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

Autonomy and the Crown

page 275

Autonomy and the Crown

This book, in surveying the history of Crown–Maori relations in the second half of twentieth-century New Zealand, concludes (like its predecessor, State Authority, Indigenous Autonomy) that a profound desire for autonomy, for the right to run its own affairs, has been the key driving force within Maori society. This finding is consonant with the histories of indigenous peoples worldwide: the quest for independence, autonomy, self-determination, self-management, sovereignty or partnership with the state (and many other terms could be, and have been, used) underpins the history of indigeneity in colonial and post-colonial settler societies. In New Zealand, this is manifested in the search for the tino rangatiratanga promised to Maori by the Crown in the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. As in other colonised and post-colonised nations, the quest for autonomy has waxed and waned, and means and goals have varied.

So, too, have the state’s responses to indigenous pressures, around which the other major conclusions of this book centre. Defeat of autonomist aspirations was always the preferred Crown goal, especially in the long assimilationist period from the beginning of the colony until the early 1970s. But where that proved untenable, the state sought to appropriate organisational expressions of autonomy for its own purposes, often attempting to turn them into vehicles for the assimilation project. In turn, Maori attempted to reappropriate the state’s appropriations. Both parties, then, resorted to compromise and subversion in pursuit of their own goals. But until the Crown abandoned the policy of full integration (as assimilation, after a long semantic journey, had ended up being called), the ultimate goals of Maori and the state seemed completely incompatible. From the 1970s, arrangements which would suit both parties to the Treaty of Waitangi (as well as pakeha and other ethnicities of New Zealand) seemed potentially achievable – that is, if they were seriously pursued through consultation and negotiation conducted in good faith.

page 276

Maori autonomist goals can be placed on a conceptual continuum. At one end lies territorial sovereignty for some or all of the Maori population over some or even all of New Zealand. Few have ever argued for this, partly because the political, demographic and tribal history of the country made it impracticable. A flavour of this perspective, however, can be seen in protest group Te Ahi Kaa’s 1986 manifesto for Maori repossession of Aotearoa, or in Donna Awatere’s call for ‘Maoris [to] have control of New Zealand because it is our country’. Towards the other pole of the continuum are various arrangements whereby indigenous collectivities can pursue specified types of autonomist activity within the parameters of existing New Zealand lego-constitutional authority. Maori groupings would exercise powers devolved by a state confident in the doctrine of total indivisibility and strongly asserting its ability to intervene in Maori governance in the interests of the ‘public good’. Clearly, definitions of autonomy clustered towards this pole are less threatening to the state and the majority culture than many at other points of the continuum, including those which seek an entrenched constitutional partnership between Crown and Maori authorities, perhaps involving a Maori parliament or a Maori chamber or chambers grafted onto existing parliamentary arrangements.

Internationally, indigenous groupings have not been able to acquire anything approaching full sovereignty, although some have retained or attained collective indigenous rights over and above the rights of individual citizens. Like other indigenous peoples, Maori have long been engaged in vigorous internal debate about both what is most desirable and most likely to be attainable. They have generally acknowledged that the colonial and post-colonial history of New Zealand has brought considerable benefit to them, just as they have in turn enriched New Zealand society in many ways. Many Maori perceive that the growing biculturalist nature of society in early twenty first-century New Zealand might provide an appropriate environment in which to negotiate rangatiratanga arrangements within existing or, preferably, modified political and constitutional parameters.1

1 Fleras, Augie and Spoonley, Paul, Recalling Aotearoa: Indigenous Politics and Ethnic Relations in New Zealand, Auckland, 1999, ch 2; Mead, ‘Options’, pp 148–52; Magallenes, ‘International Human Rights’, p 224; Legat, ‘Warrior Woman’, p 68; Awatere, Maori Sovereignty, p 15 (for ‘should have control’ quote). This concluding section of the book is partly based on my many conversations, within Treaty policy, research and settlement environments, with both Maori leaders and advocates and public servants working on Treaty issues.