CHAIR’S REPORT Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Maru (Taranaki) Trust I am pleased to present my Chair’s Report for Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Maru (Taranaki) Trust for the year-ending 31 March 2020. We continue our journey toward settlement with uri voting overwhelmingly in October 2020 to support the signing of our Deed of Settlement. From the almost 48% of registered uri who voted, 92% said they 4
TE KĀHUI MARU TRUST ANNUAL REPORT 2020
were in favour of us signing the Deed. That’s a great result, thank you for your support! Ngāti Maru has long fought for justice as a result of Crown breaches of the Treaty. The page-long list of our ancestors who petitioned the Crown is testament to that fact. As early as 1891 our tūpuna Te Kere Ngātaierua lodged our first petition to Parliament over the impacts of Crown
confiscation and other policies leaving Ngāti Maru effectively landless. What follows, down through the decades, is numerous and repeated attempts from our tūpuna to seek justice. This culminated in the 1989 and 2002 Waitangi Tribunal claims and in 2016, the Rūnanga picked up the baton to negotiate the claim on behalf of Ngāti Maru.
