History

Let us not forget our impact on the past, thereby using it to consider the future

As an iwi, Ngāi Tahu has always traded. The sustainable management of resources coupled with the acknowledged rights to harvest and trade is core to Ngāi Tahu tribal culture and history and its relationship with the land. Traditionally, Ngāi Tahu communities have traded both internally and with other iwi and clearly established trading routes existed to facilitate the trading of resources such as pounamu, tītī, tuna and other mahika kai. Sustainable harvesting is inherent to Ngāi Tahu culture and balancing the needs of the Ngāi Tahu communities reliant upon those resources without depleting them, is fundamental to Ngāi Tahu culture.

Ngāi Tahu's modern day commercial activities were commenced in the late 1950s. In those early days the Ngāi Tahu Māori Trust Board had income of about $20,000 a year with which to balance its investment and distribution aspirations. Even in those early days the decision makers recognised the need to reinvest to grow the pūtea and chose to put in place an aggressive reinvestment policy -reinvesting about two thirds of the income while maintaining a tightly focused distribution policy aimed at providing support to tribal members through the likes of education grants and scholarships.

By pursuing this strategy over a period of 25 years, the Ngāi Tahu Māori Trust Board grew its investments from modest beginnings to an asset base of around $3.2million by the mid 1980s and then to $33.3 million by the time of Settlement with the Crown. Guiding much of the Trust Board's investment decisions was an inherent understanding of firstly, the economic merit of investing in certain types of land and fisheries assets and secondly, the fit of those assets with the tribe's values, geographic presence and traditional activities.

In the 1998/9 financial year, the tribe received a considerable injection of capital when it settled its claim with the Crown. At that time, the newly established Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu replaced the Ngāi Tahu Māori Trust Board as the tribe's representative body and in turn created Ngāi Tahu Holdings Group to manage the tribe's investment.