As the new year is a time of reflection and taking stock, please join us as we improve our understanding of this founding document of Aotearoa and consider how we can all honour the principles of Te Tiriti.
Roimata Smail, author of Understanding Te Tiriti will be in conversation with Avril Bell, author of Becoming Tangata Tiriti.
Roimata Smail (Ngāti Maniapoto, Tainui, England, Scotland, Ireland) is a lawyer specialising for two decades in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. She represented lead claimants in the Waitangi Tribunal inquiry that led to the watershed Hauora Report and the establishment of Te Aka Whai Ora, the Māori Health Authority.
From a family of teachers, Roimata has a passion for education, running workshops on Te Tiriti (treatytraining.com) and creating an online resource for schools on Te Tiriti, New Zealand History, te Reo Māori and financial literacy (waiako.com). She was inspired to write the pocketbook for readers like her own generation who didn’t get to learn our history in school, she set about writing from a perspective learned from her twenty-year career in addressing what has happened since 1840 and how the Treaty promises have been broken.
Avril Bell is a Pākehā New Zealander from Kaitaia in the Far North. She is an Honorary Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Auckland. Throughout her career, she has researched what it means to be Pākehā and Māori-Pākehā relationships in the context of the legacy of our colonial history. She is the author of Becoming Tangata Tiriti (2024, Auckland University Press). Her earlier book, Relating Indigenous and Settler Identities: Beyond Domination (2014, Palgrave) extends her focus to make connections between Aotearoa New Zealand and indigenous-settler relations in Australia, Canada and the USA. She is also co-editor of A Land of Milk and Honey? Making Sense of Aotearoa New Zealand (2017, Auckland University Press).
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