Organising Indigeneity

Despite state resistance to autonomy in areas such as criminal or civil justice, Maori continued seeking to affirm their identities in a variety of ways, and to empower themselves accordingly. On a local level, a name change of one rural family from English to Maori epitomised flaxroots reconstructions of Maori identity. The core members of the whanau had gathered together its scattered members in 1985 ‘to learn about their ancestors and kinship connections’ as a prerequisite for greater agency. On a macro level, Jackson’s views remained influential in Maoridom, and there were many empowerment initiatives and developments at national and pan-tribal level in these years. Koro Wetere and Sir Hepi Te Heu Heu were among those engaged in setting up the Federation of Maori Authorities as a forum for Maori resource-based trusts, incorporations and other businesses; this organisation quickly became a powerful national voice. On a cultural level, it was only after enormous Maori pressure for state recognition and protection of te reo Maori that it became an official language, following Waitangi Tribunal recommendations. An official commission was established to promote te reo Maori, and in ensuing years the Crown gradually responded to continuing pressure and supported firmer entrenchment of the Maori language and culture in the country’s media.²²

All the while, the state was increasingly prepared to talk the language of power-sharing, especially at a tribal level. While they stressed their genealogical continuity with the past, hapu and iwi had, of course, adaptedpage 213 to circumstances over time. The advent of the Maori Renaissance and the economic challenges that intensified from the 1970s had stimulated the strengthening and transformation of tribal and sub-tribal structures. A number of tribal enhancements and reconstructions arose out of the need to organise or reorganise to resolve historical grievances; others arose in the processes of confronting the challenges posed by heightening economic hardship. The 1980s saw, in particular, a significant revival of tribal runanga, or councils, for these and other purposes. The Crown increasingly looked to dealing with runanga in its proposed partnership arrangements with iwi, especially if the runanga members were prepared to seek and gain legally-sanctioned mandates from their constituents.

The modern runanga offered the great advantage of flexibility to suit circumstances. Tribal or sub-tribal runanga and management committees of various sorts could be large or small, reconfiguring if necessary to maximise the interests of their collectivities, both discrete and overlapping. In 1986, the five iwi of Muriwhenua established the legal body Te Runanga o Muriwhenua to prepare the Treaty claims of the Far North. Some established groupings saw breakaways occurring, including the Waikato–Tainui federation in 1988. In many areas, fragmentation of tribal management occurred as sub-iwi groups sought to organise to meet the Crown’s delivery requirements. All the while, numbers of iwi were initiating ambitious plans for tribal development, some of which – such as those of Ngati Raukawa and Tainui – included establishing tertiary educational facilities. The common theme in all such developments was organisational change in the struggle for rangatiratanga.²³

The increasing emphasis on tribal identities and tribally-based self-determination can be seen from a number of different perspectives. For many Maori, the tribal renaissance addressed a longstanding rejection of centralised, state-franchised and government-influenced structures. As the realities of urbanisation struck home, moreover, ‘Māori began to question the validity of a universal Māori identity’: a return to tribal roots was seen as essential after several decades of assimilationist policies and integration into urban life, weakening tribal ties, and fading knowledge of language, tribal history and tradition. Some pan-tribal structures were losing support for a variety of reasons, including those relating to efficiency or perceived compromise. Although the official voice of Maoridom had long campaigned on a broad front of issues, the NZMC was seen by many Maori as an increasingly ‘inappropriate structure’ for embodying rangatiratanga. This was partly a function of historical memory, given its legacy of conservative positions, its National-associated leadership and its origins in the period of assimilation and detribalisation policies. But the council had also come to be seen as less relevant, the result of such factors as Tu Tangata, the new directions from 1984 and (more generally) the Maoripage 214 Renaissance. Various pan-tribal unity movements at different levels, and efforts to operate around the concept of ‘Maoritanga’, had not brought recognition of rangatiratanga.

Some Maori leaders argued that the way to re-empower their people, move them out of welfare dependency and achieve rangatiratanga was to restore responsibility not only to tribal communities but also to individuals within them, and/or to pan-or non-tribal collectivities such as those which had formed in the large towns and cities. Labour ministers were predisposed towards arguments based on individualism and urbanisation, but eventually conclusions premised on the ‘base of the Maori world [being] tribal’ achieved primacy (although non-tribal arrangements were not precluded). These seemed to offer the best means forward because they were supported by the great majority of the Maori leadership in various discussions and negotiations with the Crown. The emerging policy of direct Crown relationships with tribal groupings was, essentially, a response to the widespread Maori view that the ‘only leaps we have made have been those centred on our iwi, our hapu and our whanau’.

The Crown’s growing interest in forging arrangements at iwi level had a logistical basis as well: negotiating with and devolving to iwi would be manageable in a way that dealing with literally thousands of hapu and whanau would not. Customarily, there were said to be some five dozen iwi/tribes (although the matter was more complicated than that), a handleable figure for macro-devolution purposes. What mattered at the most fundamental (and ideological) level for the government was finding the best mechanism for divesting itself of many of its previous responsibilities. Transferring ‘service delivery’ to iwi-based authorities was a convenient method, in return for short-term transitional investment, of cutting costs and devolving responsibility to the collectivities themselves. A collective form of self-reliance was not seen as the ideal, but urgency reinforced expediency: the Maori sector used a high proportion of welfarist resources, and the need for self-reliance was clearly going to increase with state deregulatory policies impacting most heavily on a Maori population concentrated in the non-and semi-skilled workforce.²⁴

A number of Maori and other commentators argued that attaining rangatiratanga by devolving service delivery was an attempt to make use of iwi organisations rather than to empower them. They noted that the Crown’s rhetoric about proactively removing economic differentials between races, so trumpeted at the time of the Hui Taumata, was being quickly replaced by free-market and non-interventionist pronouncements. Many Maori leaders, however, took consolation in the parallel official rhetoric of self-determination: as in the past, they would aim to maximise their opportunities within whatever parameters the Crown had set. Because of recent Maori pressure,page 215 these parameters were (or seemed to be) more generous than ever before.

Nevertheless, there was much debate and contestation. Some argued that state divestment of responsibility would mean Maori tribal organisations became ‘dumping grounds’ for the welfare programmes made all the more necessary by the socio-economic consequences of the ‘New Right revolution’. A few contemporary commentators who took a Maoritanga approach (and many more, later) saw government willingness to talk the language of tribal power as a modern form of the old colonial ‘divide and rule’ policy. Internal tribal disputes over representation and mandating seemed to confirm that this was an effect, if not an intention, of government devolutionary policies.

For others, the situation involved no more than a supreme central authority paternalistically franchising some of its functions to Maori organisations: ‘With the Government ultimately retaining power and authority, devolution programmes often delivered the perception of rangatiratanga more than rangatiratanga itself’. Those arguing that government intentions did not amount to any genuine form of power sharing could soon cite a number of developments. When the Crown came to implement the thrust of Puao-Te-Ata-Tu through the 1989 legislation, for example, it was the minister who was tasked with appointing tribal nominees to district executive committees – and many Maori communities quickly came to clash with the managers of these institutions.

Tribally-based critics noted that the government seemed prepared to interpret the word ‘tribal’ very loosely. Conversely, many non-or pan-tribal organisations sought to legalise their status in the hope of being recognised as an ‘authority’ through which devolved programmes would flow. This added broader dimensions to the ‘divide and rule’ argument. Some Maori and pakeha went as far as to argue that while much Labour government rhetoric implied that Maori were at last being invited to enter a ‘partnership’ with the Crown, the two parties were really on a collision course. In the words of one academic observer, by 1984 ‘New Zealand was in the embryonic stage of two separate revolutions’, that of right-wing ‘economic rationalism’ and that of Maori revivalism. ‘Both sought control over the country’s economic and political sovereignty. They were set to collide whichever political party was in power.’

There can be no doubt that the Crown, primarily responsive to right-wing ‘solutions’ to capitalism’s global crisis, sought to appropriate rangatiratanga to a market-driven environment. To do so, it redefined rangatiratanga to mean ‘commercial self-governance’. This reflected a neoliberal model of indigenous development which, for many Maori, merely reconfirmed their allocated subordinacy within a state still essentially ‘colonial’. Those Maori who throve in the new laissez-faire environment, many noted, tended to possess western managerial and capitalist skills, experiences and mindsets. Even ‘traditional’page 216 tribal organisations, it was argued, were in danger of becoming tools for neoliberal policies if they were contemplating taking on devolved functions. For these could only be, in the final analysis, antithetical to the collective tribal ethos, especially when exercised on behalf of an extreme right-wing government and responsive to its requirements.

Notwithstanding such arguments, and misgivings based upon the economic brutality of Rogernomics, sizeable portions of the renaissant tribal leadership did opt to join discussions and negotiations. Some were fully aware that the outcomes might result only in a rangatiratanga that was both sub-sovereign and required accountability based on western business and managerial ideology. While the state’s response to Maori ‘assertion of economic and political power – te tino rangatiratanga’ was one which ‘left its [own] power intact’, then, the desire of the government to divest itself of the ‘burden’ of Maoridom meant that meaningful autonomist gains might be made regardless of the government’s motives. Maori leaders were generally confident that their organisations would be able to use their ‘collective strengths, in accordance with their cultural values’, to operate in ways that ‘reflected their needs and circumstances’.²⁵