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Introduction

The first half of this book focuses on the New Zealand state’s longstanding aim of fully assimilating Maori to ‘European’ modes of behaviour and ways of viewing the world.¹ In the earliest days of the colony, the Crown sought the ‘amalgamation of the races’. This was so much on the state’s terms that it amounted, in essence, to assimilation. Official terminology changed from time to time, but by the 1950s the state’s policy of ‘integration’ into broader New Zealand society remained – certainly in Maori eyes – scarcely distinguishable from the goal of assimilation. Early Crown and settler propaganda about amalgamation and equality had proven to be a seemingly benevolent cloak for the alienating of indigenous resources and the disappearing of indigenous culture that typified colonisation everywhere. Despite the occasional changes in labelling, in fact, the goal of full assimilation remained in place until the 1970s. But Maori had never lost hope of retaining or restoring ways of controlling their own destiny. Tribal society, moreover, had proved inventive, dynamic and resilient in its many organised responses to colonisation and pakeha politico-cultural domination. And so the Crown had needed constantly to delay and compromise over its assimilationist policies and aspirations for Maoridom.²

During the Second World War, tribally-based and other Maori organisations had achieved semi-autonomy through the Maori War Effort Organisation, and their leaders struggled to continue and further develop this in peacetime. But as the war neared its end and the Maori contribution became less imperative for the state’s war aims, the Labour government became increasingly alarmed at the ramifications of what was being sought by the Maori leadership – including by its own Maori MPs. Ministers and their officials attempted to control, steer, tame and utilise Maori proposals for autonomy to their own ends. This was the background to the Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act of 1945, which established a network of official Tribal Committees and Tribal Executives operating within (rather than, as Maori wanted, replacing or operating outside of) the Department of Native Affairs (from 1947, the Department of Maori Affairs). Nevertheless, the Act did concede a cautious degree of autonomy topage 2 Maori. The election, as 1950 dawned, of a conservative National government promised Maori little, particularly given the party’s strong ideological support for laissez-faire policies which seemed to threaten the welfare-statist approach to governing established by Labour. The incoming government, however, did not radically reverse official practices and policies. In Maori policy, faced with the realities of the situation, it had little choice but to continue Labour’s expedient approach in its relationship with Maoridom.³

However, in official eyes such compromise would need only to be very short-term. Policy-makers believed that the goal of full assimilation was finally attainable as Maori migration from rural to urban areas, which had intensified during the war, regathered momentum after it. Maori were expected to become quickly detribalised in the big towns and cities, far from their traditional rural environment. Demographic change was expected, in particular, to remove what was seen as a key roadblock to assimilation, that of ‘clinging’ to a collective socio-organisational approach to life.

What began as ‘urban drift’ became a massive migration, for both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ reasons, in the third quarter of the twentieth century. By some definitions, more than 80% of Maori eventually ended up living in urban environments – as opposed to less than 10% in 1926. This remarkable, and as yet under-studied, phenomenon was seen by the Crown (and most pakeha) as the means by which the desired goal for Maoridom could be achieved. Far from their tribal homelands, Maori would give up their distinctive and collective outlook and ‘settle down’ to become brown-skinned pakeha. Even their ‘brownness’ would be modified through intermarriage. Official policy, after some initial doubts about the wisdom of Maori urbanisation, would be re-geared from time to time to speed up, organise and shape the process. The Department of Maori Affairs, for example, provided incentives for Maori to move to the cities in orderly fashion, thereby procuring labour for industry and encouraging Maori ‘integration’ into mainstream society.⁴

Even after mass migration had turned a predominantly rural people into an overwhelmingly urban one, Maori nevertheless continued to resist full assimilation to ‘western’ ways. While anxious to adapt successfully to the cities and to modern times, they ‘stubbornly’ (as it was often put) refused to abandon their culture, identity and aspirations. In effect, many Maori lived biculturally after moving to the urban areas, oscillating and negotiating between two worlds on a daily basis. Despite the exodus from rural marae, moreover, tribal organisational structures retained their importance, and new collective entities that were predominantly or wholly Maori were established in the new urban environments. Officials and political parties were constantly reminded by leaders from all sectors of indigenous society of their people’s desire to control their own affairs. As a consequence, the Crown came to recognise thatpage 3 supplanting of collectivist and autonomist impulses would not occur quickly or unproblematically. Eventually, governments (and pakeha) needed to come to terms with the fact that Maoridom, in its many manifestations, was not going to go away.

For not only did Maori collectivist perspectives and tribal/sub-tribal identification survive the great urban migration, but also the Maori people found new modes of expression in the changed environment of the post-war world. The official organisations established under the 1945 Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act themselves provided significant means through which Maori could resist the Crown’s agenda of rapid ‘integration’ and, ultimately, full assimilation. From the beginning of colonisation, the state had sought to appropriate Maori organisational modes and energies for its own purposes. In turn, however, Maori were always adept at seeking to reappropriate the state’s appropriations, while simultaneously engaging in other traditional and non-traditional forms of resistance and adaptation. These patterns were repeated in the decades after the Second World War.

The official tribal committee system, in particular, was increasingly used by Maori as a vehicle for transferring their collective ethos and organising capacity to the large towns and cities. An appreciation of Maori assertions of rangatiratanga in the quarter-century after the war, with their constant and complex negotiations and manoeuvrings at all levels from local to national, provides a basis for understanding the dramatic resurgence of Maori as a powerful politico-cultural force from the early 1970s – the period of the Maori Renaissance. The post-war adaptation of rangatiratanga to an increasingly urbanised world had therefore not only preserved Maori agency but – despite a degree of temporary cultural loss at the time of the migration – actually made Maori cultural forms more resilient. The Crown had to come to terms with this from the early 1970s; faced with the size of the renaissance and ever more determined assertions of rangatiratanga, the state soon abandoned assimilation as its overarching policy towards Maori.

Continuing the broad themes of its predecessor, this book explores a continuous and complex series of Crown–Maori interactions whose essential patterns – despite the emergence of very different Maori lifestyles and demographic environments – were similar to those of the pre-war period. Neither Crown assimilation policies nor mass urban migration, then, were able to extinguish expressions of Maori autonomy, of rangatiratanga. Rangatiratanga continued to be exercised in traditional ways, and it emerged in new forms, ultimately strengthening Maoridom in general. Maori cultural and other adaptations often flourished in what has been called a ‘dance with the state’, with the Crown, in turn, adapting its policies to meet the challenges posed by an increasingly assertive Maori leadership. The task of this book is topage 4 explore the changing ways by which the state sought to assimilate Maori, Maori expressed their autonomy in relation to the state, and the Crown responded by attempting to control the Maori organisational forms of the second half of the twentieth century.⁵

The concepts of both the Crown and the state have been much contested in recent historiography. I use the expression ‘the Crown’ to refer to the lego-constitutional institution generally called ‘the state’. The Crown is the official name for the entity with which Maori had continually to deal, ever since annexation by Britain in 1840, when interacting with state institutions and those in positions of legally-constituted authority and power. I thus use the terms ‘Crown’ and ‘state’ interchangeably, and I also use subsets of these, such as ‘government’, when appropriate. Scholars such as myself who appeal to the notion of state or Crown authority have been taken to task by others for presenting the Crown/state as a ‘disembodied entity’. We are asked to disaggregate this entity and explore it as a ‘non-monolithic’ body that incorporates ‘ambiguity and inconsistency between agencies’. As an historian of state institutions, one moreover who has worked on policy and operational matters within the state machinery, I am fully aware that official policies are frequently internally contestable. The state is multi-layered and complex, citizens have different relations with different aspects of it, and the configuration of personnel and lines of responsibility within it change through time. I cover some of these contestations and varying relationships in both this book and its predecessor, and also in other works.

However, I place myself in the company of those who believe that it is a scholarly duty to identify broad-based patterns within and between peoples and institutions, leaving it to others to present a fragmented history or a history of fragments, to deplore ‘meta-narratives’, or to ‘unpick’ tapestries woven by ‘conventional historians’. I am untroubled by drawing generalisations about state policy or operations (or anything else) at any given time, or through time (quite apart from the impracticality of ‘disaggregating’ decades of intra-state attitudes to Maori in a single volume). It is, for example, of central significance for Maori that the Crown retained its policy goal of full assimilation for more than quarter of a century after the Second World War; whatever the niceties of internal debate between public servants and ministers or the occasional official decision that gave them some relief or hope, that is what Maori had constantly to contend with.

Indigenous people are, of course, not alone in having no choice but to deal with an entity – variously called state, government, Crown or other things – which, despite its internal deliberations, controls the parameters of their lives through broad policies which are not generally negotiable, at least in the short term. Those unhappy with the way the state and its representatives interactpage 5 with them need organisation and leadership to challenge official policy. Even where there is something akin to an appeals process or the right to take judicial action, it is ‘the Crown’ which, in the final analysis, is in charge of compliance to rules and decisions or allows for change. As the lego-constitutional expression of the state, the Crown overarches ‘the core functions of government’. As one senior politician has noted, these involve matters such as ‘internal order’ and the establishment and maintenance of markets. The conditions of ‘peace and good order’, to use an official term, are defined by those in charge.⁶

Where it counts for the purposes of this book, then, at the interface between rulers and ruled, the state presents a monolithic front, ‘the Crown’. This monolith, through time, has been destructive towards Maori political and social organisation and culture, however much indigenes exercise agency in resisting or accommodating ‘the juggernaut of the state’ or the pressures of the settlers and their descendants. As a lego-historian has written recently of both New Zealand and international literature, ‘new tendencies in historical writing can be pushed too far in the interests of creating a self-consciously new historiography which fails to adequately address the extent to which there really were “impacts” … which undoubtedly left the indigenous communities reeling’. This refers to colonial times, but effects and policies did not stop when a settler colony cut loose from its ‘Mother Country’.

Insisting on the power of the continuous entity called the state does not deny the struggles of those who are subjected to it and who resist its dominance. Such exercise of agency is central to this book. By dealing with the state (either in its central or some devolved form), individuals and community leaders may be able to negotiate accommodations on behalf of themselves or their constituencies. These arrangements, while they may suit both sides, will not however damage the central interest of the state and its agents, who will act in accord with what they consider to be ‘the public good’. However much one deconstructs the modes by which the Crown, political executives, legislators or bureaucrats reach the laws and policies they require citizens to obey, those laws and policies constitute an ongoing reality of life for those subject to them. In Crown–Maori relations, continuities are more common than discontinuities, the latter usually being the result of accumulated pressure for change.

Scholars who contend, explicitly or implicitly, that people are free to negotiate their own terms with the state, by picking and choosing which agencies to deal with, might do well to examine the history of people, indigenous or otherwise, who have long confronted states’ negative responses towards their culture, beliefs and aspirations. A Canadian labour leader, having been charged in 1919 with seditious conspiracy during a strike, observed that it ‘was a mystery during the whole of that period as to who constituted the Crown. We could not find out’. But this did not stop he and his fellow workerspage 6 from feeling the wrath of a state which, consistent with its previous attitude towards militant organised labour, aimed to ensure continuing peace and good order as defined by itself.

Sometimes the state will violate its own legal rules to ensure its long-term survival as sovereign. As the possessor of full sovereignty, the state is distinguished from all other entities by its capacity to decide what the exceptions to the normal legal order will be. This has not happened often in countries such as New Zealand. But the point is that all citizens are subject to state intervention in their lives, and the fact that this is usually by legal means is not necessarily of comfort – at least for those who are subject to laws or practices which discriminate on race, class, gender or other grounds. Most people are not particularly exercised by the precise routes by which such interventions reach them, interesting as these might be for specialist historians and their readers.⁷

While some people experience the might of the state exercised coercively against them (particularly when state agents decide that exceptions to the ‘rule of law’ are necessary), more commonly individuals experience state power hegemonically. They are often unaware of the forces acting upon them, or are aware of them only vaguely. In Raymond Williams’ words, endorsing Antonio Gramsci’s analyses, hegemony ‘constitutes the substance and limit of common sense for most people under its sway … deeply saturating the consciousness of a society’. It comprises ‘the central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived’, making up ‘our ordinary understanding of the nature of man and of his world’. This world is complex and does, it is true, admit a certain amount of contestation; the ‘effective and dominant culture’ can accommodate ‘alternative meanings and values … [and] even some alternative senses of the world’. This book explores, with reference to Maori, how hegemonic requirements are ‘continually challenged and in certain respects modified’. But it also examines the ‘modes of incorporation’ developed by the state, including those pertaining to belief structures which operate to ensure that any modification does not fundamentally challenge the interests of those who wield effective power.⁸

Just as state/Crown is a contested concept, so too are ‘Maori’ or ‘Maoridom’, terms which have been challenged by pakeha and non-pakeha scholars and commentators alike for a number of reasons. They are used in this book in the familiar way to refer to those who have Maori descent and define themselves as Maori in whole or in part. These terms are, for present purposes, also a short-hand means of referring to the many and varied collective organisations (often, but not always, tribally focused) which have had a relationship with, and exercised rangatiratanga towards, the Crown.

Ever since 1840, and perhaps before that, many meanings have been given to rangatiratanga, and its translations into English have been varied, thoughpage 7 until recent times it has perhaps most often been translated as ‘chieftainship’. In the predecessor book to this, State Authority, Indigenous Autonomy, I outline why I consider ‘autonomy’ to provide the most useful overarching interpretation, one which accommodates spatial and conceptual differences and changes in the specific manifestations of rangatiratanga over time. Rangatiratanga refers to both the inherent autonomist perspectives of Maori collectivities and the desire for Crown recognition and respect for these. One of my aims is to explore organisational expressions of rangatiratanga/autonomy in ways which recognise the complexities of the intra-Maori, Crown–Maori and racerelations history of New Zealand.⁹ This approach (inter alia) answers criticisms which have been levelled at those who are said to engage in a ‘rangatiratanga discourse’ – criticisms, for example, that such discourse demonises or ignores Maori who have been supportive of the Crown. Depicting the Maori search for autonomy/rangatiratanga as involving many and varied forms, tactics and strategies, including actions accommodative of the Crown (such as allying with it against tribal enemies), addresses such conceptual problems. It also takes into account the argument that a European-derived ‘law-based citizenship’ played a role in shaping Maori actions.

Among the scholars who seek a tighter and more prescriptive definition of rangatiratanga than ‘autonomy’ are some of those who wish to see the Crown or the state ‘disaggregated’. This is to get matters the wrong way round. While the Crown does present a united face to the citizenry, with demands it can enforce, Maori are both organised in various ways and present many and varied faces to the state in their attempts to persuade or pressure it to meet their expectations or aspirations – to induce it to recognise rangatiratanga. The Waitangi Tribunal – which, as a standing commission of enquiry, has heard great numbers of Maori representations – has noted that rangatiratanga is ‘eminently adaptable to time and circumstance’. A discussion paper presented by a marae grouping to the Maori Congress Executive Meeting in 1995 similarly noted that there were ‘differing shades of meaning’ attached to the term. In particular, it perceived a ‘recurring theme of self-determination’ throughout the various definitions of rangatiratanga. ‘As an equivalent to tino rangatiratanga, self-determination captures a sense of Maori ownership and active control over the future and avoids a semantic debate often of academic rather than practical interest. Moreover, self-determination is a term which can be applied at iwi and hapu levels, as well as to all Maori people collectively.’

However it is translated or interpreted, rangatiratanga in its organisational sense seldom implies unlimited power. Just as tribal governance was always (and remains) contestable, ‘the degrees of autonomy and power that any tribe might have in relation to any external competitor were (and are) similarly qualified’. The Taranaki Report of the Tribunal, seeing Maori autonomy aspage 8 ‘pivotal to the Treaty and the partnership’ with the Crown that Maori believed the Treaty entailed, internationalised its definition of rangatiratanga as ‘the rights of indigenes … to manage their own policy, resources, and affairs, within minimum parameters necessary for the proper operation of the State’. Maori will supply a meaning of rangatiratanga that fits their own circumstances or those of their particular tribe(s), while also acknowledging that rangatiratanga might mean something else to another tribal grouping, or to other individuals, or to themselves in a different context. Many have come to a decision to ‘respect the choices made by others … to define themselves in a way which best suits them’. This is especially the stance of Maori who appreciate the continuing changes in indigenous as well as wider society.

Clearly, then, there are many types and modes of rangatiratanga. My use of the term is broad enough to encompass the varied meanings and expressions it has, and has had, within Maoridom. Rangatiratanga might be exercised at tribal, sub-tribal, pan-tribal, cross-tribal or non-tribal level, or any combination of these. It may even be exercised by Maori operating, for various reasons, on behalf of or in conjunction with the Crown. Such a permissive definition of rangatiratanga – in effect, as any organisational expression of or aspiration for autonomy – is necessary to encompass the variety within Maori society itself. As with ‘the Crown’, rangatiratanga is both a useful conceptual device and a meaningful one.¹⁰

This book identifies the keynote Crown policies which impacted upon Maori, analyses the main manifestations of the quest for rangatiratanga in relation to these, and in turn elucidates the Crown’s responses to autonomist agency. In examining the interactions of Crown and Maori through time, not only do I eschew the deconstruction of many of the internal dynamics of the state, I also focus on the fronts which the various currents within Maoridom present to the Crown. Over and above that, there is value in undertaking a Maori-wide analysis, in line with the perspectives of many Maori: ‘Being Maori fifty years ago meant something different than it means today; being Maori means different things for different Maoris, but there are Maoris and there is Maoritanga’ – which is ‘what Maoris do and feel to be Maori which is not commonly shared by non-Maoris’.

There is (of course) a danger that any examination of Crown–Maori relations that focuses on ‘negotiations’ between the major institutions of rangatiratanga, on the one hand, and the state with its essentially anti-autonomist stance, on the other, can become too ‘binary’. It might, for example, concentrate on the ‘formal/visible and deliberate acts of resistance’ to assimilation rather than ‘everyday acts’ which may equally constitute ‘exercises of indigenous power’. Finding the essence of the Crown–Maori interaction, however, first requires an understanding of the shape and causes of the relationship through time. Onlypage 9 with such patterning, and a related appreciation of the interconnectedness of often seemingly disparate phenomena, can complexities (and departures from the rule) be understood. This work, in attempting to uncover the essence of what happened and why it happened, contributes to what is increasingly being seen as ‘the specialised genre of non-specialised history’.

In doing so, the book builds upon a great deal of my own and others’ New Zealand-based research, but it also has theoretical and universalist bases and aspirations. It does not view the Maori pursuit of autonomy as a peculiarly New Zealand phenomenon. Many scholars have noted that, through time, all submerged and dominated ethno-cultural groupings have sought (and often fought) to reassert their autonomist presence in various ways – seeking to achieve ‘ever new possibilities of fuller and richer life individually and collectively’ in the face of attempts to assimilate or dehumanise them. Others have analysed the many and often subtle ways in which resistance to coercion and hegemony is countered by dominant cultures and ruling authorities. Indigenous and other peoples, in asserting their agency, have to face overwhelming odds, confronted by a ‘technology of occupation’ which includes both overtly coercive tools and those less obviously so, such as private and public law. Those sectors which exercise power, moreover, shape social patterns and exercise social control not just through the threat or use of force, but also through control of the means of knowledge. In this respect, indigenous groups have been doubly disadvantaged, having to grapple with a world dominated by concepts different from those inherited from their ancestors. In view of all such factors, any struggle by indigenous peoples against assimilation and for autonomy is necessarily fraught with difficulty.¹¹

In the first half of the period covered by this book, the odds against Maori achieving substantial Crown recognition of rangatiratanga seemed overwhelming, because of a combination of an ethnocentric pakeha worldview and the rapid urbanisation of the Maori people. But the struggle continued, even in the new and seemingly unpropitious urban environments. This, and international influences, set the scene for significant developments in the exercise of Maori agency in the last quarter of the twentieth century. By the 1980s, Maori demands for recognition of rangatiratanga were beginning to be addressed, and the 1990s saw the emergence of significant Treaty settlements to redress past injustices. Despite these achievements, however, by the dawning of the new millennium, autonomy had not been realised. The Crown showed little sign of conceding any significant form of it, and Maori continued their struggle for state recognition of rangatiratanga. But there was much dialogue between the parties, Maori were in a far more powerful position than they had been half a century before, and many were optimistic about the possibility of continuing progress on the issue.

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