On 17th September 2008, after five arduous years of negotiating, Ngati Kahu and the Crown signed an Agreement In Principle at Kareponia marae as a way station to partially settle the historical land claims of Ngati Kahu. A copy can be viewed and / or downloaded below. It is also available from the Office of Treaty Settlements website via this link - http://nz01.terabyte.co.nz/ots/DocumentLibrary/NgatiKahuAgreementinPrinciple.pdf
A Deed of Settlement was drafted by the negotiators under instruction of the claimants and marae. However the Crown refused to negotiate it, instead insisting that the negotiators must allow the Crown to write the Deed and then agree to take it back to the marae and claimants as 'the best that could be achieved.'
As a result, the negotiators were instructed by the claimants and marae to rewrite the Deed as a book recording the struggle by six generations of Ngati Kahu to get the Crown to honour the treaty, and as a blueprint to future generations of what it will take to fully and finally settle the claims of Ngati Kahu. That book has now been written and will be published in 2017. It is titled, NGATI KAHU: Portrait of a Sovereign Nation.
