New Zealand Maori: The Quest for Indigenous Autonomy

Abstract

The indigenous Maori of New Zealand, like their counterparts in other jurisdictions, express a holistic inseparability from the land: they are tangata whenua, ‘people of the land’. But most of their land had been lost to the colonisers by 1900, and only a small proportion of it has been returned through reparational negotiations between tribes and governments over the last 25 years. These negotiations have mostly now been concluded, and thus there is no prospect of the return of significant land areas in the foreseeable future. Moreover, these areas have been transferred to tribes as land, unaccompanied by constitutional concessions in such areas as governance, law and policing; and in any case, most Maori now live in urban areas, far from their tribal homelands. From the Maori perspective, however, the negotiations have been overarched by a quest to restore that which was promised in the nation's foundational Treaty of Waitangi in 1840—their rangatiratanga, loosely translatable as autonomy. The article examines the prospects for self-determination within contexts of tribal landlessness and mass urbanisation. It explores ways in which tribal leaderships are in the process of forging forms of autonomy which, while non-territorial, are meaningful to the tangata whenua precisely because of indigenous understandings of the concepts of tangata, whenua and rangatiratanga.

Notes

1. ^.For the best general history of New Zealand, see James Belich's two-volume Making peoples (1996) and Paradise reforged (2001); for an accessible single volume coverage, refer to Michael King's The Penguin history of New Zealand (2003).

2. ^.New Zealand is an independent Realm within the Commonwealth, a constitutional monarchy whose head of state is Queen Elizabeth II in her capacity as ‘the Queen in Right of New Zealand’. In New Zealand, the state is both officially and generally referred to as ‘the Crown’, a shorthand for ‘the Crown in Right of New Zealand’. Maori place great emphasis on the concept of the Crown, which they call upon to honour the promises it made to them in the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. For an extended interpretation of developing Crown–Maori relationships during the twentieth century, see Hill (2004, 2009).

3. ^.For an elaboration of some of the issues discussed in this article, see Hill (2012).

4. ^.Definitions of what the tribes are and what constitutes a tribe are many and variable. The tribal location maps in The Oxford history of New Zealand, for example, reflected a nineteenth-century official perspective (Oliver & Williams, 1981, pp. 464–465). In the 1992 updating of that work (Rice, 1992), an extra dozen had been added. The New Zealand historical atlas (McKinnon, 1997), which had significant Maori input into its production, worked on the basis of related tribal clusters in broad regions, with overlapping boundary areas.

5. For purposes of transparency, it should be noted that the author of this article was a member of the Waitangi Tribunal panel which produced the report under discussion.

6. Maori scholars and tribal leaders, for example, have developed close links with a number of indigenous communities in the Northern Hemisphere, including with Sámi people (see Falch, Selle, & Strømsnes, 2015); some of the ideas and developments in such communities have resonance within New Zealand's indigenous discourses.