Settler colonial bordering and post-pandemic futures: disrupting the nation state in Aotearoa/New Zealand

ABSTRACT

In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the relative safety offered by border regime closures during Covid-19 promised to ease uncertainty surrounding perilous futures, yet it did so by extending nation building into more intimate areas of life, exacerbating existing lines of discrimination. While justified in terms of crisis management, state expressions of citizen care during the pandemic were largely modelled in terms of a particular conflation of nature, society and economy peculiar to settler colonialism. Using bordering practices during the pandemic as a point of departure, this essay draws on scholarship on borders to interrogate settler colonialism in Aotearoa. This allows for four innovations: First, it situates Covid-19 as structure rather than event, one which accentuated historical patterns of nation-making. Second, it underscores continuities in Indigenous relations of ownership, belonging, social reproduction, kinship ethics and environmental engagements. Third, it suggests alliances between migrants, non-white and colonized peoples; those for whom borders do not remain at the periphery, but rather penetrate deep into the informal spaces of the everyday. And fourth, it recalibrates resistances as expressions of sociality aimed at reclassifying nature, economy and society.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders
• settler-colonialism
• Māori
• Covid-19
• kinship
• nationhood

Introduction

A consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic is that the reach of nation states was overtly revealed to the public at the same time as globalization projects have become increasingly challenged; a trend characterized by growing nationalist and isolationist tendencies, the erection of border walls and fences to stem immigration and a contraction in world trade (Svetličič 2021). State bordering during the pandemic appears to have accentuated these currents (or trends or patterns or phenomena) as, and sometimes overnight, borders were closed to protect citizens from zoonotic infections, immobilizing both humans and virus in the process and entrenching boundaries between us (‘natives') and them (‘foreigners’). In Aotearoa/New Zealand, borders closed in response to the incursion of Covid-19 in March 2020 to anyone not a permanent resident or citizen, a closure which was to remain in effect for over two years. Rather than a retreat from globalization, we interpret this as a node in a much longer process of settler colonialism and its particular global dynamic. In this conception, ‘the West’, property, capital, finance and whiteness, alongside Eurocentric kinship and interpretations of nature as external antecedents to society, variously underpin the imaginary of a settler-colonial future. Western law, for instance, is universalized within the boundaries of the settler state as well as in global arenas (Morgensen 2011) and environmental management regimes, grounded in Western logics and amplified by neoliberalism, are instituted as the way to manage nature.

How settler colonizers come to think about the places they call home, despite ambivalences, may also reinforce the relationship between settler peripheries and imperial centres (Veracini 2010). Indeed, while New Zealand’s citizens and permanent residents were able to return during the course of the pandemic, providing they could secure a two-week spot in quarantine facilities,¹ this was not the case for its citizens travelling from India during April 2021. Conversely, irrespective of soaring coronavirus rates in the core, New Zealand citizens travelling from the United Kingdom and Europe were never denied entry. Meanwhile, neoliberalized global economies largely defied pandemic restrictions. The operational imperatives of New Zealand’s marketized fisheries regime, for instance, meant that 570 Ukrainian and Russian fishing crew entered New Zealand’s quarantine system in May 2020 through a ‘critical worker’ exemption programme, signalling the concerted failure of the five largest fishing companies to invest in local labour, the global value chains inherent in production, and the precarious labour of foreign crew.

State bordering regimes and the globalized or de-globalized futures they conjure, however, are not fixed, nor are their values universally shared. Settler colonial bordering in Aotearoa/New Zealand has long been shot through with difference as subaltern alterities disrupt, become entangled, or otherwise complicate its trajectory. The intensification of state bordering during the pandemic was reflected in an upsurge of discourses in which differently constructed pasts and differently imagined futures came to challenge national projects in old and new ways. Presenting these alternatives, we draw attention to the ordinary: everyday journeying, child rearing, the dynamics of kinship, local environmentalisms, migrant belongings and the daily work involved in maintaining Indigenous ways of life. These we conceptualize as border disruptions, their significance lying in the power of the vernacular and in the configuration of alliances they propose. Conversely, we also observe a sharpening of racial boundaries, interpreting this as both novel in its appropriation of cultural markers and global ideologies as well as contiguous with settler colonial bordering.

The troubled relationship between state bordering and Indigenous sovereignty, under the specificities of settler colonialism, is central to our analysis; a tension amplified during Covid-19 as attempts to deepen colonial bordering hit against Indigenous efforts to protect tribal communities. Kinship, while an oft-hidden aspect of state making, is pivotal to settler colonial bordering, just as kinship is integral to Indigenous sovereignty and land relations. A similar friction is observed in ecological relations; these are extended in state bordering practices at the same time as being crucial to Indigenous relations with land and sea. We observe that, in moments when concepts of settler safety are threatened, border violence, white supremacy and fascism visibly emerge. In these instances, the positioning of ethnic minority migrant and non-white peoples in the colonial settler-Indigenous binary, potentiates the forging of new social alliances as well as creative imaginaries that reach beyond state bordering practices. While mindful of the deep intersections between these phenomena, in the sections below we identify three axes around which tensions coalesce: indigeneity and colonialism; kinship and nationhood; and migratory histories. First, though, we turn to our research methodology.

Covid-19 methodological innovations

The 11 research interviews cited in this paper occurred between August and December 2021, during which New Zealand vacillated between various lockdown and public health restrictions in reaction to Covid-19. The pandemic, thus, stimulated both theory and method; border security, border breaches and border workers, the fate of overseas citizens, which category of person should be entitled to enter New Zealand, dominated public discourse. Emergent too was a classification of some people as vectors and, over time, reactionary calls for ‘freedom’, thereby revealing connections, normally hidden, between border dynamics, dominant political orders and national self-understandings.

As authors, five of our group are migrants to Aotearoa and one of us an Indigenous Māori woman, this dynamic providing a shared sense of curiosity explored in our research and interviews. Lockdown, public health measures and border closures meant that our team met in person only once, and only towards the end of the research when all restrictions had been lifted. Our meetings over zoom, however, were intensely productive and joyous affairs as we each negotiated our respective isolation, taking solace from our shared intellectual work. Five of our research interviews were conducted in person, following the Covid-19 social distancing and mask restrictions pertinent at the time. Six, however, were conducted over zoom. To mitigate the discombobulating effects of conducting research interviews over zoom, we introduced a tactile component, starting each interview with an online mapping exercise. Here we asked participants to mark their home(s), journeys, significant sites, connections, places they felt safe and unsafe on a series of maps, using Jamboard, a tool for online visual collaboration. This method, whereby thick and thin, differently shaped and coloured lines were used to narrate experience, provided the basis for a dialogical interaction marked by enthusiasm, creative insights, sometimes frustration and, on other occasions, profound sadness. Maps were also a component of our in person interviews, though beyond intermittent interest, did not become a central feature of the dialogue (Table 1).

Table 1. Research Participants.

Pseudonym	Description
Mere	A Māori grandmother who has lived in Australia, for sixteen years. Her primary identification is Tainui (a Māori sub-tribe) and Niuean, having spent memorable times in her childhood with both her Māori and Niuean extended family in Aotearoa.
Atamai	A second-generation Pacific Island migrant and mother resident in Aotearoa. She identifies her heritage as a mixture of Samoan, Tongan, English, Māori, Hawaiian and Sri Lankan, though primarily draws on her Pacific identity.
Rojan	A Kurdish Muslim refugee for whom Pakistan became an adopted home. She is a young mother, having lived in New Zealand with her husband from South Asia, for eleven years.
Manaia	A Māori grandmother whose pepeha (Māori introduction) includes the Tainui waka (migration canoe). She left New Zealand with her two children when she was 23 to escape gang violence and now resides in Australia. One of her daughters returned to her former hometown in New Zealand where she now lives with her own daughter.
Atawhai (father) Aroha (daughter)	A father and daughter from a hapū (subtribe) of Waikato Tainui, who are involved in Māori governance, a land claim protest, and who are deeply committed to the everyday labour of Māori decolonial struggles. The father identifies as Māori, Tongan and Palangi (Tongan term for white person) while the daughter identifies as Māori and Tongan.
Marama (mother) Inia (daughter)	A Māori mother and daughter, tangata whenua (people of the land) of a coastal hapū. Both are heavily involved in their extended families and local Māori governance issues. The daughter lived in Australia for 15 years, returning with her children to become the head teacher at her local kohanga reo (Māori language learning facility).
Anahere	An environmental spokesperson, academic, researcher and eminent Māori activist from a coastal hapū who has travelled widely. She also has Irish and Chilean heritage, maintaining connections with both places.
Seema	An Indian migrant whose ancestors have a migratory history from the Arabian Peninsula and who has lived in New Zealand for 21 years, though only recently attained citizenship. They identify as transgender.
Michelle	A Pākehā (white European) woman, born in Canada and brought up in a working-class suburb of Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. She identifies as a working class, bisexual, woman.

Indigeneity and colonialism: land relations

Land acquisition is a driving force in settler colonialism, one characterized by the imposition of borders through both violence and stealth: declarations of terra nullius, warmongering, confiscations, surveying, privatizations, dubious ‘sales’ and erroneous legal assumptions. This bordering includes material and non-material dimensions, for instance, walls and fences demarcate new land divisions as well as property regimes, economies and environmental relationships; territorialization includes state governance and infrastructural features which divide tribal territories into competing administrative units, complicating Indigenous attempts to care for human and environmental resources. Roads are also an infrastructure of borders (Murton 2017), providing frontier access to settler economic and recreational activities, while slicing across Indigenous land divisions and ceremonial sites. The sea too is bordered through Individual Fishing Quota, Marine Protected Areas, aquaculture developments and so on, leading to new ways of valuing labour and nature as well as novel inclusions and exclusions.

Settler colonial bordering of land and sea disturbs historically porous tribal boundaries, entrenching new forms of hierarchy. Aroha describes the flattening of histories that has occurred in recent contestations over interests in cultural heritage sites as hapū (subtribe) and iwi (tribe), with different genealogies and narratives of place, are reduced by local councils to equal stakeholders: ‘These maps have lists [of hapū and iwi] and you don’t get a level of depth from the lists. When you go to council, they treat you evenly, as if we all have an equal stake’. Here she is referring to seven borrow pits which have been lodged by her hapū with Heritage New Zealand. When developments are proposed, consultation must be initiated with hapū and iwi stakeholders, ‘they need tick-offs to be able to destroy them … we opposed and the other group [iwi] supported because it has low to no significance to them, so it can be developed’. The depth identified as missing in the stakeholder logic includes the journeying of ancestors, narratives around significant sites, genealogical connections and kinship relationships, all of which work together to position one kin group as holding mana whenua (customary authority) while others play a tautoko (support) role.

A ritual recognition of these tribal boundaries, however, exists in the vernacular movements of Māori. Inia recounts how she journeys in New Zealand:

You have the invisible line of rohe [tribal territories] like maunga [mountains] and different pepeha [tribal introduction] and dialects. When we go into another rohe, you have a breather, a ngā mihi [gratitude], ‘my tupuna [ancestors] take care of me while I step into someone else’s rohe … have a little karakia’ [prayer].

Her mother, Marama, adds:

At Taupiri you stop, turn your radio off … a moment of silence and then carry on. The silence is in recognition of all those dead people on the hill. When we go to Ngāti Porou [east coast tribe] territory, you can feel the difference. You want to make sure spiritually you are ok, and just like whakawatea [open a clear pathway].

Anahere describes this recognition as a form of respect:

You see the respect paid by people coming from one place to another, we’re moving into their territory … they are the ones with the mana [authority, power, effectiveness]. They come here and they are in our territory; go down to help at Whanganui, you are just there to support them and they will greet you into their territory and send you off.

Covid-19 evoked a physical re-enactment of tribal boundaries as Māori in Northland, the East Cape and elsewhere erected their own borders to prevent the spread of infection by establishing checkpoints on major roads flowing into their territories; a mobilization interpreted as an expression of rangatiratanga [sovereignty], underpinned by tikanga Māori [Māori customs/law] (Fitzmaurice and Bargh 2021). This Indigenous bordering, however, was contentiously received by the non-Māori public (Fitzmaurice 2021) and delegitimatized by the New Zealand state whose pandemic response instead was defined according to Regional Council administrative divisions and securitized by police.² Aroha recalls the anxiety produced by the amplification of state bordering during Covid-19:

… the nervousness, because we just went the way we normally go which is the back ways through Matamata to Whakatane, the country roads and the anxiety of it! ‘Have we crossed over? Don’t speed, are we over it [regional border]? Can we relax? I guess I hadn’t seen the power of the government to enforce borders before. While iwi groups were doing that, it didn’t feel the same as the government doing it. I saw protection of kaumatua [elders] … versus control.

Seema comments that borders imposed internally by the state in response to Covid-19 shadow those introduced in the 1860s colonial land wars. State borders, Seema suggests, accentuate a settler association with ‘one part of the country over the other’ in contrast to the tribal identity reinforced by Māori borders. Referring to the latter, Seema proposes:

It’s such a provocation to the system … We have this imagined community of being from Auckland, but there’s less an imaginary notion of community if you’re from some hapū or iwi. If Māori start exercising their identity by saying ‘oh no we can actually enforce this border' … one side of the debate is afraid where that will lead.

Indigenous borders are perceived as requiring less ‘imagination’ than national ones, underscoring the work involved in maintaining a settler nationalist sense of community and the un-settled history on which this rests.

As an ongoing phenomenon, settler colonial bordering is apparent in Treaty of Waitangi claims and settlements.³ Here, a hybridized border emerges as Māori kin groups couch their claims in the language of exclusion and establish new forms of governance to manage post-settlement assets, adjustments necessary to progress claims. Treaty settlements have propelled iwi as the dominant form of social organization, a happening which has its antecedent in European engagements in the mid-nineteenth century. The expression of Māori society as headed by iwi, however, is understood as a colonial imposition responsible for the relegation of autonomy from hapū to iwi (Ballara 1998, Maaka 2003). The settlement of Māori claims, beginning in the early 1990s, amplified the power of iwi and instigated their emergence as a corporate entity. Waikato-Tainui, the tribe with which Aroha’s hapū is affiliated, negotiated a Treaty of Waitangi Settlement in 1995, becoming the first iwi to settle a historical grievance with the Crown. Prior to the settlement, governance was assembled through affiliated hapū, whereas post settlement, this changed to one based on marae [ceremonial meeting house complexes]. This is significant as it signals a shift from descent-based principles to those based on residence, resulting in an inequitable voting system and the removal of authority from local hapū:

Waikato marae inland next to the river, make decisions for coastal marae because they outnumber them and Waikato-Tainui don’t have the capacity to go across all the rohe. So, they delegate not to hapū, which is the iwi, hapū, whānau thing, but to marae … our argument isn’t personal, it’s the Crown mechanism that made it like that, ‘oh, you’re all even’, but it’s like, this side is three hundred years old, that side is celebrating their hundredth-year anniversary! (Aroha)

A conformity seeps into post-settlement entities, generating new inequalities and distorting traditional relations between kin groups. Māori have an ambilineal kinship system such that descent is traced through a mixture of male and female links. This, coupled with ambilateral affiliation, means that Māori society has an extremely flexible kinship system (Van Meijl 2006) and overlapping interests and rights in land, though these are subject to the status of ahi kā [burning fires signifying continuous occupation] and the weighting given to eldest sibling chiefly lines. Unlike some of their Polynesian relatives, however, Māori did not have ascribed royal lineages, nor are some tribal members construed as descending from the gods while others emerge from the earth. The ethnographic record for Māori instead documents an expectation of mutuality and reciprocity expressed through kin group dynamics (Metge 2001, Wehi and Roa 2019). Indeed, it is the historic continuity of this expectation that is encountered in contemporary Māori critiques of new social hierarchies, a commentary that roots emergent inequalities in ongoing colonial bordering (McCormack 2018).

If a fence is conceived as the quintessential feature bordering western ownership of land, then the corresponding phenomenon in Māori society is pou whenua. While the former is concerned with exclusion, the latter is pivoted towards the creation and maintenance of relationships: between neighbouring kin groups, between ancestors and descendants and between people and environmental resources. Aroha explains: ‘pou whenua are not devoid from whakapapa [genealogy] or korero tuku iho [oral history]’. Wairere, the highest waterfall in the North Island of New Zealand is, in Ngāti Tamainupō narratives, a significant ancestor and pou whenua. Here Mahanga, Wairere’s father, reconciled with his enemies, baptized his son, united two whānau (extended families) and divided land between neighbouring hapū: ‘it was a peace-making gesture … our pou whenua is based on the gift of land’. Pou whenua can be carved posts, hills, streams, creeks or other natural features and, in contemporary Māori mapping, are represented by points or even feathers. These sites, however, do not link to create a continuous line distinguishing hapū territories, their significance lies, rather, in the sites in and of themselves, that is, their power emanates out.

As lines on a map in cartographic renderings, borders are associated with a particular history and ideology derived from post-Westphalian politics;⁴ one that reifies nation states, their territorial integrity and supreme sovereignty in exercising authority and violence (Linklater 1998). As lines, borders are thus a culturally specific political metaphor which work to both cut out and cut across messy geo-historical relationships, creating binary separations (Green 2018). In settler colonialism borders as lines are rooted in imperial expansions and the ongoing dissemination of a bundle of ideologies used to imagine and re-imagine settler states into being. This bordering is especially pronounced in times of emergency, as concessions to indigeneity become rapidly forsaken. In a priority report critiquing the government’s Covid-19 response, the Waitangi Tribunal identifies an active breach of the Treaty of Waitangi for political convenience, the prioritization of a generalist approach for fear of political backlash if special consideration were given to Māori and that, from the second half of 2021, Māori disproportionately risked being infected by the Delta variant of Covid-19 (Waitangi Tribunal 2021).

Indigenous borders can exist as traces; things which remain in the present, albeit minutely, as markers of events or memories serving to evoke the past and make sense of the future (Taussig 2008). Such borders are not fixed, nor can their temporality be confined to the present; they appear, disappear and reappear to interact with other times and other places (Radu 2012). Green (2018) usefully suggests an interpretation of borders as tidemarks; a metaphor which encompasses space and time, the materiality of lines and the symbolic significance of traces. Conceived as tide marks signalling pre-colonial social organization, pou whenua are mobilized to generate an account of hapū relationships that oppose settler colonial bordering of land, sea and kinship. This traction is apparent in recent Māori claims to the sea, wherein the novel concept of ‘shared exclusivity’ is being negotiated under the Marine and Coastal Area Act, 2011. Aroha explains: ‘We’ve identified all our neighbours through whanaungatanga [kin connections], through pou whenua. We’ve involved everybody that has that shared history, whakapapa [genealogical connection] to our harbour, our moana [sea].’ Her father, Atawhai, adds:

Borders cause you to get territorial and protect them, they don’t allow for korero, whakapapa and whanaungatanga. With borders, everybody is seen as trying to encroach without any detail of whakapapa. In Māoridom, it doesn’t matter who has taken the land, the mana is still there. You can take the physical, but not the spiritual.

Nation-making: kinship ideologies and ecologies

Settler colonialism is at its core a nation-building project, one which attempts to construct a social-political identity while erasing that which has gone before (Gillespie and Narayanan 2020). Rather than secular political ideologies, however, nationalism’s building blocks tend to draw on phenomena such as religion and kinship (Anderson 2006 [1983]). The type of kinship employed in settler nationalism has a strong Eurocentric bias, being premised on a cluster of principles rooted in blood relatedness, nuclear families and patriarchy (Herzfeld 2007, Denetdale 2020); a bordering which seeps into national policies as the generations of ‘stolen children’ in Canada, Australia and (unofficially) New Zealand, bear witness to. In New Zealand, this kinship ideology articulates with a rugged individualism, tenacious independence, ideology of ‘fairness’ and an early and comprehensive embrace of neoliberalism wherein attributes of self-reliance through accumulation prevail (McCreanor 2005, Lipson 2011 [1948]). As Eurocentric kinship, though, settler nationalism purports a superficial homogeneity, masking a considerable complexity in how kinship is understood and actioned. In Aotearoa, Māori kinship includes the extension of an ethic of care to social groups beyond the nuclear family to non-human species and nature. This expansion results in considerable diversity, positing alternatives to the uniformity imagined in settler nation-building.

The extension of kinship obligations to a dense network of relations is historically continuous in tribal organization. In Māori hapū, each whānau is considered to have a different though complementary role; some are considered ‘workers’, others are cooks, while others are seafood gatherers, hunters, or possess the cultural expertise to carry out ritual protocols. Activism or leadership in progressing Indigenous claims may also be considered the trait of a particular whānau. Learning the correct role features strongly in social reproduction. Manaia describes how her daughters were sent on an annual pilgrimage from Australia to New Zealand, and her pride when they mastered the diplomacy inherent in setting and serving the main table during ceremonial events, the ‘traditional’ role of her whānau. Children also spend extended time with bilateral kin to experience different kinship roles and dynamics, escape those at home, provide care for elders, for reasons of family poverty or structural violence. The emphasis placed on cultural repertoires in Anahere’s natal hapū contrast with the ‘action’ embraced by her father’s people, with the latter known for planting food, cooking, feeding people and building marae, however, ‘you won’t find them sitting on a paepae [orator’s bench], you won’t find them doing the karanga [ceremonial call], that’s not their space’. These key differences led to her six-year-old brother, a matakite (visionary), being sent to her father’s whānau to escape ‘all the spiritual here’.

Instilling a cultural experience of the environment is also embedded in social reproduction. Inia left her coastal hapū for fifteen years following the death of a significant elder, describing the move to Australia’s Gold Coast as instigated by the trauma of death and a desire to disconnect from familiar landscape and kin: ‘I didn’t know how to grieve in a place that meant so much’. Yet, in her child rearing practices she reinforced the importance of the ocean and forest in her hapū traditions, providing her children with a Māori experience of these environments:

I could still raise Kaha by the water, in the water. It was a different type of learning, but it was the same. You could go and get kai [food], do karakia [prayers] and still have pipi [a bivalve] and tuatua [a larger bivalve] … familiar things like patiki [flounder]. We could still go to the bush [forest], to the cold water, we placed ourselves in familiar upbringing territory.

Her husband’s extended kin provided additional cultural security: ‘they had a ropū [group] of sports, kapa haka [performing arts]’ and Inia introduced Te Reo Māori language classes using the rākau method, an approach centred around coloured Cuisenaire rods.

Identifying and constructing commensurable environments is also important in ethnic migrant narratives. Rojan describes the presence of mountains, rivers and valleys as connecting her home in New Zealand with her place of birth in the borderlands of Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Pakistan, where her family fled as refugees, is also reproduced as colourful patterning in her house’s furnishings. For Seema, however, unsettled colonial contestations over land position them as a ‘guest’, irrespective of their New Zealand citizenship and twenty-one years of residence. Their feelings of unease are specifically linked to the unequal distribution of power between the Crown and Māori and their desire that Māori governance and sovereignty not be constrained by a ‘commonwealth and empire idea of New Zealand’, inclusive of colonial legacies, racial exclusions and whiteness.

Rather than an autonomous individual within a contained family unit, Māori kinship infers ancestral presence, locating a person in time and space through whakapapa, taonga [material and non-material treasures], sacred places and the spiritual agency of non-human species (Salmond 2007, Sissons 2019). Indeed, environmental relations are forged in the idiom of kinship. Anahere explains, ‘we’re all the one whānau, though humans are on the lower scale. The scale at the top of us is the trees. Our tupuna [ancestor], Tane Mahuta, is a tree, older than us and we are just little underlings’. Mountains, rivers, fish, animals and birds are genealogically linked to their living descendants through whakapapa. Taniwha, for instance, are ancestors who have shapeshifted into stingrays, eels, owls or other creatures and who now act as environmental guardians or kaitiaki, appearing on significant occasions to provide resource abundance or to serve punishment when environmental mores have been transgressed (Schwimmer 1963, Kawharu 2000, Wareka 2020). Taniwha intercede in the worlds of their descendent kin, feature strongly in narratives of place, contemporary Māori art and in Indigenous claims to land, sea and resources.

Kinship ideologies mediate the relationship between humans and nature; Indigenous peoples extend kin relations to non-human species and environmental features whereas settler nationalism portends anthropocentrism, extraction, species decline and pollution (Whyte 2018b, Bacon 2019). These tensions are central to the co-evolving relationship between the state and Indigenous people. In New Zealand, Māori claims to land, fresh water, fisheries, forests, mountains, seascapes and more, are arguably as much about sovereignty, property and reparative justice as they are negotiations over environmental ontologies and epistemologies. Māori have achieved success in claiming rights to commercial and customary fisheries (1992, 1998) and to central north island forests (2008) while legal personhood has been granted to the Urewera forest (2014) and Whanganui River (2017). It is important, however, to pay attention to the type of rights and recognitions afforded as these develop through Indigenous settlements and other forms of state and civil recognition, often with contradictory results. Research on the settlement of Māori fisheries, the first significant pan-Māori environmental claim, traces how the settlement enabled significant Māori ownership of fishing quota concomitant with the financialization of traditional catch rights and the emergence of dependent sub-tribes, leaving little opportunity for fishing labour. The fisheries settlement has also raised questions about the type of sustainability operationalized in marine governance and its congruence, or otherwise, with Māori understandings of environmental maintenance and stewardship (McCormack 2017, Reid et al. 2019). In the Australian context, Wolfe (1994) shows how recognition is an othering device, a ‘repressive authenticity’ used to construct authentic and inauthentic Indigenous experiences, while Povinelli’s (2002) ‘cunning of recognition’ refers to the distortion of alterity in reconciliations.

A similar contradiction is evident in the bureaucratization of environmental science. Here, Indigenous knowledges emerge as ‘supplemental value’, that is, ‘ … as inputs for adding (i.e. supplementing) data that, scientific methods do not normally track’ (Whyte 2018a, pp. 62–63); a markedly temporal form of recognition and one that elides deeper engagement with the governance or self-determination struggles of Indigenous peoples (Ludwig 2016, Neale 2023). These frictions are also at play within local environmentalisms wherein Indigenous peoples are positioned as bearers of redemptive knowledge at the same time as they are perceived to obstruct conservational norms. Anahere describes her frustration with the intrusion of environmental groups on Karioi maunga (mountain), a significant ancestor and source of identity for her hapū. Parts of Karioi were set aside as a native reserve in 1855 and Māori owned land blocks continue to connect the mountain to the sea, reflecting the seasonal movements of people (Ellison 2012). A community group now vies for authority on Karioi, receiving funding for pest management from Arocha, an international conservation NGO espousing a Christian ethos. The group’s vision is to restore ‘biodiversity from Maunga ki te moana’ (the mountain to the sea) and while attempts are made to include Māori concepts, restore taonga species (culturally significant native species) and consultation occurs with tangata whenua, this is experienced as piecemeal, ‘tokenism’ and undertaken for strategic purposes, ‘they don’t have respect, they don’t have ears’. Further, the type of conservation work implemented is at odds with Māori practices, ‘if there’s a little pekapeka [native bat] sitting there, leave him alone that’s his habitat. You don’t have to tag him and annoy him … we already know he’s there'. Anahere’s hapū withdrew their support from the environmental group when, despite requests, pekapeka was identified in a recent funding application as in need of protection.

There is a community of people who feel like they are close to nature and they’ve appropriated Māori thinking, Māori worldviews and they are using this to appear as if they are the kaitiaki (environmental custodians) in funding applications … they tap into Māori land because that’s where all the pests and all the taonga are, the untouched land, because most of the other [non-Māori] land has been stripped of all the native stuff. (Anahere)

An indigenizing of settler discourse in treaty settlements and environmental spheres, irrespective of incongruities, may denote the emergence of a postcolonial nationhood (Johnson 2011); a peculiar form of nationhood in which the state draws on the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (primarily white settlers) to inform colonial reconciliations, bring about a post-colonial future and frame the incorporation of new immigrants who are neither Indigenous nor white. Post-colonial nationhood, in this synopsis, signifies an affective shift away from former imperial metropoles, though it neither disturbs existing power discrepancies nor the fundamental character of settler colonialism.

Such dissonance is apparent in New Zealand’s response to Covid-19. During the pandemic, the phrase ‘team of five million’ became a state mantra, providing a point of contrast from the disunity perceived overseas (particularly the United Kingdom and America), as well as a means to coalesce the internal population. Indigenous culture featured, for example, in calls for lockdowns to be translated in terms of the Māori concept of rāhui (ritual prohibition on the use of resources) (Parahi 2020, Rewi and Hastie 2021) or in the daily 1 pm government briefings which included an incidental use of Te Reo (Māori language) (Beattie and Priestley 2021) and appeals to protect the health of whānau (extended families). Nation-making, as noted, is also a form of erasure; the absence of Māori health experts or community leaders speaking at the daily briefings was notable, prompting a critique that these were merely an ‘exercise in whiteness’, or that the Covid-19 public health response was designed around Pākehā (white European) culture and predominantly for Pākehā consumption (Jones 2020). Indeed, Covid-19 exacerbated existing inequalities in health; Māori have suffered more infections, more deaths and their vaccination uptake is lower than the national average (Taonui 2021). This vaccine disparity is rooted in inequities in access to vaccine sites, an age sequencing plan which favoured an older European demographic, and a lack of targeted public health messaging (Whitehead 2022). Three of our Māori participants remained unvaccinated during the pandemic, a decision arising from their experience of institutional racism in health provisioning and injustices perpetuated by the colonial state. Pertinent too was a feeling of discomfort over the extension of vaccine mandates into Māori ceremonial spaces and centres of learning. A lag in the uptake of vaccines by Māori was compounded by an unequal weighting of risks. Māori (and Pacific peoples) are more likely to work in blue collar jobs deemed essential to the pandemic economy, live in over-crowded houses, socialize in extended families and be targeted as vectors of the virus (Ma’ia’i 2020). Similarly, in Australia, Covid-19 restrictions were found to reflect ‘particular national histories of privilege, containment, and exclusion’ (Wynn 2021, p. 356).

That settler nationhood now contains a semblance of Indigenous culture does not imply that the legacy of settler-colonial bordering has been dismantled. Indeed, conceived as a binary relation, indigeneity in New Zealand is still entangled with the role, both symbolic and material, of the British Crown, its representatives, institutions and governance (Sissons 2005, Shore and Williams 2019). And, while the precise location of an imperial imaginary may shift, the bordering inherent in its progression is continuous, that is, boundaries around ownership, kinship, race, nation, nature and society continue to embed settler colonial political economies, dispossessions and worldviews. It is also possible that racial boundaries have strengthened and sharpened; at least half of New Zealand’s Māori, Pacific and Asian populations have reported experiencing more racism and discrimination since the start of the pandemic (Thaker 2021).

The arrival of the Delta variant of coronavirus in mid-2021 signalled the end of New Zealand’s elimination strategy, changes in public health messaging, confusions over new restrictions and a general pandemic malaise. This was the context for a steep increase in the popularity and intensity of disinformation and other forms of ‘dangerous speech’ related to far-right movements. Anti-Covid restriction protests became events through which this messaging was disseminated, largely under the auspices of cries for ‘freedom’ and notions of ‘sovereign citizenship’ – a peculiar, American form of anti-government ideology. This ‘protest citizenship’ (Hodge 2019) was localized through the appropriation of key ancestors, markers and symbols of Māori decolonial movements; hīkoi (peaceful marches), haka (Māori war dances) and emblematic Māori sovereignty flags mingled uneasily with wellness gurus, swastikas and pro-Trump signs at anti-Covid restriction protest camps. Research now shows how these tactics acted as a ‘trojan horse’ pushing followers towards ‘more violently exclusive, supremist, xenophobic, racist, far-right and extremist ideologies’ (Hannah et al. 2022, p. 15). Sovereign citizenship, a radically individualized doctrine, distorts the collective, kin-based understandings of sovereignty common in Māori movements (see Walker 1990).

The largest anti-Covid restriction protest occurred in February 2022, during which some 1000 people occupied parliament house in Wellington (the seat of government), many of whom remained camped on the grounds for up to three weeks. While the original focus of the occupation was vaccine mandates, an issue which united a plethora of diverse interests, this increasingly gave way to far-right narratives, radicalizations, extremisms and violence (Hannah et al. 2022). The presence of Māori protestors at the occupation was a deeply unsettling phenomena. Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara, a Māori researcher, activist and online monitor of white supremacy in Aotearoa, tweeted ‘it is sad for me to see all our Māori, many disaffected, left out, kept unemployed, constantly imprisoned, shut out of housing, now being drawn into this to be cannon fodder on the front line … ’ (23 February 2022); a disenfranchisement exacerbated by the decades long entrenchment of neoliberalism in New Zealand’s institutions and political economy. Meanwhile, in an online discussion forum,⁵ four Māori leaders and experienced activists – Tina Ngata, Sina Brown-Davis, Arama Rata and Emily Tuhi Ao-Bailey – described the far-right ideologies underpinning the occupation as being antithetical to the legacy of Māori protests, irrespective of a visual co-option of Māori symbols, language and traumatized peoples. Central to this legacy is a respect for mana whenua (customary authority over land, eloquently described by Inia, her mother Marama and Anahere above [pg 7]) and the enactment of kinship relations. Taranaki Whānui, the iwi who hold mana whenua over the occupation ground, condemned the impact on their land, the vandalism of their marae, and the harassment of local people, including Māori elders (Radio New Zealand 2022). Of critical concern was an insidious attempt by protest leaders to ‘become community’ for disempowered Māori, variously alienated from hapū structures, through tactics such as ‘love bombing’, a method which manipulates trauma by evoking emotional extremes (Tina Ngata, Indigenous Pacific Uprising, 2022).

The subversion of Māori cultural markers and co-option of disenfranchized peoples reflects, we suggest, the propensity for settler colonial bordering practices to usurp Indigenous symbology and extract Indigenous labour. Arendt (1968), a proto-postcolonial thinker, observed some half a century ago that colonizers are ‘functionaries of violence’, defining themselves, over time, both by their opposition to a constraining nation state and by their brutal subjugation of natives in the conquered territory. Calls for violence against Māori politicians, activists and medical professionals and a general anti-Māori sentiment is, as we write, notably increasing (Sherman 2022).

An uptick in racism in New Zealand cannot be divorced from the promulgation of a national version of kinship in which relations with others are derived from notions of biological relatedness. This one-dimensional belonging is rendered quantifiable in settler colonies in measurements of ‘blood quantum’, a spurious calculation of Indigenous identity based on hereditary traits and skin colour. Blyton (2022) traces the imperial intellectualism underlying this idea in Australia to the English school of eugenics while Kauanui (2008) shows how blood quantum calculations not only create new internal discriminations amongst Hawaiians but also inform hierarchical distinctions within Hawaii’s diverse society. In New Zealand, blood quantum measures were abolished in the national census in 1986, though their influence remains in public and political discourses, ‘where it is not uncommon for Māori rights and sense of peoplehood to be challenged on the premise that no Māori full-bloods exist’ (Kukutai 2011, p. 48). This construction of identity, an explicitly racialized form of recognition, is undermined by evidence which variously roots Indigenous identity in kinship, tribal structures, genealogies, ancestors, ritual practices, connections with land and sea, livelihoods and cross-cultural engagements (Moeke-Pickering 1996, Hau‘ofa 2008, Kauanui 2008). Atawhai, describing his heritage, comments, ‘I’m a full Māori, I’m a full Pākehā, I’m a full Tongan, I don’t cut my tupuna [ancestors] in half, I love them all.’

Kinship is critical to nation building. This relation takes on a particular dynamic in settler nationalism as, for Indigenous peoples, much of everyday life and every ceremonial event remains expressed in utterly different kinship terms to those institutionalized through nation statehood. By conceptualizing this tension in terms of borders, we draw attention to the expansiveness of Māori belonging as inclusive of multiple relatives, ubiquitous ancestors, animal species and environmental features and contrast this with the relatively closed boundaries characterizing Eurocentric kinship. This suggests an interpretation of colonial bordering as one which works to excise categories of kin. A silencing of Māori kinship collectivities, a politically progressive and liberal other, however, is most alarmingly present in recent amplifications of far-right rhetoric spurred by the circulation of disinformation during Covid-19. Observing a connection between threats to settler safety and the emergence of border violence, we now turn to the positioning and possibilities of ethnic minority migrant and non-white peoples in the settler-Indigenous binary.

Migratory histories: forging new alliances

The ways in which national borders are experienced varies enormously according to hierarchies of citizenship, wealth, ethnicity, ‘race’ and learned practices of border navigation. In Aotearoa, practices of securitization and citizenship hierarchies underscore the nation-state as a sovereign entity where colonial history, including the power of whiteness, deepens lines of exclusion and disadvantage. These practices included strict controls of entry and exit during the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic, challenges on movement during lockdown, limited availability for return or for migration and the prioritizing of premium Covid-19 vaccines for local populations. The effect of these differing practices of exclusion and differentiation were most clearly articulated by our participants who identified as migrants.

Our discussion with migrants fell into two groups. Firstly, those who had migrated to New Zealand during their lifetime and understood their own histories, identity and relationship to society through varying frames of othering and exclusions. Secondly, Indigenous Māori women who, living as migrants in nearby Australia, experienced a newly fractured relationship to their homes in Aotearoa under pandemic border regimes. In both migrant categories, participants shared histories that dispute the highly symbolic power of settler colonial histories and their associated reliance on whiteness as a racial category and as a foundation of national identity. When their stories are held in tension with the securitization of borders during the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic, they highlight, firstly, the ways in which colonial histories are interlaced with ethnic and racial identities to legitimize the use of legal and bureaucratic instruments and displace Indigenous rights and sovereignties (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Secondly, these stories speak to both actual and potential alliances between colonialized and migrant peoples.

Novel forms of border management in reaction to Covid-19 both visualized and amplified existing securitization processes occurring in protective, settler colonial nation-states. New Zealand and Australia both closed their borders to the world in March of 2020, allowing only citizens and permanent residents to gain entry to the nation’s ports and airports. This isolation continued in the tradition of using strict visa controls, coastal guards and relying on the deterrence of dangerous waters to almost eliminate illegal migration. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s environmental protectionist management system, which famously requires incoming visitors to discard most food and wood products and produce their shoes for cleaning, was increasingly conflated in everyday border imaginaries with the containment of human others. Such conflation is evident in forms of right-wing white ‘environmentalism’ or ‘eco-fascism’ as espoused by the Christchurch Mosque shooter in 2019. It is also evident in more latent, widespread racism that emerges as acceptance or disinterest in today’s criminalization processes that treat people of colour as suspicious and dangerous in locations of border crossing (Lesser 2010, Ross and Bevensee 2020). Such management practices can reflect anxieties about the relationship between the nation and nature, the environment and safety (Kurian and Munshi 2006). This is evident in, for example, the targeting of some populations at the airport for additional screening, the restriction on returnees from India during the Covid-19 pandemic and discourses that conflate citizenship with the ability to speak English.

The power of whiteness to underpin the experience of citizenship and belonging is apparent in Seema’s reflection on using their New Zealand passport. While they noted the passport gave them easier access to other nations coded as ‘white’, such as Germany or Australia.

Culturally, it doesn’t change a thing … the prospect of going into the heart of whiteness is very daunting, to go to places that are coded as white or occupied by white folks. The irony is that I live in such a place! Even though I’m a citizen of this country, I don’t feel like it. I still feel like the border is hanging over my head. (Seema)

Bringing up the example of the political community of the British commonwealth, Seema reflected that the coded ‘white’ countries had preferential movement and that non-white subjects could be a ‘functional economic contributor’ but ‘not one of the white subjects, you have all these restrictions, barriers, these frictions, this arbitrary exclusion’.

As a racial concept, whiteness grants opportunities, creates burdens and marks off people differently, an exclusion which also emerged in Mania’s account of her daughters lives in Australia: ‘my oldest struggled, she’s darker and she looks definitely Māori, my youngest is fairer … she got in the peer groups quite easily’. Aroha points to an association in New Zealand between skin colour gradients and feelings of exclusion. Two of her children have her lighter skin colouring while two have her husband’s:

… and they’re like, ‘I wish we were more like Moses’. Why is that? ‘Because you and Moses are tanned.’ As if tanned was an ethnic group! We go, what do you mean? ‘Because we are Māori and you guys are tanned’. I thought oh my goodness, what the heck? Well, we could be tanned Pākehā and they were always just Māori all day.

Michelle, although identifying herself as of Scottish and British heritage, also rejected the fallacy of imaging Imperial Britain as a historical and political homeland of New Zealand with corresponding white hierarchies: ‘English people think they’re the centre of the universe, they really do … whiteness as insulating me from something’.

Offering an alternative to these conflations of environment, protection and whiteness, some interviewees spoke about how the environments of foreign landscapes provided them with a sense of home or belonging. When Seema found connections, it was with the physical environment, such as in their time in north Australia’s tropical climate which ‘we feel very comfortable in … a sense of home’. Inia found the beaches of Queensland in Australia to provide an environment that mimicked that of her home in Aotearoa, while Rojan recreated familiar colours and patterns to foster home on foreign land, ‘if you go inside my house, you will see a lot of colourful patterns, I feel like I’m back in Pakistan, I take my safe zone with me everywhere I go’.

Gibbons’s (2002) analysis of an assumed ‘New Zealand’ identity highlights how such identity claims can continue the work of colonization against Indigenous claims, while also falsely marking off New Zealand as isolated from the world. Michelle explains: ‘my father, like many white bogan,⁶ settler colonist, New Zealanders … he's forgotten any other belongings he might have had in order that he can just belong in New Zealand’. For Rojan, ‘the hardest borders are the metaphorical ones’, and boundaries around religion and ethnicity are burdens. Naming her son and first-born child the word for ‘border’ in Persian, Rojan claimed that borders should be places of meeting, an interpretation also signalled in Māori mobilizations of pou whenua. Seema, meanwhile, felt ambivalent about their relationship to New Zealand as a form of ‘home’ or ‘identity’, describing themselves as ‘rootless’ and living with a heightened sense of the politics of belonging, ‘the kind of gut feeling of not being from here and the kind of conscious feeling of being a guest on this land’.

Seema’s detachment from a national identity and their ambivalence to prominent forms of national belonging inflected their discussion with a political critique that dissected the assumptions of the securitized New Zealand state. Drawing on their maps, Seema drew thick green lines encircling all continents, linking them together and emphasizing their interconnectedness. Those ethnic migrants who had experienced significant political upheaval in their lives drew their stories of fractured national belonging into an articulated sense of identity, viewing their own positions in the world as ‘in-between’ or even as a living border – a shifting ground where oppositions meet. Among these participants there was a greater readiness to imagine the world as borderless and, at times, an ideological commitment to a world where oppressive and racist qualities of national borders were done away with.

In local Pacific histories the ocean is not a ‘barrier’ around Aotearoa but instead the ‘highways’ of migration, trade and circulation enabling cultural continuity (Gibbons 2003, Hau‘ofa 2008). Mere drew lines of connection across her map, selecting a map of the Pacific islands and using different colours to illustrate journeys taken by her relatives across the Pacific. Aatamai drew green lines of migration on her map across the Pacific Ocean, stretching from Hawai’i, through Samoa, Tonga and down to Aotearoa. She spoke of different kinds of national borders based on her understanding of ‘wellbeing’ and shared history. For Pacific Island nations, Atamai proposed that borders be more ‘lenient’ in terms of travel to New Zealand, something that had been restricted under Covid-19. In discussing China’s growing presence in the region, however, Atamai perceived borders as a defensive mechanism against Chinese expansion. In this context, Atamai comments: ‘what we’re seeing in the Pacific region is a real muddled boundary line about, you know, who sets the boundaries … that address the wellbeing, the human rights of people?’

Māori migrants with whom we spoke were three among the approximately one in six Māori who live and work in Australia (Pool and Kukutai 2018). These large numbers cannot be divorced from the generational dispossession, discrimination and disadvantage Māori experience in Aotearoa. Australia offers financial opportunities with significantly higher wages across a range of employment sectors. Inia explains, ‘you have a bit more coin in your pocket’. Yet, there is a cost in moving. Manaia reflects on the affective labour involved in upholding connections with her Māori culture and kin, noting, on visiting New Zealand, that her daughters, ‘really struggled they were less Māori than the Pākehā girls and the white girls because they had lost a lot of stuff … I’d send them back every year after that to get that … ’.

Moving to Australia also offers a form of distancing from the ramifications of state management of Māori populations. Manaia describes her own move to Australia as an escape from gang violence and family discord in Hamilton, noting that these problems emerge from a history of managing Māori according to colonial borders. This containment she exemplifies with reference to an aukati line, a border initially established by Māori in the mid-nineteenth century colonial land wars to mark off settler advances from Māori-held territories. This line was re-appropriated in the state management of Māori populations over generations, engendering spaces, Manaia, observes, known for alcohol abuse and impoverishment. Moving to Australia, however, was only ever meant to be a form of visiting: ‘I never wanted to become a citizen over there [Australia] … I felt like I was cheating on my being Māori’. Similarly, Inia refuses to acknowledge the citizenship of her Australian born children, ‘ … it doesn’t mean that they are what the paper says. It’s not where their whakapapa is’.

The hazards and risks of migration came to the fore during Covid-19 border closures. Of course, Covid-19 border management was an expression of securitization based on the outside threat of a deadly virus. This is a disease to which Indigenous populations in Aotearoa (and Australia) are more vulnerable owing to ongoing disparities in health outcomes, life expectancy and chronic conditions as a legacy of colonial violence and dispossession. Participants were at once largely supportive of the ‘strong stand’ on borders at the same time as being distressed at the great cost of separation. This dissonance was particularly emotive when cultural practices surrounding death disrupted collective mourning rituals. It is pertinent too in the truncation of care imbuing social reproduction. Manaia describes visiting one of her daughters now resident in New Zealand,

I went out on the first flight that opened, stayed for 28 days, got back just in time [before borders closed again]. … the saddest thing was when I was watching my daughter and she didn’t know how to bathe her baby properly … all those things that she didn’t get a chance for me to pass on.

Māori participants living in Australia discussed their unequal rights and restricted opportunity in gaining Australian citizenship. Meanwhile, their ability to travel to New Zealand was curtailed during the pandemic, creating an emotional, moral and sometimes spiritual sense of loss and dislocation. For Mere, state borders are experienced in terms of containment and restriction, evoking a profound source of stress as she navigates issues of citizenship, access to health services and the potential for a safety net in Australia. Recent and ongoing legacies of the brutal removal of migrants, such as the 1970s dawn raids on Pacific migrants in New Zealand or the current incarceration of visa-overstayers and those accused of petty crimes in Australia, creates an alternative experience of everyday policing, safety and inclusion. Similarly, asked to describe what ‘borders’ meant to them, Seema replied that while living in Aotearoa: ‘my instinctive psychological reaction is threat, unsafety … so the border is not like a physical line, but a threat that I would be, my life would be, destabilised once we crossed the border, it was conditional’.

The settler-colonial management of borders in New Zealand reflects international imaginaries of taming remote and exotic colonies into contained spaces of civilized control. As elsewhere, this form of bordering appears as visas, passports, citizenship, policing and border patrols which are firmly scaffolded to racial hierarchies laid and built upon colonial legacies and violence in the protection of whiteness (Mbembé and Meintjes 2003). As Trouillot (2003) argues, though, containment, civilization and conquering narratives are ever troubled by alternative practices of bordering and boundary making. In New Zealand, Indigenous and migrant narratives reflect other international expressions of sociality across politicized borders (Ong 2003, Jusionyte 2018), whilst offering critical insights into particular local dynamics and the potential for disruption held in these alternative alliances.

Post-pandemic futures

This essay engages scholarship on borders to interrogate the trajectory of settler colonialism in Aotearoa, using bordering practices during Covid-19 as a point of departure. The relative safety offered by border regime closures promised to ease uncertainty surrounding our perilous futures, yet it did so by extending settler nation building into more intimate areas of life. While justified in terms of crisis management, state expressions of citizen care during the pandemic were largely modelled on phenomena suggestive of a particular conflation of nature, society and economy peculiar to settler colonialism.

As authors we are at once assuaged that the bundle of measures adopted resulted in relatively fewer illnesses and deaths as well as extended periods with no community spread (Summers 2020) but, at the same time, are acutely aware of differential experiences of the pandemic modelled on pre-existing lines of discrimination. Conceptualizing this in terms of borders allows for four advances: First, it situates the Covid-19 pandemic as structure rather than event (Sahlins 1985, Wolfe 2006) accentuating historical patterns of nation-making. Second, it underscores continuities in Indigenous relations of ownership, belonging, social reproduction, kinship ethics and environmental relations. Third, it suggests alliances between migrants, non-white and colonized peoples; those for whom borders do not remain at the periphery, but rather penetrate deep into the informal spaces of the everyday. And fourth, it recalibrates resistances as expressions of sociality aimed at disrupting settler state bordering of nature, economy and society. Post-pandemic futures, the call in disaster responses to ‘build back better’, contends with an era of global crises where solutions to complex problems largely involve capitalist restructuring and retrenching (Sultana 2021). In this context, the provocations for border change at various scales presented in this essay offer alternative embers for social innovation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Interdisciplinary Collaboration Research Grant from the University of Waikato. Ethics Approval was granted by the Division of Arts, Law, Psychology and Social Sciences, Human Research Ethics Committee (FS2021-51).

Notes

1 Managed Isolation and quarantine facilities, largely refurbished hotels, were a pivotal component of New Zealand’s Covid-19 response. Capacity was an ongoing problem and many citizens were effectively unable to return.

2 Some of the iwi checkpoints, however, came to be somewhat supported by police, especially during the second comprehensive lockdown in August 2021.

3 These are settlements negotiated between Māori iwi (tribes) and the Crown over transgressions of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.

4 The Peace of Westphalia refers to two treaties signed in 1648 in Münster and Osnabrück which codified the co-existence of religious differences in terms of strict borders and national sovereignties (Linklater 1998).

5 Indigenous Pacific Uprising live #049, 23 February 2022. https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=search&v=371334757858659.

6 The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘bogan’ as an informal, derogatory Australian, New Zealand term used to describe ‘An uncouth or unsophisticated person regarded as being of low social status’.