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Maori and the State: Crown-Māori relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1950-2000

National, Regional and Local Developments and Debates

National, Regional and Local Developments and Debates

In seeking to pursue rangatiratanga in the early years of the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of Maori were looking to the past in working on various ideas for reviving kotahitanga. It was in the context of innumerable debates within Maoridom on this issue that, gradually, the main unity focus shifted towards forming a new Maori political party. In the MMP environment, many saw, such a parliamentary grouping might come to hold the balance of political power and (among other things) be able to force constitutional reform onto the political agenda. By the time of its 1999 election victory, Labour had regained the support of the Ratana movement and reclaimed the Maori seats from political opponents. But with almost universal Maori protest at its overturning of their right to access the judiciary to fight for customary rights to the foreshore and seabed, the time had come for those planning a unified party of indigeneity to put their proposals into action.

At the 2005 election, the new Maori Party presented its kaupapa, one based fully on rangatiratanga. This translated, said its co-leader (and former Labourpage 288 minister) Tariana Turia, as ‘self determination’, and in winning four of the seven Maori seats the party made a good start to its journey towards a support role in government three years later, after it gained a fifth seat. As the end of 2008 approached, the Maori Party began preparing the groundwork – with Pita Sharples as Minister of Maori Affairs – for future discussions on Crown– Maori relations, the National leadership having agreed to set aside its proposed abolition of the Maori electorate seats.

Quite apart from this and other developments at nationwide level, many Maori – tribally-based or otherwise – had always continued to seek recognition of rangatiratanga in regional, district or local environments. As well as the ambitious devolution plans of that time, during the lead-up to local government reform in 1989 there had been discussions about including reference to the Treaty of Waitangi in the relevant legislation. When this did not happen, and the Runanga Iwi Act was repealed as well, the pursuit of rangatiratanga at regional level or below seemed to suffer a set-back. The Resource Management Act of 1991, however, in allowing for the Treaty principles to be ‘taken into account’, led to much greater consultation with Maori. Some local authorities went so far as to establish formal relationships with tribes in their area. Elsewhere, arrangements were made in some Treaty settlements to ensure that Maori could participate more fully in local-body decision-making. When a regional council created a precedent in 1998 by establishing seats for Maori (a provision ratified legislatively in 2001), this was widely seen as a promising precedent, although it proved to be controversial one.

All such measures and events provided hope for greater progress in recognition of rangatiratanga, especially in the context of a heightening national and international discourse on ‘genuine self-rule’ and much talk of tino rangatiratanga being ‘the central objective’ for Maori.

Just before the new millennium, officials acknowledged that the ‘Tribunal has shown that what is required for truly Māori development is the exercise of rangatiratanga’, their definition of which clustered around ‘the collective power of the group to exercise control over its resources, determine priorities and, to the extent reasonable, fix its own policies and manage its own programmes’. In 2000, Labour’s Maori MPs were urging upon their own government the importance of ‘Maori autonomy, self-determination or self-rule’, although they were facing somewhat of an uphill struggle – partly as a result of a degree of pakeha backlash.12

Right-wing ‘anti-Treatyist’ scholars and polemicists had been worrying away for many years at the increasing weight given to rangatiratanga. One expressed the view that ‘[n]o matter how generous we are with land and money, [Maori] will not be satisfied, because they want power as well’. While such extreme sovereigntist stances were usually held only on the populist right, possiblepage 289 ramifications of rangatiratanga also concerned left-wing commentators for whom the interests of the poor and the dispossessed could only be guaranteed by an ‘absolute and indivisible’ sovereign state of social-democratic or socialist orientation. For some, the choice was between a ‘modern, democratic and prosperous nation’ based on ‘equality of rights’ and a ‘culturally divided, economically stagnant and aristocratically misgoverned Pacific backwater’.

Responses to such binary approaches might note that states elsewhere, of many a political ilk, could readily find a place for indigenous autonomy, including through devolution of politico-cultural powers. In any case, matters within the province of sovereignty are as routinely devolved to non-or semi-state entities in New Zealand as in other western jurisdictions. A legitimated use of coercion, for example, is granted to private security firms and Maori wardens for specific purposes. Even a major exercise of devolution, of course, does present the advocates of tino rangatiratanga with the problem that whatever powers are sanctioned can later be taken away, but proponents of a devolutionist approach argue that this does not preclude the negotiation of acceptable autonomist arrangements for power sharing or partnership.13

Public and academic debate on such matters is often both bewildering and rapidly evolving, and history and other disciplines are frequently involved. One approach, for example, combines the insights of cultural studies with recent historical attempts to avoid interpretation of the past in terms of the present (‘presentism’). It urges re-examining the ‘over-simplified and essentialised’ bicultural paradigm within which many debates are couched. New possibilities are posed, including a ‘reconceptualisation of bicultural politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand that draws on an inclusionary and multifaceted identity politics’. Such perspectives, it is argued, could lead to concepts that move beyond the implicitly adversarial lens of bi-or multi-culturalism. The prospect of an ‘interculturalism’ is raised, involving a search for a hybrid New Zealandness based on ‘the criss-crossing, the overlapping [and] the in-betweenness of cultures’. While the Treaty and the tangata whenua would retain their distinctive place and status, any such quest would also aim to find ‘common ground within the dynamic of exchange, interchange and inclusion’.14

Care needs to be taken, however, at the interface of scholarship and its social or political application. The study of Crown–Maori relations, especially ‘Treaty of Waitangi issues’, can tempt scholars to veer towards advocacy rather than analysis. History produced for the Treaty reconciliation processes, in particular, will sometimes reflect the overt agenda of the commissioning agency, especially when the legal profession intervenes in its production. It can also have other consequences, such as a tendency ‘to emphasize the particular over the general, and Maori as victim over Maori as agent’ – or, indeed, Maori as agent over Maori as victim.

page 290

This book, like its predecessor, is one not of advocacy but interpretation. Given its time frame, it has focused on the general, on the essence, rather than on the specific. It has explored the endeavours of Maori institutions, first, to resist the Crown’s assimilation policies and, when these were abandoned through lack of success, to forge relationships with the Crown which respected Maori and their rangatiratanga. It has examined the state’s attempts to contain and supersede autonomist expressions and energies, using (among other things) the tools of appropriation; and it has analysed the Crown’s efforts, once it had formally abandoned assimilation, to address rangatiratanga in ways which could also contain the more ambitious aspirations within Maoridom.

Ever since 1840, Maori have faced massive armed and hegemonic conquest, loss of land and other resources, assimilationist onslaught on their culture, marginalisation, dispersal from their turangawaewae, and appropriation of indigenous organisational forms and energies. If the history of Crown–Maori relations in New Zealand – and, more broadly, the whole historical experience of ethnicity and indigeneity under imperialism and post-coloniality – is a reliable guide (and it would be remarkable were it not), the Maori quest for autonomy or self-determination, for enhancement of and respect for rangatiratanga, will not go away. Until, that is, the Crown addresses the issue of rangatiratanga in ways that satisfy Maori in their various collective modes of organisation – tribal, sub-tribal, pan-tribal and non-tribal.15

12 Turia, ‘Flying the Flag’; Dominion Post, 17 November 2008; Orange, An Illustrated History, pp 190–92, pp 266–8; Dodd, Nation Building, p 1 (for ‘genuine self-rule’ quote); Kelsey, Reclaiming, p 52 (for ‘central objective’ quote); Te Puni Kokiri, ‘Treaty Framework’, draft policy document, Nov 1999, pp 4–5 (for ‘Tribunal has shown’ and ‘the collective power’ quotes); Bain, Helen, ‘Maori MPs speak first in break with tradition’, Dominion, 9 Feb 2000 (for ‘Maori autonomy’ quote).

13 Minogue, Waitangi, p 58; Round, Truth or Treaty? pp 102–3 (for ‘how generous’ quote); Trotter, Chris, ‘The unanswered question’, Dominion Post, 12 Dec 2003 (for ‘modern, democratic and prosperous’ quote); Vasil, Biculturalism, p 44; Byrnes, Giselle, The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History, Melbourne, 2004.

14 Meredith, Paul, ‘Hybridity in the Third Space: Rethinking Bi-cultural Politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, He Pukenga Korero, 4(2), 1999, p 12 (for ‘over-simplified’ and ‘reconceptualisation’ quotes); Meredith, Paul, ‘Revisioning New Zealandness: A Framework for Discussion’, Te Matahauariki Research Institute, http://lianz.waikato.ac.nz/PAPERS/paul/NZ.pdf [accessed June 2008], p 6 (for ‘criss-crossing’ quote). The types of quest outlined are often influenced, consciously or otherwise, by post-structural and post-modern theories or their derivatives, such as Homi Bhabha’s hybridisation theory: with the hybrid identity inhabiting more than one ‘imagined community’, it inherently deconstructs both binarism and ethnocentrism, and in the world of hybridity the (unattainable) concept of ‘unified nation’ can give way to something more in tune with the complexities of society; see Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp 140–144.

15 Belich, ‘Colonization and History’, p 187 (for ‘to emphasize the particular’ quote); Pearson, The Politics of Ethnicity, p 204.