49 Human Rights Commission The Native Land Acts (1862, 1865) establishing the Native Land Court played a pivotal role in alienating Māori land. The 1862 Act allowed the appointment of Māori judges. Later, the Crown, considering these positions too powerful, used the 1865 Act to demote Māori judges to the position of assessors where they no longer had a decision-making role in Māori land matters (Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2016a). The Native Land Acts created a new form of Māori land ownership through the individualised title to Māori land.ix Henry Sewell explained the aims of the Native Land Court were: … to bring the great bulk of the lands in the Northern Island ‘within the reach of colonisation’ and ‘the detribalisation of the Māori – to destroy, if it were possible, the principle of communism upon which their social system is based and which stands as a barrier in the way of all attempts to amalgamate the Māori race into our social and political system’ (Taonui, 2012a). From the 1870s, the government’s legislative and policy direction strongly reflected settler priorities with Māori calls to participate in political and economic power firmly rejected. Māori were exposed to intense and aggressive intolerance by the settler government with swift consequences applied to any who challenged its authority. Rather than choosing to honour Te Tiriti, the government elected to manipulate, dominate and manage Māori into landlessness, discrimination, poverty and destitution (Marr, 1997). The newly established individualisation of title allowed settlers to acquire land by buying from individual owners. The net impact was not only the wholesale acquisition of land but also the undermining of Māori leadership and fragmentation of social unity and cohesion within iwi, hapū and whānau. Fundamentally, the individualisation and cash-sale of land constituted an absurd cultural imposition on Māori whose pre-colonisation tikanga customary practices never ‘bought and sold’ in this manner: Customary Māori land is land held by Māori people in accordance with their traditional customs and usages. All land in New Zealand was originally Māori customary land. After 1840, the Crown not only pursued a policy of alienating land from Māori ownership, but also of converting land remaining in Māori hands from customary title into title derived from the Crown. This became known as Crown-granted or freehold Māori land. By the turn of the century, most customary Māori land remaining in Māori ownership had been transferred into [a Māori] freehold title. Māori land ownership had plummeted to five per cent by 1980 (Marr, 1997, p. 2). Māori land title was based on shareholders, whose number increased each generation. This was based on the Crown’s decision in 1873 that the title to Māori land bequeaths equally to all shareholder descendants (removing the 10-owner rule of 1865). This fragmentation was untenable, as it “made each individual share an uneconomic size for farming” (Reid et al, 2017, p. 62). Once Māori land title was fragmented, Māori owners were often unable to access financial support for developing their land, in the way their Pākehā counterparts typically were (Kukutai, 2010, p. 53). As whānau could not find funds to develop their land, they began to move away from their land into urban areas. Whānau would travel the country to wherever the land courts were sitting, to give evidence of their ownership. Even if they had always lived on their ancestral land, handed down through whakapapa, this had to be ‘proven’ in court. Whānau had to repeat their whakapapa rights to the land, speak on behalf of those who could not speak English, and then work tirelessly to negotiate with other whānau members as to whose name would go on which title (Te Whaiti, 2021). Whānau and whole communities would be involved in protracted hearings, incurring significant costs along the way. Even when Māori won, they had to pay expensive legal fees, leading some to sell the land they had just won to recover costs (Taonui, 2012a). In combination, these factors had a devastating impact on Māori society, which many Pākehā celebrated.