Before taking my seat, I stood in line to greet the ceremony’s other attendees. As I approached each person—tribal elders, community leaders, politicians—we pressed our noses and foreheads together for several seconds to perform the hongi, a customary greeting of the Māori people, the Indigenous Polynesians of mainland New Zealand. According to Māori tradition, the greeting meant I was no longer manuhiri, a visitor, but tangata whenua, a person of the land. This meaning was fitting for the event. Hundreds of us gathered to acknowledge how the Crown—as New Zealand’s government is still known colloquially today, as the successor to British colonial rule—unlawfully confiscated the Ngāti Maru (a Māori tribe) land more than 150 years ago.

Beginning in the 1860s, European settlers declared large areas of tribal land “confiscation districts.” Against the will of many Ngāti Maru members, countless acres were opened for British settlement, which rendered the tribe nearly landless, led to generations of economic, cultural, social, and spiritual hardship. Now, two centuries later, the Crown was there to apologize, and I was there, all the way from the United States, to witness what happens when a colonizer admits wrongdoing to the ancestors of those it colonized.

Ngāti Maru members welcomed the Crown with a series of full-throated hakas or ceremonial dances.

“The Crown acknowledges that Ngāti Maru’s relationship with the Crown has been one characterized by loss of land, of identity, and of autonomy. For Ngāti Maru, this loss has left a legacy of dislocation and dispossession,” Andrew Little, New Zealand’s minister of health and minister of the Treaty of Waitangi negotiations, told the audience. “For those [Crown] actions which rendered your iwi almost completely landless, severed your connection to your whenua [land], and inflicted economic hardship and suffering on generations of your people, the Crown sincerely apologizes.”

Little also read a lengthy list of historical harms: The Taranaki region wars of the 1860s brought on by the government were “an injustice” and violated the Treaty of Waitangi, the landmark 1840 agreement between Māori and British settlers; rampant land theft “divided the tribe” and deprived it of traditional food sources and sites of ancestral significance; the fragmentation of the land led to the “erosion of tribal structures”; the Crown’s imprisonment of Ngāti Maru members for their participation in peaceful resistance campaigns inflicted “unwarranted damage” and represented a denial of human rights and Māori sovereignty; the government “grossly polluted” the Waitara River, a resource Ngāti Maru members consider an ancestor, and degraded the environment.

Read the full article about reparations for the Māori people by Fabiola Cineas at Stanford Social Innovation Review.