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

Relationships, Rangatiratanga and Class

Relationships, Rangatiratanga and Class

What was most important for tribal and non-tribal groupings alike, however, was that rangatiratanga was – as the Tribunal put it – ‘the key principle of customary social and political organisation, part of the essence of Maori identity, and a taonga in its own right’. It embodied a state of being, a non-negotiable declaration, not something to be secured with the assistance of, or requested from, the Crown. ‘Its presence is detected’, it has been said, ‘not by what onepage 280 says but rather by what one does. Thus, if you want self-determination for your iwi, do it and act as though you have it.’ The problem was, then, how to secure recognition and respect for rangatiratanga from a Crown which continued to demand that Maori operate accountably within its own lego-constitutional framework, especially if they were to receive state resources (including those in compensation for past losses).5

There was not necessarily any need to fully adopt ‘western values’ and methods in order to gain Crown recognition, however. While some Maori groupings have believed that it was not possible to ‘create management systems for one culture from within the paradigm of another’, others have adopted or adapted western frameworks. Still others have sought to meld the traditional and the non-traditional, and this has not precluded (indeed, it may sometimes have assisted) the forging of mutually beneficial relationships with the state. Ngapuhi’s runanga, for example, aimed to build a governance regime which had both a legal relationship with the Crown and incorporated ‘traditional dispute resolution processes based in the law and tikanga of Ngapuhi’.

A number of groups have taken up the challenge of bringing rangatiratanga into the global marketplace, even if its values might be antithetical to their traditional and even contemporary worldview. Some tribal and urban organisations saw little choice after the economic rationalisation of the 1980s–90s than to participate in the international economy through such devices as joint ventures; they would be better able to engage with the Crown on their own terms once they had built up a resource base through such means. A number of groupings have attempted to extend their influence on the world stage beyond the economic, with Te Runanga a Iwi o Ngapuhi, for example, seeking to ‘establish diplomatic, political, cultural and economic relations with … Indigenous Nations’, and making a number of appeals to international bodies to put pressure on the New Zealand Crown to respect rangatiratanga.6

Views on rangatiratanga and relationships both remain diverse and continue to diversify. Certain Maori commentators argue that rangatiratanga is, in effect, unconscionably compromised by many or most forms of its modern organisational expression, especially where these are franchised in some way by the Crown. Some declare that anything short of full kotahitanga represents surrender to a modern divide and rule strategy by the state. Others claim, for quite different reasons, that divide and rule is implicit in any organised mode of rangatiratanga: since Maori are disproportionately represented in lower socio-economic sectors, any form of politico-cultural separateness splits off Maori from the pakeha working-class and its struggles. This is said not only to help perpetuate the capitalist social relations which underpin Crown supremacy, but also to create downstream consequences as well. These are argued to include encouragement of racist attitudes among pakeha which further dividepage 281 the white from the brown proletariat, and delaying radical socio-economic reforms which alone can bring the parity with pakeha that is implicit in Article Three of the Treaty. The quest for rangatiratanga through any exclusively Maori-orientated organisational effort, then, leaves ‘intact the very social order which consigns Maori to the bottom of the heap’ in the first place.

In some pakeha variants of such reasoning, the two populations are so ‘thoroughly intermixed’ that Maori cannot be defined as an ‘oppressed nation’ or anything like it. Those identifying as Maori are advised to make common cause with the white working class in a fashion which ‘takes into account the double oppression of Maori workers’ and utilises Maori collectivist impulses to further the class struggle. Some analysts continue to believe that the ‘politicisation of ethnicity’ since the 1970s, supposedly based on a process of ‘retribalisation’ driven by a bourgeois elite, has led many Maori to support neotribes that are ‘subverting democracy’. The neotribe is defined as ‘a private economic corporation in the accumulative system of global capitalism’ which ‘conceals its privatised character’ by an appeal to ‘communalism’. This ploy has allegedly seduced not just Maori but much of the pakeha left into supporting structures whose corporate operations have little to do with traditional social-democratic or socialist notions of collective endeavour and justice for all. Few Maori have subscribed publicly to such views, although some have expressed opinions that resonate with elements of the analysis – in condemning, for example, runanga flirting with Rogernomics and its successor policies under subsequent governments.

Neither this book nor its predecessor, State Authority, Indigenous Autonomy, is directly about class, central though this is in a capitalist society and so highly relevant as it is to the lives of the majority of Maori people, especially after 1950. Having been stripped of their resources and subjected to huge assimilationist pressures thereafter, Maori were needed in the cities from the mid-twentieth century to form an urban workforce for an industrialising nation. They continue to make up a disproportionate percentage of the working class and, more generally, of the disadvantaged in society, as a variety of statistical indicators make clear; the Maori cancer mortality rate, for example, was twice that of non-Maori at the end of the twentieth century, and Maori remain highly over-represented in court and corrections statistics. All that being said, this book examines the politico-cultural aspirations, during the second half of the twentieth century, of those who identify as Maori and the reactions of the state to their various ways of organising the quest for te tino rangatiratanga. While class forms a very necessary backdrop, indigenous aspirations, and the state’s concerns (and fears) regarding them, are about much more than class.7

Any book analysing the actual organisational forms of Crown–Maori relations in the decades after 1950 is not, then, the place to examine in depth thepage 282 views of those who advocate pursuing a form of rangatiratanga by subsuming it within wider class struggles – important as such perspectives were in radical Maori circles at the outset of the modern Maori Renaissance. One might note, however, that arguments centring around combining Maori and pakeha class struggle are compatible with some standard twentieth-century Marxian perspectives on ethno-cultural national minorities: self-determination is not only feasible but may be a necessary stage on the way to a socialist society, a way of removing a key ‘roadblock’ on the highway to socialism.

In such interpretations, moreover, the indigenous ethnic group, in its struggle against state coercion and hegemony, can (given that it is collectivist in orientation in the first place) readily establish structures and promote thinking which both assist the attainment of and ‘pre-figure’ a post-capitalist society. One might also reiterate, at this point, that milder versions of left-wing perspectives regarding ethnicity have been endemic within New Zealand social democratic movements – certainly since they began seeking Maori support in the 1920s. Such views live on as part of the broad debate about what kind and degree of social ‘equality’ should be sought, and they continue to temper Labour’s attitude to Maori issues. The Labour-led governments from 1999 onwards, focusing (reasonably successfully) on ‘reducing inequalities’, tended to be lukewarm on issues of rangatiratanga – and even positively hostile to it at times, especially over the issue of the foreshore and seabed – and settlements.

5 Waitangi Tribunal, Waipareira Report, p xviii (for the key principle’ quote); Mead, ‘Options’, p 151 (for ‘presence is detected’ quote); Dawson, The Treaty of Waitangi, p 132.

6 Royal, Te Ahukaramu Charles, ‘There are Adventures to be had’, Te Pouhere Korero Journal, 1(1), Mar 1999, p 5 (for ‘management systems’ quote); Te Runanga O Ngapuhi, Constitution, 6.1(n) (for ‘establish diplomatic’ quote), 6.1(t) (for ‘dispute resolution’ quote); Kelsey, Reclaiming, pp 20–22, 310.

7 Cox, Kotahitanga, p 141; Ferguson, Philip, ‘Race relations and social control’, Revolution, no 14, Xmas 2000–March 2001, p 36 (for ‘the very social order’); Jarvis, Huw, ‘Maori liberation versus the Treaty process’, Revolution, May–July 2004, p 36 (for ‘thoroughly intermixed’, ‘oppressed’ and ‘takes into account’ quotes); Rata, ‘Ethnicity, Class’, pp 14–15 (for ‘economic corporation’ quote), p 15 (for ‘conceals’ and following quotes); Wellington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Access to Cancer Services for Māori: A Report prepared for the Ministry of Health, Wellington, Feb 2005, p 15; Poata-Smith, ‘He Pokeke’, p 112.