Stuff's NZ Made/Nā Nīu Tīreni project: When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, Māori owned more than 66 million acres of land. By 1975, almost 97 per cent had been sold or taken.

Over several decades, Māori were stripped of their land, their economy and many of their cultural touchstones. The very existence of Māori people came into question. Data journalist Andy Fyers quantifies the scale of the loss for Stuff's NZ Made/Nā Niu Tīreni project.

LAND

When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, Māori land holdings encompassed most of New Zealand. Within a century, that had diminished to a few pockets of land, mostly in the middle of the North Island.

The land was lost through a combination of private and Government purchases, outright confiscation, and Native Land Court practices that made it difficult for Māori to maintain their land under traditional ownership structures.

Early purchases

There were some purchases of Māori land made before the Treaty was signed. The most significant by the New Zealand Company, whose business was buying land in New Zealand and then on-selling parcels of it to prospective settlers in Britain.

Starting in 1839, the Company went on a buying spree in the lower North Island and upper South Island. The towns of Wellington, Nelson, Whanganui and New Plymouth were all eventually established on this land.

In Wellington, there were conflicting claims to the land and some chiefs believed they were legitimising their claim, rather than extinguishing it. The Māori and European concepts of land ownership were at odds.

After the Treaty was signed, a land commissioner, William Spain, was tasked with investigating the legitimacy of all pre-Treaty land purchases by Europeans. By this time, settlers who had bought land in the New Zealand Company settlements were beginning to arrive.

Despite his reservations about most of the purchases, Spain ultimately found that at least part of each of the purchases was legitimate, with the exception of a purchase at Porirua. In many cases the New Zealand Company was made to pay compensation to Māori.

The commission he led investigated pre-Treaty land purchases around the country and when purchases were seen to be legitimate, a maximum of 2560 acres could be awarded to the buyer. But instead of the remainder being returned to Māori, it went to the Crown.

KATHRYN GEORGE/STUFF Some Māori were pressured into bad land deals with the Crown.

Crown purchases

The Treaty gave the Crown exclusive rights to buy Māori land. This was known as pre-emption.

It was occasionally waived to allow private parties to buy land – one such period resulted in large areas of land being bought by settlers in and around Auckland. For the most part, land was sold exclusively to the Crown in the decades immediately after the signing of the Treaty.

The Crown used pre-emption to buy two-thirds of the entire land area of New Zealand from Māori – including most of the South Island. They paid 21,150 pounds in total – the equivalent of $2.4 million in today's money, or about three residential properties in Auckland.

Treaty breaches have been identified by the Crown in the process of these purchases, these vary from purchase to purchase.

In some cases, iwi were made promises that helped to convince them to sell, but the promises were often broken or simply ignored.

Between 1848 and 1864, Ngāi Tahu sold most of the South Island to the Crown for 15,000 pounds – a sum that equated to a fraction of a penny per acre.

In return, the Crown promised to build schools and hospitals for the iwi and to set aside 10 per cent of the land for their occupation.

The schools and hospitals never materialised and Ngāi Tahu received only 37,000 acres of the purchased land – one-thousandth as opposed to one-tenth.

In the years that followed, the iwi fell into subsistence poverty and by the turn of the century there were just 2000 Ngāi Tahu left in their traditional lands.

He Tohu / YouTube See major Crown acquisitions since 1840, including confiscations after the New Zealand Wars and peak Native Land Court era.

Confiscations

In the 1860s, the Government passed legislation to allow confiscation of Māori land from those who had 'rebelled' against the Crown during the New Zealand Wars. The lands of pro-Government and neutral iwi were also taken.

The confiscated land was occupied by Pākehā settlers. The main confiscations were in the Waikato, Taranaki, Hawke's Bay and Bay of Plenty regions.

Some land was returned later, although not always to the original owners, and it was often then bought by the Crown.

Native Land Court

The Native Land Acts of 1862 and 1865 converted customary lands (generally in collective ownership) to individual title which could then be on-sold to private buyers. By 1872, over five million acres had been converted from customary to individual title.

The process of gaining title was often expensive in terms of survey costs and the long journeys many Māori had to make to attend the court hearings.

In some cases the cost of attending the hearings and surveying the land absorbed the entire value of land itself, leaving the original owners with nothing.

Putting the unfairness or fairness of the court's practises to one side, the outcome of the late-19th and early-20th Century period in which this court operated in this way was wholesale alienation of Māori from their land.

In 1865, some 19 million acres of land was in Māori customary title. It has been estimated that by 1909 at least 18 million acres of it was in individual ownership, almost none of it had been settled by Māori.

Total land loss

In the 20th Century there was further loss of Māori land to the Crown through private and Government purchases and under the Public Works Act, that sometimes breached the Treaty.

The cumulative effect of all the purchases, confiscations and acquisitions is that collectively owned Māori land now accounts for 4.8 per cent of New Zealand's total land area.

There is a more-detailed breakdown of the Treaty land breaches across the country on the NZ Made/Nā Niu Tīreni homepage.

ECONOMY

With loss of land, comes loss of the means of production.

Before the Treaty many Māori had developed lucrative trading relationships with Europeans.

This is cited as one of the reasons many were initially keen to sell land: to benefit from trading with Europeans.

It is difficult to quantify the full extent of the economic losses that resulted from the extensive land alienation.

But there are many historical accounts of the success of the Māori economy in the years before and immediately following the signing of the Treaty.

The first export crop grown by Māori was potatoes, which they traded with whalers in the early part of the 19th Century. The scale of the cultivation enabled whaling ships to purchase potatoes by the tonne.

In the 1820s and 1830s, the flax trade with Australia took off, while sealskins and spars for ships were exported to China and India.

In 1830, it was reported that 28 ships carrying an average of 100 tons of potatoes and milled grain made 56 journeys between New Zealand and Sydney. While the following year 1200 tons of flax was exported to Australia.

As the settler population grew following the signing of the Treaty, Māori were well placed to supply them with the goods they needed.

Settler towns such as Nelson initially depended entirely on Māori for food and other supplies.

In 1857, then-Attorney-General William Swainson estimated that the Tūwharetoa and Mataatua iwi, which consisted of about 8000 people, owned about 9000 acres of wheat, potatoes, maize and kumara, 2000 horses, 200 cattle, 5000 pigs, four water-mills, 96 ploughs, 43 coasting vessels and 900 canoes.

Māori owned flour mills throughout the country. Fifty were built in the Waikato region alone in 1840s and 1850s.

However, in the late-1850s the price for potatoes and wheat crashed in Australia and the land wars began in the 1860s, which diverted resources towards fighting and resulted in the confiscation of some of the most productive land in New Zealand.

POPULATION

In 1769, Captain Cook estimated the Māori population at 100,000, while life expectancy was about 30 – similar to Western Europe at the time.

By 1840, the Māori population was estimated between 70,000 and 90,000.

After the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi diseases brought by the influx of European settlers – to which Māori had no immunity – had a devastating impact on the population and life expectancy.

Poverty and overcrowding as a result of land alienation made it easier for diseases to spread and by the end of the century the Māori population had roughly halved and was estimated at 42,000.

In 1891, Māori life expectancy was 25 for men and 23 for women. In 1886, 51 per cent of Māori who died were younger than 15, compared with 14 per cent of non-Māori.

In the 20th Century the trend began to reverse as Māori developed better resistance to European diseases and received better healthcare.

After WWII, the population boomed again thanks to lower mortality rates while fertility rates remained high. More people began to identify as Māori after 1981, which partly explains the spike.

At the 2013 Census, Māori numbered 600,000 with life expectancy of 73 for men and 77 for women – still below the figures for Pākehā.

CULTURAL LOSS

Loss of land often meant Māori lost access to culturally significant sites such as burial grounds and pa. It often also meant their access to forests, waterways, food resources, wāhi tapu and other taonga.

In the 1980s, a claim was made to the Waitangi Tribunal that te reo Māori was a taonga and that the Crown had a responsibility under the Treaty to nurture it.

The claimants further argued that Crown actions in suppressing use of the language in schools had contributed to its decline. The Tribunal asked whether the promises of the Treaty could be met if, "there is not a recognised place for the language of one of the partners to the Treaty".

In 2013, 21 per cent of the Māori population spoke te reo Māori, down from 25 per cent in 2001. Over 40 per cent of Māori aged over 70 can speak the language, compared to less than 20 per cent of those under 30.

* Map outlines for gifs courtesy of Click Suite. A 3D animation of the Māori land loss video, which the gifs are based, on can be viewed at the He Tohu exhibition at the National Library in Wellington.