a motel in Rotorua. The Distinction Hotel. We sat in a room and we said right lets have a chat about the allocations. The Crown told us that was going to cause us a real problem and we will never be able to get that sorted. We told the Crown to “piss off, stay out of the discussions, we’ll deal with it.”

That particular...it was a wānanga held over two days, and it was amazing. By the end of the second day, we had come to an agreement. We thought “right, we can deal with this. Let’s deal with it in a commercial way.” So we allocated the forestry rentals to each of the iwi and we came up with a formula that was agreed to by everyone.

One of the key points in order to get this particular agreement over the line though, was in terms of Ngāti Whare and Ngāti Manawa. These are iwi, smaller iwi that have a huge interest in the Kāingaroa. Everybody acknowledges that. Everybody acknowledged that.

So their concern was “we don’t have a lot of people so we are not going to get a lot of the allocations back right now.” Each of the big iwi said “Yeah, you’re right. So what we will do is that we will all shave off a percentage from each of our settlement. So rather than the 15% that we, Raukawa took into the CNI, we took a 14% interest. So we were allocated just over 14% of the rentals. Tūhoe they also took a percentage drop, Te Arawa and Tūwharetoa. We all took a percentage drop and we shared that amongst the smaller iwi, in order to get this over the line.

It was a time that we were able to come together and that we shared in some really key principles, principles that we understood and that really related to us. Things like whanaungatanga was expressed during those period. Kotahitanga was expressed during those periods. Rangatiratanga was expressed during those periods.

One of the things that we recognised back in those early days, was that the whenua was going to be a different story. It was always going to be very, very hard to do. We should of have... we should have attempted...if I were to say that I was disappointed in one aspect of the CNI Settlement it would be that we didn’t go that extra step to allocate the whenua then while we all felt this kotahitanga, this whanaungatanga.

Once the settlement dropped, Oh some of these principles sort of went by the wayside piece by piece by piece. We started to loose that connection with each other. Suddenly we were at each other, suddenly there were different interpretations.

While we were there in those very early days, we were all very clear that this was about rangatira ki te rangatira, this was about whanaungatanga.’

Miriata Te Hiko:

‘The actual break through came when I was talking to Chris and I said ”Chris you need to go over to Tūwharetoa, they want to talk to us”.

Prior to that I was having meetings at Mokai with Tūwharetoa. They wanted us to join and I said “nah I can’t give that permission, it was not for me. I can’t say yes that Raukawa will join yous” And they go “oh why?” and I said “no I can’t do that...

But I still went to the meeting. So one day I said to Chris “oh Chris you need to go over to Tūwharetoa they really want to talk to you”. And he goes “oh no you go, cos I need to go take my son”. His son was graduating or something was happening.

So I said “oh yeah, ok” and my fellow trustees George and Thomas, before we even went there, geez we had a powwow at the board, you know, “What are we going over there for? “Oh I don’t know, they want to talk to us, lets go and see what they want”. “Are you sure that’s the right thing to do?” “oh, if you don’t come I’m going by myself” They said “we can’t let you go by yourself, that’s rude to let the woman go”. So they came.

We spoke with them about joining the CNI. We spoke with them and they wanted us to join them at the CNI. And I said “Oh boy, that’s a big ask, I need to go back and tell Chris how our meeting went and we need to organise a meeting for you to come over and talk to Chris, the other board members and our kaumātua because we can’t move on anything of this. We are only here to listen to what your saying and to give a bit of our whakaaro across to you”.

They said that was “kei te pai” and they gave us a beautiful kai..one of ours, Thomas got up and thanked them for the kai and the kōrero. It was beautiful kōrero, so we bought it back to Chris.

Chris organised a hui. That hui Tūwharetoa and Raukawa had was quite a successful hui with the kaumātua and the rest of the board and other whānau members. Yes they were quite happy. So we started branching off from there and then we started going to hui in Taupō with Tūwharetoa to try and get into the CNI. Then other iwi were there, at those hui, so we were hui’ing (sic) with the other iwi, there were 7 other iwi other than ourselves. Things started to pull together then and things started looking good.’

Nigel Te Hiko, co-negotiator:

‘I remember the day on the 23 June, myself, Cheryl Pakuru and Kim Blomfield flew to Wellington to organise the final logistics on how our people were going to be accommodated at parliament. So we walked through parliament buildings and we went through to the Banquet Hall of the Beehive.

It was quite clear that if every iwi decided that they bought everybody then yeah, there was definitely no way that we were going to fit everybody in. But we weren’t changing our plans. We were coming down with three coach loads and so the Crown had to come up with some way in which to accommodate for the celebration of that day.

They struggled to such an extent I thought “O buggar it, I’m gonna leave. I’m going back home. We’ve got to organise everybody, the coaches, everything. So I’m gonna shoot off back to Tokoroa. We had Cheryl and Kim, they remained at parliament, talking with security and all the parliamentary staff on organising all the logistics for the day.

In fact I have to be honest it was Cheryl and Kim and a young fulla from Ngāti Whakaue, I think his name was Shae, Shae Mitchell who virtually took charge of the organisation and logistics for that day. They did a fantastic job.’

Vanessa Eparaima:

‘It was a huge, huge experience and I have to thank Chris for that phone call, cos I might of still puddled along for a while if he hadn’t done that. You know, the way things happened, sometimes we don’t appreciate at the time. But sitting back and talking to you now about it, if that hadn’t happened, I could’ve still puddled along for another while, until people got sick of me and decided to get someone in that really was going to do the job.’

Chris McKenzie:

‘I put a plan in place, I got a small amount of money, I literally camped out at the Office of Treaty Settlement on their couch for days, until I got enough leverage to include us in CNI, which then got us some funding, which then enabled us to get a team, which then meant we needed to get a negotiator.

You want to know what my most memorable moment at the signing was because...the CNI was the culmination of years of some of the most arduous negotiations that I have been involved in.

To put that in context, nobody wanted us in CNI right from the very beginning, right through to the end most people in CNI didn’t believe that we belonged there, the Crown didn’t want us in CNI.

We just kept going to Wellington. Staying in backpackers. Turning up at OTS saying “We’re going to oppose you. You’re talking about the Central North Island forests and you are forgetting our interests. They didn’t believe that we had interests. We did it so many times and caused the Crown such a pain that finally the Crown said to the other CNI Iwi “We think you need to include Raukawa.” So they sent a group out to see us and they said “O, you’re gonna get some opposition, people don’t want you in. We’ve got a hard enough time keeping CNI together without you.”

But, I mean seven tribes involved and two of them, sort of, were ok with us joining.

So we forced our way in to be honest. Not only did we force our way in, we got a good proportion of the redress settlement. The money in particular. We get rentals for 25 years (sic) on CNI. This upset some people, but there are a couple of really memorable moments. Some funny, some sad, some not so good.

I was an original CNI member for Raukawa and was on there almost all the way to the end and at my first meeting was challenged by tribes “What’s your interest?” I had no idea what our interest was. I had an inkling of our interest. I knew that the lands in one of the satelite forest was in our area and that’s all I knew.

We had no money to do any of this work. We had to, within our River and Comprehensive negotiations, we had to stretch our research team even thinner to even get any information in CNI.’

Ruthana Begbie:

‘Well, I guess one of the major things as I see it is that it definitely put Raukawa on the map. It enabled Raukawa to see the inside of parliament, where many of our people had never been before. It enabled our people to be able to put their name to a piece of paper that will be of some significance many years down the track.

I think that with the CNI it certainly has helped to galvanise Raukawa as a whole. Its created a forum where we are now working with other iwi in a very political and strategic manner. Previously, iwi dynamics at a national level was dealt with on the marae and by our kaumātuas (sic). I think that the CNI certainly the signing of it was where we came through in a more modern way, where the young leaders of the tribe are working and negotiating along side other tribal leaders as well.

So that’s a real political forum that we are in now which has never happened before for us. So I think that is a significant move for iwi as a whole to ...it’s not moving up, but its actually moving a sideways move from the marae forum to a more modern approach to decision making, inter-relationships between iwi and that happened at the signing of the CNI.’

Cheryl Pakuru:

‘When we did the CNI signing, Kim Blomfield and I actually went down to parliament with the other iwi representatives to organise how the signing was going to go, it was something that parliament had never done before. They had never had that many people in their building at any one time ever, in its existence.

It was a logistical nightmare, so Kim and I and Shae worked out, I can’t remember which iwi Shae was from and Lois Otimi from Tūwharetoa we worked out quite quickly that we needed all of the other men, other than Shae out of the room because it was going to take too long to sort out.

We got rid of them and just sat down with the people from the Crown who knew the buildings, We worked out, because we already knew how many iwi...which iwi were coming and how many were coming with them.

So we just worked out in terms of room size. OK, these ones can meet there if they need to. We’ll all go up to the signing. We’ll have these people and so...we had worked it out. But there were just some things that were needed to make sure it happened while we were there because of security and Nigel had a moment during the signing.

He was like “Right, when we get up there, we gonna haka.”

So he comes down to the area where Raukawa is meeting. He takes everybody out of there and upstairs, which is all of a sudden, a breach of what we had already agreed to because of security. The haka was beautiful. It was amazing , but when they come down to talk to somebody about what had just happened...its not Nigel.

I’m the one standing there going “Yes, well all I can do is apologise. You know, yes I understand we weren’t supposed to do that.”

But anyway it worked for us and it was amazing. I’m glad that he did do it, I just kind of wish that it was his head on the chopping block when it came down to it.

I think the CNI was huge. Huge, not just for Raukawa but for the Iwi Collective. It was the beginning of something that could have been...Oh had a huge impact on Aotearoa, I believe, because as a Collective there was so much drive forward. Having the iwi leaders together doing that together, meant so much more. So I think, for me it was, just a little unfortunate that it hasn’t played out to the original whakaaro behind having the Collective in place.’

Chris McKenzie:

‘Now, when it came time, finally, to sign the CNI, I mean, I’m not a...as the lead negotiator, I’m not a good lead negotiator, I never like sitting up at the front, I never sat up the front on any of our signing days, I just felt relieved that it was over. I wanted to sit at the back and see the tribe enjoy their day.

It was the same at CNI. We...I have three memorable things that happened on signing day. The first thing was that we made a fake CNI cheque. A big one...or somebody made it...we didn’t....Oh somebody from Tūwharetoa made it and very early in the day, we stole it. We were handing it around our bus.

I know it sounds stupid but it was like a big huge cheque and it had CNI tribes and it had the total value of the package. Now it wasn’t about the money, it was about the fact that here was a day where our settlement was finally acknowledged...’

Nigel Te Hiko:

‘The CNI signing day, the signing day was scheduled to begin on the 25 June 2008.

Leading up to the signing the Crown had basically told us that they couldn’t accommodate all eight iwi at parliament. If we bought everybody that we wanted to bring then they wouldn’t be able accommodate it.

So they told the CNI Iwi that we were basically going to be limited to how many people we were going to take. They actually said fifty people.

Our view however was that the Crown had screwed us for 150 years-160 years and this was such an important occasion for our people, that there was no way we were going to pick and choose which of our people was going to go and celebrate the CNI Deed. We left that decision up to our people.

As a result we ended up taking down with us 150 people, three coach loads.

Other iwi had other views. They took their people down as best they could. But we decided that if our people were going to travel then we would make them as comfortable as possible as well.

So there were three large coaches.

We also had our kaumātua go ahead of the main body. So they went ahead on our transit vans. So there were two transit vans that went down ahead of the main group.

Our kaumātua, this was something special for them, so we put them up in a nice hotel in Wellington. The rest of us, we stayed at marae at Ōtaki.’

Phyllis Tahere:

‘One personal event that I got to see and take part of was the CNI, the CNI Settlement. That was really special in the way that when it was the day of the signing and we were down in parliament, you had the dynamics of 8 iwi around parliament.

Once our leaders had actually signed the deed there was opportunity for whānau, uri to participate and sign the deed as well. In the different areas where they had the iwi seated, you had extra papers for all the uri to sign.

My boy at the time Te Rangihiroa he was 9, he was so proud to be Raukawa, he was so proud to be Tūwharetoa, he was so proud to be Tūhoe, that he went and signed, not only the Raukawa paper, but we went and tracked down where Tūhoe were and he signed that paper. We went and tracked down where Tūwharetoa was and he went and signed that paper. That stuck out to me because I had asked my 9-year-old, “Why you want to go do that for?” He goes “Cos one day, one day, my children will see my name.”

That was something for me that was a personal highlight I suppose. With that overall significant event for the iwi of Raukawa. Because from that signing for Raukawa, that led us on to open up negotiations to carry on to settle the rest of grievances towards comprehensive. So that I will never forget.’