Debating Devolution and Tribalism

The discussions and debates of the later 1980s about the intersections between Rogernomics and rangatiratanga, between devolution and duping, have raged ever since. Some participants added a twist to that main strand of original opposition to devolution which saw the devolving of authority to Maori institutions as a tool for appropriating tribal energies to the service of rightwing capitalist restructuring imperatives. Rather than devolution proposals having reflected an attempt by neoliberalism to take advantage of iwi, it was contended, tribalism had been enhanced or even ‘reinvented’ by new-right sympathisers within the Maori world even before Labour took office.

In such a view, the politics of cultural identity (‘culturalism’) obscured (and continues to obscure) the real problems faced by the majority of Maori: poverty and class oppression. A new Maori leadership was said to have emerged, one which found scope for personal advancement in reviving badly ailing tribes or inventing new ones out of the ruins of the old (or even out of nowhere). These new leaders had entered the ‘middle class’ in the post-war period, and found in the concept of tribalism a vehicle to further their careers in the world of business and management – one with potential access, moreover, to the resources still owned by the ‘old tribes’. They opted, it was argued, to create capitalistic ‘neotribes’ upon the ruins of a remnant tribalism rather than campaign for Maori progress on the basis of commonalities with pakeha workers, a task for which the Maori collective outlook was particularly suited.

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Such arguments had some resonance with far left positions taken in the years after the war, insofar as they elevated class over race, and even more so with the once common pakeha perspective that urbanisation and modernity had detribalised Maori. Those presenting such views claimed that, along with their pakeha supporters, Maori engaging in tribal revival and ‘identity politics’ were establishing ‘fundamentally different social structures’ from those of the ‘redistributive and non-accumulatory’ traditional tribes. In the 1980s, these professional Maori elites were exploring (it was argued) ways of taking these processes of retribalisation, together with associated indigenous ‘identity politics’, onto a new plane: the role of elites in ‘the accumulatory competitive environment of capitalism’ would be enhanced if they could negotiate the acquisition of state power and resources for their neotribal institutions.

Similar developments were said to have occurred among indigenous peoples in North America and elsewhere. Those who ‘were to become a neotribal comprador bourgeoisie’ in New Zealand through exploiting their own people were depicted as the equivalents of elite collaborators with the colonial Crown and its settlers. In such a view, the ethnicised discourses of the 1980s (and ever since) have masked class inequalities and diverted a mostly working-class population away from its best interests. With ‘Bi-culturalism co-opted by [the] New Right’, as the title of one article put it, tribes were said to resemble increasingly corporate agents of neotribal capitalism.

Such critiques struck at the heart of the pakeha liberal alliance with Maoritanga that had been forged during the beginnings of the Maori Renaissance. They presented the Maori leaders’ exploration of devolution with the fourth Labour government as setting large numbers on pathways along which cultural ‘revivalism becomes subverted within the interaction with capitalism, becoming integral to capitalist hegemony by providing the ideological concealment of the imposition of exploitative class relations’. On the allegedly false basis that contemporary tribes were the legitimate inheritors of traditional tribal forms, it was argued, the new elites gained control of Maori collectivities in the name of Treaty partnership. In subsequently gaining access to both indigenous property and Crown resources, such elites were said to have dispossessed both urban Maori and the exploited ‘workers-in-community within the new tribes’. This has supposedly led to a situation where ‘[p]roperty-owning corporate tribes are now the structures for wealth accumulation and distribution, and for class formation’, and ‘capital-labour political relations’ have been re-sited in ‘the depoliticised mode of regulation of the tribe’. All such developments are said to have been greatly boosted as a result of the Labour government’s decision to open discussions with Maori on its devolution proposals: the relatively few class-based critics, during the 1980s, of these interactions are seen to have subsequently been vindicated.

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Such views have been vigorously rejected on many grounds, especially from within Maoridom – including by those who are, nevertheless, uneasy about managerialist trends within their tribal authorities. Most critics of the ‘neotribe argument’ would, however, concede that, with prosperity collapsing in the 1970s as a result of the retraction of the global economy, some of the new Maori professionals had worked to create new collective entities in the cities and/or turned to managerialist models and laissez-faire economics. A number had even taken neoliberal messages back to their tribal bases (which clearly existed!), determined to set their people on the capitalist path. Many of the Maori professional elites had firmly embraced the new-style Labour government and sought to maximise their advantages in the discussions and negotiations it had offered. The urban education which had assisted many indigenous New Zealanders into the activism of the Maori Renaissance, then, had taken others to positions of influence from which they sought to align tribalism, however defined and constituted, with neoliberalism.²⁶

As Maori commentators and various scholars have noted, however, those claiming the existence of the capitalist neotribe, and of a ‘tribal fundamentalism’ that disempowers and appropriates from urbanised and modernised Maori, have exhibited a shaky hold on post-war history. For it is clear that modern tribes are indeed contemporary manifestations of continuously existing (if reconfiguring) tribal entities, despite the complications of urban migration. It is equally apparent that most urban-dwelling Maori of migrant background know their iwi, hapu and whanau, can and do participate in their affairs, and retain linkages with home marae. More broadly, tribal members (including those who live away from their home marae or tribal rohe) are far from the passive subjects of exploitation by ‘neotribal’ elites, as they have been depicted. Maori observers have noted that their own people, by free choice, opted to pursue the ‘politics of indigeneity’.

They observe, too, that it was Maori collectivities which made the decision, in the wake of the Maori Renaissance, to select iwi (however subdued some tribes might have been after mid-century) as the primary vehicles of discussion and negotiation with the Crown. When they had commanded sufficient resources, the Hui Taumata had declared, Maori themselves would ‘provide the most appropriate and effective programmes’ for their people. Pending that eventuality, many Maori collectivities chose the tribal route for dealing with the state to assist them to acquire, increase and distribute the necessary resources. This, it was noted, was far from either ‘tribal fundamentalism’ or ‘neotribalism’; it was self-determination.

There were (and are) many variations to the debate about how modern rangatiratanga could and should be effected. Whatever the validity of claims regarding a nexus between such actual or imagined things as ‘tribalpage 219 fundamentalism’, neoliberalism, urban Maori disenfranchisement and neotribalism, they do serve as a reminder that interpretations based upon culture and ethnicity cannot be divorced from broader socio-economic and class considerations. The 1980s processes of seeking vehicles for incorporating rangatiratanga in major and meaningfully ways into a capitalist state, especially one buffeted by political and economic efforts to meet the demands of a national and international restructuring of capitalism, provided difficult challenges to those attempting, whatever their motivations, to empower Maori people, enhance their culture and promote their worldview.

When corporatisation entered the political agenda, an anthropologist has recently noted, the ‘historic aim of Maori self-determination [was] rapidly becoming the prominent issue’ in New Zealand: the movements for both rangatiratanga and economic restructuring picked up great momentum almost simultaneously. Any analysis that sees in Maori developments of the time and subsequently, however, the hidden triumph of neoliberal ideology masquerading as bicultural sensitivity can only make sense in reference to the primary devolutionary mode chosen – rather than to the aims and intents of the great majority of Maoridom. One alternative mode, the hapu, once believed by many scholars to have become virtually defunct, had its supporters as the vehicle for devolution; and the localised whanau-like organisations of Tu Tangata also worked well for their own purposes. But both Crown and Maori leaders, while not discarding the worth of large numbers of localised, district-level or regionalised ‘empowerments’, favoured more ambitious and overarching arrangements. Many Maori, including those in the cities, appreciated the enormous gains for rangatiratanga which it might be possible to negotiate under an iwi-based model.

In summary, to see tribal (or ‘retribal’) leaderships as either dupes of international capitalism or in its service might be a useful exercise for analytical purposes or for establishing hypotheses to interrogate. But it disregards or downplays a great deal of counter evidence, ignoring (for example) the huge tensions and difficulties that Maori leaders experienced when dealing with the ministers and officials pursuing the right-wing economic agenda of the fourth Labour government (and its National successor from 1990); people who had little understanding of, or empathy for, Maori autonomist aspirations and goals. Such an analysis also fails to take cognisance of Maori leaders’ attempts to counteract politicians’ and officials’ schemes to utilise indigenous institutional forms and procedures for their own ends, which, needless to say, were little to do with rangatiratanga.

A Maori Labour minister later noted that when ‘iwi organisations first started dealing with government agencies, the structure of the government tended to dictate the structure of the runanga’. Numbers of officially franchised runangapage 220 soon came to resemble ‘mini-governments’ which were far from ‘accountable to the [Maori] community’, and many of their members protested at such developments. From the beginning of the devolution discussions, in fact, the Maori struggle for ‘complete authority over themselves and the country’s key resources of land, fisheries, waterways and minerals’ did not sit easily with the politicians and officials – however much their deregulatory pronouncements held out promise of fulfilling rangatiratanga. In the final analysis, there was a clash of worldviews, of collective versus individualist ways of doing things, between Crown and Maori, and high barriers to Maori success in the pursuit of rangatiratanga remained.²⁷