UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.
KENNY MALONE, HOST:
Can we start recording? Is that OK?
MAVIS MULLINS: Let's do it.
DARIAN WOODS, HOST:
Mavis Mullins started her career in a sheep barn in New Zealand.
MALONE: Her job was to grade the quality of wool.
MULLINS: I loved it. And wool was such a beautiful natural fiber. It's actually a protein.
WOODS: Mavis is now one of New Zealand's most powerful wool magnates. Her company handles a million sheep a year.
MALONE: Yeah. Mavis is involved with all kinds of boards and trusts. And a big part of her life is hotel rooms, taxi cabs, frequent flyer lounges. Although initially, she was a bit shy about that frequent flyer status.
MULLINS: I don't want to expose myself that way.
WOODS: OK. OK.
MULLINS: Well, actually, you saw - of course, there's nothing hidden. I am an elite Gold (laughter) Club member and proud of it.
WOODS: And I just want to point out that you can hear in Mavis this fundamental paradox of being a New Zealander like myself. It's beaten into us that we're never supposed to brag. But we're also meant to always tell it like it is. And I find that really hard myself.
MALONE: Mavis Mullins, on the other hand, is unusually deft at this. She has this disarming honesty that lets her just cut to the chase about anything, and you will like her even more. It has made her a great negotiator. Her friends know this about her, her business associates and, apparently, her cousin because one day, Mavis was on a trip to New Zealand's capital city when she just happened to run into this cousin.
MULLINS: I was in Wellington. We passed in the street. And he said to me, stop. I need to have a coffee with you.
WOODS: Your cousin, was it? - just grabs you and pulls you into a coffee shop.
MULLINS: Yeah. That's how it started.
MALONE: Mavis knew what was about to come and to some degree had been actively avoiding this very conversation.
WOODS: Mavis is Maori, an indigenous New Zealander. And she knew that her tribe was scheduled to sit down with the government for one of the most important negotiations in its history - a negotiation for reparations.
MALONE: The more accurate word for tribe in New Zealand is iwi. And Mavis's iwi had been working towards this reparations moment for decades. And at this surprise coffee meeting, Mavis's cousin essentially was saying, we need you, Mavis. We need you to drop some of that jet set business life and come help the tribe. Come help the iwi.
MULLINS: Iwi politics isn't always very pleasant. I'd rather work in business, where the lines are pretty (laughter) well-drawn. So it's just a whole different ballgame.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WOODS: Did you say, I'll think about it?
MULLINS: I said, I'll talk to you later.
WOODS: Wise move.
MULLINS: Yeah (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MALONE: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Kenny Malone.
WOODS: And I'm Darian Woods. The story of New Zealand is unfortunately familiar. The country had an indigenous population, was colonized by Europeans. And by the 1970s, Maori had lost ownership of 97% of their land, often through deception and sometimes violence.
MALONE: But over the last 35 years, the New Zealand government has spent billions of dollars to build a system to address those unthinkable wrongs and to try and actually pay for them. Today on the show, we head to New Zealand to see how it works. And to hear what it's like to put a price on history, we ask Mavis Mullins.
WOODS: Because, of course, she agreed to help her cousin negotiate.
MULLINS: I rang and said, put it in. Just hurry up. Let's just get on with it.
WOODS: In New Zealand, there are two main islands. They stretch about a thousand miles in total. And if you kind of zoom in on the bottom part of the North Island, you'll land here, on a small mountain that Mavis Mullins knows as Pukaha.
MULLINS: Almost like an inland island dedicated to the birdsong.
WOODS: The name Pukaha comes from a Maori word that means flock of hawks or windy mountain.
MALONE: This is where Mavis's tribe is from - her iwi.
MULLINS: We weren't sea people or mountain people. We were people of the forest. It was our food basket. It was our protection, you know? It was our castle and our moat. It was a playground. It was our chemist.
MALONE: It was their chemist, she says. It was their pharmacist.
WOODS: Yeah. Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, were way ahead of Walgreens. They were using leaves and seeds that now show up in commercial pharmaceuticals.
MALONE: Mavis remembers being sick as a little kid, and her grandma was able to just collect ingredients from the forest.
MULLINS: Poultices and potions - things like that.
MALONE: Were you, like, no, I don't want to drink that, grandma? Or was it - would you...
MULLINS: You didn't really have too much of a choice. Sit down. Have this. This will help your tummy.
WOODS: So for Mavis' ancestors way back, the forest was everything. But then the European settlers came - at first, just a handful of settlers who wanted to tear down some of the forest to farm sheep.
MALONE: Mavis's iwi figured, great. We can charge these settlers rent. They'll tear down some trees in some small plots, but the iwi can preserve the rest of the forest.
WOODS: But then the New Zealand government got involved. After a series of bad deals, unfulfilled promises, outright deception by the colonial government, almost all of the iwi's land ended up in the hands of white settlers.
MALONE: And within just one generation, Mavis's ancestors went from being landlords for the white settlers to being their laborers, their farm workers and sheep shearers because of their own government.
MULLINS: Wow. It just happened so quick without regard. You were not good partners. You were not sincere. You were not true. Be nice to have you say sorry, damn it.
WOODS: Mavis' ancestors had gotten everything from this vast swath of forest, and almost all of that forest was chopped down when the land was sold to white settlers. In fact, there's really only one big chunk remaining now.
MULLINS: Pukaha is all that's really left of the forest. This is the last real remnant that's in one piece.
MALONE: Pukaha is the last real place where Mavis can go to see and feel and hear what her ancestors would've experienced. But infuriatingly, it was no longer controlled by Mavis's iwi. Pukaha fell into government ownership. And to add insult to injury, for all of Mavis's life, New Zealand maps did not use the name Pukaha.
MULLINS: Mount Bruce. It was Mount Bruce.
MALONE: Mount Bruce. And nobody seems to know exactly who Bruce was or why Pukaha got changed to Mount Bruce. It certainly wasn't because it sounded better.
MULLINS: Pukaha - it sounds like a bird call, doesn't it? Pukaha.
WOODS: Yeah.
MULLINS: ...Whereas Mount Bruce...
WOODS: (Laughter).
MULLINS: ...Kind of doesn't have that same beautiful flow to it.
WOODS: Yeah. Now, all of this history, from the renaming of Pukaha to the mass transfer of land - this was not necessarily something that Mavis knew in its entirety. All of this came together during the first stage of New Zealand's reparations process, a fact-finding tribunal.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: The next witness is Punga Paewai.
MALONE: This audio is from Mavis's tribunal. And there were hundreds of hours of testimony at this from regular iwi members, including Mavis's dad...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: ...Bush was our chemist shop and...
MALONE: ...From land surveyors and historians...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: The loss of land has a demoralizing influence on the psyche.
MALONE: ...And also from legal experts for Mavis's iwi - which, by the way, is named Rangitane.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Rangitane are indeed landless.
WOODS: After months of testimony, the tribunal officials pulled together a single exhaustive history of how the government betrayed Mavis's ancestors. That history is a thousand pages long.
MULLINS: And covering all that real truth was just devastating - just how ruthless, heartless and fast it was.
WOODS: Versions of the same story happened all over New Zealand. Maori make up about 16% of the country's population now, and there are about a hundred Maori tribal groupings in New Zealand. Each could have their own 1,000-page history of betrayal. Mavis says Maori experience the kind of social and economic shock that gets inherited generation after generation.
MULLINS: I wish I could say that it wasn't, but it is. It has multiplied. Maori are more likely to die young. Maori are more likely to have less education. Maori are more than 50% of the population of prisons, the homeless. These are people that I grew up with. These are family.
MALONE: So that is what's at stake when you enter into the negotiation, I suppose - trying to begin moving the needle on that stuff.
MULLINS: That's what it is.
WOODS: On day one of Mavis's reparations negotiations, Mavis wakes up before 5:30 a.m. She looks in the closet.
MULLINS: I had a whole wardrobe of power dressing stuff back in those days.
WOODS: It's still dark outside. Mavis starts her three-hour drive. She drives past farm after farm after farm. She drives past Pukaha - or, as the sign says, Mount Bruce.
MALONE: Now, in her car driving to this first day of negotiations, Mavis is aware that there are essentially three parts to any reparations package - land, money and an apology. Now, which bits of land, how much money and what that apology actually says - that is what the negotiation is going to be about.
WOODS: So that first bit, land - Mavis had a list of about a hundred cultural sites that the iwi wanted back for themselves.
MULLINS: Pukaha was right at the top.
MALONE: And then on the money side, she was looking at 20, maybe $30 million based on what other iwi had gotten.
WOODS: And the apology, Mavis thought - yeah, I know that's theoretically important.
MULLINS: I'm always one that says, you know, words are cheap. It's just - let's see the action. Words are cheap.
MALONE: So Mavis eventually arrives in Wellington, New Zealand's capital, and meets up with her negotiating team at a cafe for that first day.
MULLINS: I don't even think my tummy was settled enough to have anything at that point.
WOODS: The adrenaline was rushing.
MULLINS: Yeah, because you don't quite know what you're going into. You don't quite know who the people will be, the faces.
MALONE: Mavis and her negotiating team walk up to a government building and then into a windowless room.
MULLINS: You know when you go into surgery, and you go into one of those sterile kind of rooms that have no personality - that's just a there room?
MALONE: This negotiation will be Mavis and her team versus the government. And by the way, you'll hear people refer to the government here as the Crown.
WOODS: Yeah. I mean, the queen still is on our coins.
MALONE: Yes. And now it is time to face the Crown. There are a few government negotiators throughout this process, but the key negotiator is a guy called Rick Barker. What does he look like?
MULLINS: He's tall. He's fair.
MALONE: We heard he rides a motorcycle. We did hear that.
MULLINS: Yes. Yes, he - that's right, true. He's - yeah. So he's a bit cool.
RICK BARKER: (Laughter) I don't know about the cool, but - I like that, but I wouldn't put that - ascribe that to myself.
MALONE: Rick Barker is a former politician and looks a bit like it - politician hair, politician suits, politician ties.
WOODS: But sitting across the table from Mavis, Rick's role is the Crown negotiator. He was appointed by the New Zealand government to go into that windowless room and represent the Crown's position.
MALONE: What this means for Rick, practically, is that he wants to close a deal with Mavis as fast as possible. He is a political appointee. And the faster these settlements get done, the better this is for his bosses.
WOODS: And there are constraints. Like, he can't just open up the Crown's checkbook.
BARKER: The truth of the matter is, the Crown does not offer compensation because if it was to offer compensation for the lands which was taken, the figures would be simply fantastic - would not have the money.
MALONE: Would it bankrupt the country, potentially?
BARKER: Oh, potentially, yes.
MALONE: So instead of compensation, it is widely understood by Mavis, by others that what's happening here is, quote, unquote, "redress" - as in a package of money and land that is a tiny fraction of what was actually taken from Mavis's iwi but still large enough to help them rebuild.
WOODS: The other thing Rick has to think about is keeping this negotiation with Mavis roughly in line with the others. There are around a hundred separate tribal groupings, and one by one, the Crown wants to sit down with each of them to negotiate reparations.
MALONE: So ultimately, Rick is in that room to make sure this particular negotiation stays within a certain range. And he says one of the first things you learn as a Crown negotiator is that the Crown has a formula.
WOODS: What is that formula?
BARKER: Well, it's buried in a secret place.
WOODS: Oh.
MALONE: Wait. Really? Is that true?
BARKER: Yeah.
WOODS: Buried. So somebody digs it up when they consult the formula.
BARKER: Yeah. Yeah.
MALONE: Rick is half-joking here. The exact formula is a secret. But we do know there are three basic variables that make any given settlement bigger or smaller. No. 1, how many people are in your iwi?
WOODS: No. 2, how much land was lost?
MALONE: And No. 3, how was that land lost? If it was a bad faith deal by the government, that is worth less money than if the government came and took your land violently at musketpoint.
WOODS: In the case of Mavis' iwi, the government reneged on a deal and kept huge amounts of land anyway.
MALONE: So there's Mavis and her team in this windowless room with a thousand pages of historic wrongs. And then ultimately, these facts of history kind of get plugged into this, like, reparations machine, and out comes an initial offer.
MULLINS: What they first showed us gave us a total settlement of $10 million, which, you know, nothing to scoff at.
MALONE: Sounds like a lot of money. I don't - yeah.
MULLINS: It does. It does. But no, no. That was unacceptable to us.
WOODS: There are a few thousand people in Mavis' iwi, so per person, this settlement would come out to a few thousand dollars each. Mavis figured, we're going to have to work on that number.
MALONE: And then there is the cultural part of the settlement. Mavis had that list of about a hundred sites her iwi said they wanted back.
WOODS: With Pukaha at the top of the list.
MALONE: And Mavis says she will never forget the moment she brought that list into the negotiating room. She knows they're not going to get all 100 sites.
MULLINS: Of course, the Crown then says, no, you can only have five.
MALONE: Five from the northern end of your land, five from the southern end, but that's it. That's all you get. That's what the reparations machine says.
MULLINS: That was one of those times you come out of those meetings just punching the air not in glee but in frustration. And then you got your own people saying, God, you guys are useless. You couldn't even - you know, only five of those sites? Jeez, what were you fellas doing in there?
MALONE: Mavis was starting to realize that this was not the kind of negotiation she was used to in her business life.
WOODS: It didn't feel to her like two equal partners. This is the government writing the rules, holding the cards and deciding how to deal them out through the negotiator, Rick Barker.
BARKER: There are constraints I have beyond which I can't go.
WOODS: Do you ever personally wish you could give more?
BARKER: Well, it's challenging. Of course it is. I mean, the point is that you represent the minister and the Crown. And I'm not there to represent myself.
WOODS: The negotiations dragged on for months and then years. This process Mavis was going through can be so frustrating that other iwi have just walked out of negotiations.
MULLINS: No, it's not right. No, it's not fair. Yes, it sucks. And you can either step out of it, or you just lean into it.
MALONE: They decided to lean into it and then came up against a particularly insulting problem the Crown just did not seem to understand. It had to do with sharing cultural sites.
WOODS: There was another iwi much bigger and more powerful than Mavis' that was also laying claim to all kinds of important sites, including that last big chunk of forest, Pukaha - Mount Bruce.
MULLINS: The Crown, wanting to be very paternal, saying, why don't we share this? Why don't we share? Share this place. Share.
MALONE: Can't everyone just share Mount Bruce?
MULLINS: For Pukaha, the answer was no.
MALONE: But the question is, with limited leverage, when you are negotiating against a reparations machine, what can you actually do? That answer after the break.
WOODS: So the thing about any negotiation is that at the end of the day, you're still sitting across the table from a human being. The face of the Crown is still a human face - specifically, in this case, Rick Barker's face.
MALONE: Mavis and her team decided they were going to try and win over Rick Barker. They launched a kind of soft diplomacy campaign. They invited him down to their iwi's area. They took him to the forests, to the lakes, to Mount Bruce - Pukaha. And they put Rick in front of the very people Mavis was negotiating on behalf of.
MULLINS: Where our people could come and look them in the eye and love or hate them as well. Take a look. Who's this guy? You know, what's Rick Barker?
MALONE: Rick remembers one moment in particular from one of his trips because he just didn't seem to get why sharing all of these cultural sites was a bad solution.
WOODS: So Mavis had Rick come over to her local cafe. They order their coffees. They sit down.
BARKER: Mavis was very good. She could be very succinct and very clear about what it was that she wanted. She said, look; we need a place which is for us - a place for us to stand and for us to be proud of. Sometimes you just turn the knob on the microscope, and suddenly, you know, the image is sharp. And I thought, wow, I get that. I just - it moved me.
MALONE: It apparently moved Rick so much that he went to his boss and said, look; I think with Mount Bruce - Pukaha - we cannot split. It needs to just go to Mavis' iwi. And also, about that official name, Mount Bruce - that needed to change, too.
WOODS: Now this was the moment that Mavis could have fought to tear down all of those Mount Bruce signs and replace them with the original name, Pukaha.
MALONE: But when Mavis thought about this, she was like, look; erasing one history with another is the original sin here, so completely replacing Mount Bruce with Pukaha - that is just another version of the same problem.
WOODS: And so Mavis and her team agreed to a different kind of solution. They agreed that the official name of the mountain should be Pukaha/Mount Bruce.
MULLINS: It is still Mount Bruce - Pukaha/Mount Bruce. So, no, I don't want to be disrespectful of those settlers, whoever Mr. Bruce may have been.
MALONE: Who knows?
MULLINS: But it is about being respectful of all of that. So Pukaha/Mount Bruce - fantastic. Love it.
MALONE: But on the money side of the negotiations, Mavis and her team were a little less compromising. You'll remember their initial offer from the government was around $10 million. She and her team were actually able to get that number way up.
WOODS: It's a little complicated, but in essence, Mavis and her team beat the Crown at its own game. If the government was going to use a formula, they were going to scrutinize just about every number getting plugged into that formula.
MALONE: And in the end, the government conceded quite a bit. That initial $10 million package tripled. Mavis' iwi wound up with $32 1/2 million worth of money and land, including, of course, Pukaha/Mount Bruce.
MULLINS: I was satisfied. Was I thrilled? And I talked to my uncle. You know, he still thinks we got the rough deal. And I don't disagree with him. But the settlement was, I felt, the best we could do with what was in front of us and offered.
WOODS: The way this works - the government doesn't cut checks to each individual member of Mavis' iwi. All that money goes into a trust controlled by the iwi that then invests the money.
MALONE: And then each year, Mavis' iwi is able to withdraw a little bit of that money for things to help the community start to rebuild - things like additional education, health, social services.
WOODS: So money, land and changing the names of things - frankly, those are things that government can do fairly easily.
MALONE: But the third and final part of each settlement is something that bureaucracies are notoriously bad at - apologizing, as in actually showing up and saying, we are sorry.
WOODS: And what was being planned was that a group of government officials would come to Mavis' hometown. They'd set up a massive tent. It would be packed with hundreds of members of Mavis' iwi. The treaty negotiations minister, Rick Barker's boss - he would step up to a podium. And then, after 175 years, the Crown would officially apologize to Mavis' iwi, Rangitane.
MALONE: But, look; Mavis already knew what that apology was going to say because the actual words were part of her negotiation with the Crown. And each side was supposed to review those words before the actual apology ceremony. And frankly, Mavis didn't think she would care that much about the apology because, remember; in her own words, words are cheap.
MULLINS: But we received the apology draft, and I got it on the email. And I sat alone in this hotel room, reading this apology, and just cried. All of a sudden, there's a document that says, we acknowledge that we did this. Unreserved sorry for all of this. Even now, it still creates reactions in me.
MALONE: Do you want to just read it? Is that OK?
MULLINS: Yeah. God, I hope I don't cry. You guys have me as a stinking crybaby in here.
MALONE: We're not cry-baiting, I promise.
MULLINS: OK, all right. All right.
(Reading) The Crown is deeply sorry for its many breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi - the Treaty of Waitangi - and its principles and for the effect that these breaches have caused to generations of Rangitane o Wairarapa and Rangitane o Tamaki nui a Rua.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: The Crown unreservedly apologizes for not respecting the rangatiratanga of Rangitane o Wairarapa and Rangitane o Tamaki nui a Rua and for not having have honored its obligations to Rangitane o Wairarapa.
MULLINS: I just think New Zealand is incredibly brave to even play in this space because it's so much easier just to shut the box and, you know, carry on. Even if it is flawed, even though it's crap and frustrating, it's - for me, it's a journey of building something.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: The Crown looks forward to developing a new relationship that has mutual respect and trust as its foundation.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEOFF SMITH'S "STRELITZIA NUMBER 5")
WOODS: If you think about the gap between a historic betrayal and a modern-day apology, that gap is so wide that lots of countries can't figure out how to bridge it.
MALONE: But New Zealand has built this road map to try and do exactly that. It is a very long road map. In Mavis' iwi's case, it took 25 years from filing their first reparations claim to that official apology.
WOODS: This whole process has to act as a kind of format converter. It has to start with the raw emotion of generations of pain and then translate it into a format compatible with bureaucracy - paperwork, laws, financial statements - the kinds of stuff the government needs to actually spend real money.
MALONE: And the money is real. It is by no means enough. It is not even close to full compensation for what Mavis' ancestors lost. But she says it is enough money to build a springboard for communities.
WOODS: And also to show that the apology is sincere. As a famous Maori judge told us, an apology is fine as long as it's written on the back of a check.
MALONE: So one day - like, $10 million shows up in the account one day? They wire you the money.
MULLINS: Yeah. Printed out the statement, and it's framed on my wall.
MALONE: Is that true?
MULLINS: Yeah, of course. That's amazing.
MALONE: What does it look like?
MULLINS: A bank statement with a whole lot of zeros.
(SOUNDBITE OF LEIGH MCALLISTER GRACIE SONG, "YOU GOT ME STARTED")
WOODS: There are a lot of people to thank for this show. And, in particular, thanks to everyone we interviewed for this story - Sharon Hawke, Sir Taihakurei Durie, Jim Bolger, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Jamie Tuuta and Tracey Whare.
MALONE: And also a very special thanks to the Waitangi Tribunal for providing archival recordings and also letting us sit in on one of their hearings. And if you've got thoughts, questions, interests, you can email us. We are planetmoney@npr.org. We're also on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - @planetmoney.
WOODS: You can sign up for our newsletter at npr.org/planetmoneynewsletter. It's a welcome addition to my inbox.
MALONE: Today's episode was produced by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Alex Goldmark is our supervising producer, and Bryant Urstadt edits the show. I'm Kenny Malone.
WOODS: I'm Darian Woods. This is NPR. Ka kite ano.
(SOUNDBITE OF LEIGH MCALLISTER GRACIE SONG, "YOU GOT ME STARTED")
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