6 April 2004 Media Release

LAND HISTORY PROJECT TO HELP CNI MAORI

“Results from the Land History Alienation Database (LHAD) will be available to Central North Island claimant groups by the end of April,” Crown Forestry Rental Trust spokesman, Trustee Kingi Smiler announced today.

“This project traces the history of approximately 3 million acres of land in the Central North Island and will help CNI Maori by providing data to support their claims,” he said.

"Full-scale production of outputs will start this month and run through to the completion of the CNI claims research. The roll-out of this information to CNI claimant groups is timely, given the Crown’s recent announcements accepting the Tuwharetoa and Te Arawa mandates.”

Kingi Smiler said that the Crown Forestry Rental Trust, which is an independent trust receiving no taxpayer funding, will endeavour to ensure that the funding of CNI claimants’ treaty negotiations is done on a timely and cost-effective basis.

“Settling claims is the responsibility of claimants and the Crown, not the Trust, but we have always been committed to providing tools claimants need and to making sure that nothing we do slows the process down,” he said.

“Speedy progress to settlement will prove to be a significant boost to Maori economic development and of benefit to the whole economy.”

Background

The LHAD provides a comprehensive view of the Crown record of events affecting land either alienated from Maori or remaining under Maori ownership. It provides the facility to capture a structured representation of the complete Crown record from 1840 to 2000, including Crown acquisitions, public works takings, private purchases and development schemes.

The gathering of data to support claims in the three Central North Island claims districts will soon be complete. It has involved the capture of over 80,000 events affecting 18,000 blocks of land from data sourced directly by Trust researchers from the Crown records at the Maori Land Court in Rotorua and Wanganui, the LINZ online and physical archives at Hamilton and Wellington, and the National Archive in Wellington.