Greenstone quandary

With the challenges to its ownership behind it, Ngai Tahu now has to decide what it is going to do with its massive greenstone resources, reports HUGH DE LACY.

Probably no single aspect of its compensation deal with the Crown cheered the South Island’s Ngai Tahu iwi as much as the formal return to their ownership of the greenstone resource that had defined and identified its people for hundreds of years.

Indeed the original name of the South island itself - Te Wahi Pounamu, or the place of jade/greenstone – reflected Ngai Tahu’s role among the 20-or-so iwi as the miner and manufacturer of the beautiful stone ornaments, utensils and weapons that it traded the length and breadth of the country.

So there were huge celebrations in September 1997 when the then National-led Government passed the Ngai Tahu (Pounamu Vesting) Act, and the iwi became the unequivocal owner of the entire South Island resource.

Never before in modern history has a nation formally vested a mineral resource of such value and significance in the original indigenous owners. However, the passage of the Act did not immediately eliminate all claims – legal or otherwise – to the resource, and the iwi has spent much of the last decade fending off counter claims.

Now that the full intent of the Act has been established in common law by the recent conviction for theft of a father-and-son team, who had helped themselves to a big chunk of it, the iwi is looking forward to developing the resource in line with its tribal and business values.

By 2002 the iwi had set up the Ngai Tahu Pounamu Management Group to, “develop the policies and processes for the management and protection of the pounamu owned by Te Runanga, and to facilitate the devolvement to, and empowerment of, Kaitiaki runanga to manage pounamu in their respective takiwa.”

But though the will was there to put Ngai Tahu at the helm of the $30 million a year greenstone mining and processing industry, the legal battles to turn the ownership principle into a practical reality have delayed development of the resource until now.

Legal challenges

Probably the most significant of these battles began in 2000 when the scope of the vesting Act was challenged all the way to the Privy Council by a West Coast company called Glenharrow Holdings that held a greenstone mining licence issued 10 years earlier under the Mining Act 1971.

In issuing the licence, the government stipulated a term of only 10 years, compared to the 42-year term normally conferred under the Mining Act. As the licence approached its expiry date, Glenharrow went to court to get it extended for a further 32 years under provisions of the 1971 Act that gave the Minister of Energy discretion to vary a licence’s terms, and/or gave the licence-holder a priority right to apply for a new licence over the same area when the current one expired.

The claim itself covered 107 hectares of Mt Griffin on the West Coast where Glenharrow had identified a huge greenstone resource that it wanted to develop into an export business. Though

Glenharrow’s case was supported by ample precedent under the old Mining Act, ultimately the Privy Council decided that the vesting Act supplanted it, and its decision went against Glenharrow  in 2004.

Other challenges to Ngai Tahu ownership were to follow. The last of these ended in October last year when Haast helicopter operators David Saxton and his son Morgan were convicted of stealing pounamu from the Cascade Plateau in South Westland. Rather than the bare-faced theft that had characterised other individuals’ elopement with commercial blocks of pounamu, this case was complicated by the Saxtons’ claim that they had customary rights to it through their family associations with Ngai Tahu. They were convicted in February this year anyway, and each sentenced to about two and a half years’ jail.

At the time of writing the Saxtons, widely respected in South Westland for their helicopter rescue work, were out of jail on bail awaiting an appeal against their conviction. But Ngai Tahu has already put the matter behind it, according to Rick Barber, the deputy leader of Te Runanga o Kati Waewae, one of the nine runanga scattered down the West Coast and across into the Dart River and Wakatipu areas of Otago that are responsible for their local deposits of the beautiful stone.

Barber says the iwi is “looking for a way forward” to manage, use and protect the resource. “We’re looking at the wider spectrum of sustainable use, working our way through planning, marketing, commercialisation and customary use.

“The thing is with us that we’ve got huge constraints as to how we progress the sustainable use and maximisation of our taonga. The pounamu doesn’t belong to us – it belongs to our future generations and the ones who came before. We’re just the kaitiaka – guardians – of it, and we want to further its management in a way consistent with the true values of kaitiaki-tanga, or wise use.”

The question of scale of eventual use has yet to be tackled.

“We’ve got a lot of options in front of us and, from a commercial point of view, we’ve got to do some analysis of what really is the best. As a diamond-miner will tell you, the best way to maximise the value of any mineral is by constraint on extraction,” Barber says.

“That’s also one way of maintaining its long-term availability. If you devalue taonga by mass-exporting it, as this government seems keen to do with coal, there’ll be very little left for our great-great-grandchildren,” he says.

Clearly the Ngai Tahu will be consulting more than the bottom line as they work out the degree to which they want to exploit the pounamu resource. Glenharrow was intending to export the Mt Griffin lode in bulk, much as the Italian marble industry does. But as yet no detailed stock-taking of South Island pounamu has been undertaken, and the short term for the iwi may revolve around keeping the domestic tourism market supplied, rather than getting into the global building industry.

The resource

The resource itself varies widely in both character and value, and occurs in two forms – nephrite and bowenite. Nephrite, the more common, is a calcium magnesium silicate of the amphibole group, and contains small amounts of iron that determine the depth of the green coloration. Bowenite, which is found only at the entrance to Marlborough Sound, is an iron magnesium silicate that produces a translucent form of serpentine.

The Maori recognise four distinct types of pounamu identified by their colour and translucence: kawakawa, kahurangi, inanga and tangiwai. The first three are nephrites while tangiwai is bowenite. Within the four main varieties are a range of other types that carry tribal names based on their shade and hue.

Historically and today the main deposits used by the Maori were those around the Taramakau and Arahura Rivers, as well as coastal South Westland and Lake Wakatipu in Otago. The Arahura River resource was specifically set aside by the 1997 vesting Act as belonging to the Mawhera Corporation, the business arm of the runanga that owns most of the land Greymouth is built on.

Having cemented the ownership of their resource, Ngai Tahu is not rushing to exploit it.

“We’ve been following minerals across the Pacific for 5000 years, and we’ve lived here as a people for about 1000 years,” Barber says. “Pounamu is central to Ngai Tahu heritage, and the underlying theme to the planning for its usage is to ensure that other people place as great a value on it as the Ngai Tahu do."