What does “from rebels” assume?
The confiscation statutes called their targets rebels. Ākonga test that word against who actually lost land — and what calling someone a rebel made legal.
- Word on trial: “rebels” — who applied the label, and what did it license?
- Evidence it produces: An account of what the label made lawful, grounded in the statute and the outcome
🕘 Lesson at a Glance | Te Hōtaka
Lesson Overview | Tirohanga Whānui
Lesson 2 ended with a researchable question: if the two texts of te Tiriti differ, which text's terms were acted on? Today ākonga hold one answer in their hands — the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863, quoted verbatim. They read a statute the way historians read it: the preamble's justification story first, then the operative sections that grant the actual power, then the gap between the two. Finally they read what a Crown-established tribunal concluded in 1996 when it went looking for the evidence the Act itself required. No one tells ākonga the law was misused; they watch the Tribunal fail to find the Governor's evidence, and draw the conclusion from the record.
Learning Intentions | Ngā Whāinga Ako
- Read a statute's preamble and operative sections as different kinds of evidence.
- Quote the exact words that state the Act's purpose and the exact words that grant its power, and name the gap.
- Distinguish what the 1996 findings establish about Taranaki from what they cannot establish about every confiscation.
⚡ Do Now · Two Words on Trial
⏱ 5 minPut this claim on the board as a claim to test, not as a fact:
“In the 1860s, the Crown confiscated land from Māori who had rebelled.”
Run it
- Circle (1 min): circle the two words doing the most work — the one that names what the Crown did, and the one that names what Māori did.
- Put “rebelled” on trial (2 min): rebellion is a word for a relationship, not for an act on its own. Write the one thing that must already be true about authority before “rebelled” is the accurate word — then write who would have to agree that it was true.
- Put “confiscated” on trial (2 min): write one thing you would need to check in the Crown's own documents before you could be sure this is the word the Crown itself used for what it did.
Activity 1 · Build the Lens: Four Moves a Law Makes With Words
⏱ 10 minWhat it is: four naming moves, built as portable tests, so ākonga can hear what the statute's language is doing before they touch the sources.
Run it
- Turn each card into a test (3 min): pairs rewrite each move as a one-line question they could ask of any sentence in any statute. Write the four questions down the margin of the source lab.
- Practise on the Do Now (4 min): apply the first three tests to the board sentence. Who is the actor in “confiscated”? Who is the actor in “rebelled”? Which word is a noun with a verb hidden inside it?
- Predict (3 min): a preamble tells the story that justifies a law; the numbered sections grant its actual power. Predict which of the four moves you expect to find in each part, and why. Activity 3 checks the prediction against the words.
🪶 Cultural integrity: raupatu is living history — iwi in Taranaki, Waikato and elsewhere carry it in whakapapa, settlement negotiations, and memory. Local iwi accounts of raupatu in your rohe take precedence over any national summary, and no ākonga should be asked to speak for their iwi. The class analyses the Crown's own documents; the sources carry the evidence, not the students.
Activity 2 · Provenance Before Content: Who Was Entitled to Name This?
⏱ 15 minWhat it is: ākonga read around the three sources before reading through them, asking the question this edition keeps asking — whose words are these, and what authority stood behind them? All three describe the same events in three different vocabularies, and only one of those vocabularies became law. This unit's third provenance twist sits here too: an 1863 Act that was later repealed, surviving in full inside a 1996 Waitangi Tribunal report.
Run it
- Label (6 min): complete the provenance grid for Sources A–C, recording both creation and reproduction dates where they differ. Then add what the grid does not ask for: in the margin of each row, write the word that source uses for what happened to the land.
- Predict (4 min): before the word-work, predict one strength and one limit each source carries because of its provenance — and say which source you expect to use the plainest word for the taking, and why its author could afford to.
- Check (5 min): skim each source card and adjust the predictions. Note the framing warning on Source A — the preamble's description of Māori is evidence of how confiscation was justified, not a description of the people.
Activity 3 · Word by Word: The Story, the Power and the Silence
⏱ 25 minWhat it is: the core evidence work, run with the four tests from Activity 1. Ākonga quote the preamble's words and the operative sections' words phrase by phrase, name who each phrasing makes the actor, and record what the Act never says. No paraphrase, no memory — quotation.
Run it
- Who is named, and who is not (7 min): the preamble sorts people — “evil-disposed persons of the Native race”, those “engaged in open rebellion”. Now read section IV: whose land can actually be taken? Copy the exact phrase into the table. One naming judges character; the other reaches “any person whomsoever”. Write who disappears between the story and the power.
- The word the whole trigger turns on (6 min): section II sets the condition for declaring a district. Copy the operative words. Circle the single word the section hangs on — satisfied — then write two things: who the sentence makes responsible, and what it never requires that person to produce.
- A promise with no promiser (6 min): section V grants compensation, then takes it away from five categories of people. Copy the opening promise and ground (1). Now look at the grammar of both: “Compensation shall be granted”, “no compensation shall be granted”. Granted by whom, refused by whom? Write who is absent from both sentences.
- The word that is missing (6 min): search Sources A and B for the word “confiscation”. Record exactly what you find. This is the word the class put on trial at the start of the lesson — write one sentence on what work the absence of a word does in a law that takes land.
Board the key finding, in their words: the preamble promises “protection and security of the well-disposed Inhabitants of both races”; section IV takes “any Land within such District” from “any person whomsoever” once the Governor in Council declares it required. And nowhere in the Act does the word “confiscation” appear. Ākonga should arrive at this from the table, not from the teacher.
Activity 4 · 1996: The Tribunal Says the Word
⏱ 15 minWhat it is: ākonga read Source C — the Waitangi Tribunal's findings — and watch a Crown-established inquiry supply in plain words what the 1863 vocabulary left out: an Act “which on its face was not for the confiscation of Māori land”, lawfully enacted and unlawfully applied. A parliament can validly pass a law, and a government can still break that law's own terms when using it; holding those two apart is today's hardest and most valuable move.
Run it
- Name the silence (4 min): the Tribunal noticed in 1996 what ākonga found in Activity 3. Copy its sentence about the missing word — “The taking of land was so coincidental that words like ‘confiscation’ did not rate a mention.” Then copy the two findings most people run together: the Act itself “is not unlawful”, and “the confiscations were unlawful because they did not comply with the statute’s terms”. Note which noun the Tribunal uses freely and the Act never used once.
- Look behind “satisfied” (5 min): section II required the Governor in Council to be satisfied that tribes were in rebellion — the word ākonga circled in Activity 3. What evidence did the Tribunal go looking for behind it, and what did it find? Copy the sentence — “We can find no evidence that he ever had such information.” Then write what that does to the word “rebelled” in the Do Now sentence.
- Two vocabularies, one set of events (4 min): the preamble said the Act was for the “permanent protection and security of the well-disposed Inhabitants of both races”. The Tribunal concluded the confiscations were “unlawful, contrary to the Treaty of Waitangi, and prejudicial, because most hapū were deprived of their means of subsistence”. Set the two sentences side by side. What can an inquiry with full archives say that a preamble never could?
- Rank (2 min): which is stronger evidence that the Act's power outran its story — your Activity 3 word table, or the Tribunal's findings? Defend the answer.
Activity 5 · Bridge Back and Forward: Whose Words Became Law?
⏱ 15 minWhat it is: ākonga answer Lesson 2's question — which was always a question about words — then aim the unit's next inquiry at resistance and redress.
Run it
- Retry the Do Now (5 min): revise the opening sentence so that every word in it can be carried by today's sources. If you keep “confiscated”, say whose word it is and where it comes from. If you keep “rebelled”, say who applied that word, under which section, and on what evidence. Peer-check: evidence underlined, scope boxed, limit starred.
- Answer Lesson 2 (5 min): Lesson 2 ended asking which text of te Tiriti was acted on. In one paragraph, connect the evidence: the te reo text guarantees te tino rangatiratanga over whenua; the 1863 Act empowers the Governor in Council to take “any Land within such District” from “any person whomsoever”. Which text's terms does the Act's machinery match? Quote both documents.
- Question forward (5 min): land was taken by statute, and the Tribunal's report exists because people never stopped contesting it — including contesting the words used for it. Write one researchable question about how Māori resisted raupatu or pursued redress — petitions, Parihaka, the courts, the Tribunal itself. Keep it; it is the brief for the unit's next inquiry.
Exit · One Word, Its Work, Its Limit
⏱ 5 min- Claim: name one word the 1863 Act used, or the one word it never used, quote it exactly, and say in one sentence what work that word did.
- Limit: one sentence saying what today's sources cannot establish — about intentions in 1863, or about districts beyond Taranaki.
- Question: one question about resistance, redress, or what happened to the people whose land was taken.
🎯 Curriculum Links | Te Hononga ki te Marautanga
The unit's anchor statement, taught here at its machinery: Lesson 1 planted this anchor; today ākonga read the statute in which a colonial governance framework — the Governor in Council, no Māori institution anywhere in the chain — decided whose land was reachable.
Exclusion of most Māori men from the political system and voting due to the property-based franchise and Māori communal landholding practices. Traditional leadership structures based on mana and whakapapa were not incorporated into colonial governance frameworks, contributing to differing understandings and reduced representation.
📦 Materials & Resources
- Te Raupatu ā-Ture Source Lab — one per ākonga.
- Highlighters in three colours: exact quotation, gap between story and power, limit.
- Board or shared display for the Do Now claim and the Activity 3 key finding.
- The Taranaki Report: Kaupapa Tuatahi (Waitangi Tribunal, 1996) — the full Act is appendix II, from p 351; the findings quoted are in chapter 5. For teacher preview or connected-device extension.
- Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 — Lesson 2's statute, for the Activity 5 comparison paragraph.
📊 Assessment Framework
This lesson uses formative evidence only.
- LI 1: Activity 2 provenance grid records the Act's creation, repeal, and 1996 reproduction as separate facts about Sources A and B.
- LI 2: Activity 3 table quotes exact phrases from the preamble and from sections II, IV and V, with a named gap in each row.
- LI 3: the exit slip states a limit that correctly scopes the Tribunal's findings to Taranaki or to the surviving record.
🚀 Extension Activity
Two directions, both source-first:
- The amendments: appendix II of the Taranaki Report also reproduces the 1864, 1865 and 1866 amendment Acts. The 1866 Act declares that everything “done or taken under authority of the said [New Zealand Settlements Act]” is validated. Read section 6 at the link and ask: what does a parliament passing a validating Act concede about what came before it?
- The other statute: the same appendix carries the Suppression of Rebellion Act 1863, which suspended ordinary legal process. Compare its preamble with the Settlements Act's — same story, different power. One further exact-words comparison, one further gap.
🔗 Unit Progression | Te Ara o Ngā Akoranga
Lesson 1 established that authority did not begin with Crown institutions; Lesson 2 put the exact words of both Tiriti texts in ākonga hands and ended on the enforcement question. Today answers it at the level of machinery: a statute whose power reached “any person whomsoever”, judged by a Crown tribunal to have been used unlawfully in Taranaki. The next inquiry follows the exit questions — resistance and redress: petitions, Parihaka, the long road to the 1975 Act ākonga have already read, and what settlement can and cannot restore. Revisit Lesson 2 if the word-level comparison method needs re-grounding.
📋 Teacher Planning Snapshot
Paearu Angitu | Success Criteria
- I can quote what the Act says it is for and what its sections actually empower.
- I can explain how a lawfully made Act can be unlawfully used, using the Tribunal's findings.
- I can keep the Taranaki findings scoped to Taranaki, and say what would be needed to reach further.
Differentiation for this lesson
Inclusion guidance
- Reading load: the preamble is one long unpunctuated sentence — read it aloud once as a class, pausing at each “And Whereas”, before pairs work it. That single move halves the difficulty.
- Language support: start the Activity 3 table at the middle row (section IV, “whose land can be taken”) — it is the shortest hunt with the sharpest payoff, so every ākonga lands one complete row early.
- Executive function: release the story-and-power table one row at a time; the scope test opens only after all three rows hold quotations.
- Extension: require the 1866 validating-Act comparison from the extension panel, with its concession question answered.
- Cultural safety: some ākonga whakapapa to iwi who suffered raupatu, in Taranaki and beyond. Give notice of the preamble's language before reading, offer the option to work analytically without personal disclosure, and never position Māori ākonga as spokespeople for their iwi's losses.