Richard S. Hill

Fitting Multiculturalism into Biculturalism: Maori–Pasifika Relations in New Zealand from the 1960s

“Race relations” are an ever-present topic of public discourse and state policy formation in New Zealand. The emphasis is generally upon the relationship between the indigenous Maori, on the one hand, and the state and the majority ethno-cultural population group, the European(especially British)-derived Pakeha, on the other. In particular, the past, present, and future of the nation’s foundational document, the Treaty of Waitangi, signed between the first nations and the British Crown in 1840, has dominated popular debate and official policy in recent decades. Other ethno-cultural and politico-constitutional relationships, including those between Maori and significant immigrant populations from countries within the Pacific region (Pasifika peoples), have received scant attention. This article examines Maori-Pasifika relations in the context of an emergent sociocultural and official biculturalism in New Zealand, investigating attempts to fit multicultural policies and practices within a broad bicultural framework. Tangata Whenua, the indigenous Maori people of New Zealand (frequently called Aotearoa), and Tagata Pasifika, peoples from Oceania, together comprise more than a fifth of New Zealand’s population. There are synergies between these two broad groupings, and some tensions too, as is inevitable in the processes of social adjustment to and by immigrant groupings and their descendants. This article analyzes the relationship between Maori and immigrant Pasifika people principally in the context of the most overt and long-lived struggle against assimilation in New Zealand, that waged by the Tangata Whenua, or “people of the land.” The approach, then, is limited but useful in exploring both initial synergies in the Maori-Pasifika relationship and later complications in this nexus. The article finishes by canvassing some contemporary perspectives that find reason for optimism Ethnohistory 57:2 (Spring 2010) DOI 10.1215/00141801-2009-064 Copyright 2010 by American Society for Ethnohistory

MAORI URBAN MIGRATION AND THE ASSERTION OF INDIGENEITY IN AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND, 1945–1975

This essay examines the exercise of indigenous agency during extensive Maori urban migration within Aotearoa/New Zealand in the decades following the Second World War. It argues that, contrary to official expectations and despite many difficulties, the longstanding indigenous quest for the state to recognize rangatiratanga (broadly, Maori autonomy) adapted successfully to the new urban and suburban environment. This defied the belief firmly held by governments and their officials, one shared by most within the British-derived dominant culture, that urbanization would greatly speed up a supposedly inevitable process of assimilation. The many modes of resistance to assimilation, and the great deal of organizational change which accompanied the urban migration, contributed eventually not to disappearing but to enhancing the cause of rangatiratanga – despite seemingly unpropitious circumstances. State-provided adjustment measures, for example, which had aimed at appropriating Maori organizational energies in ways which would accelerate assimilation, were in turn reappropriated in the pursuit of rangatiratanga. By the mid-1970s, this period of momentous politico-cultural turmoil for Maori had established a sound base for a ‘Maori Renaissance’ so powerful that the state was already abandoning its assimilation policies.

New Zealand Maori: The Quest for Indigenous Autonomy

Abstract The indigenous Maori of New Zealand, like their counterparts in other jurisdictions, express a holistic inseparability from the land: they are tangata whenua, ‘people of the land’. But most of their land had been lost to the colonisers by 1900, and only a small proportion of it has been returned through reparational negotiations between tribes and governments over the last 25 years. These negotiations have mostly now been concluded, and thus there is no prospect of the return of significant land areas in the foreseeable future. Moreover, these areas have been transferred to tribes as land, unaccompanied by constitutional concessions in such areas as governance, law and policing; and in any case, most Maori now live in urban areas, far from their tribal homelands. From the Maori perspective, however, the negotiations have been overarched by a quest to restore that which was promised in the nations foundational Treaty of Waitangi in 1840—their rangatiratanga, loosely translatable as autonomy. The article examines the prospects for self-determination within contexts of tribal landlessness and mass urbanisation. It explores ways in which tribal leaderships are in the process of forging forms of autonomy which, while non-territorial, are meaningful to the tangata whenua precisely because of indigenous understandings of the concepts of tangata, whenua and rangatiratanga.

People, land and the struggle for rangatiratanga/autonomy in New Zealand

This article interrogates indigeneity in the context of two New Zealand indigenous discourses, one of them land orientated and the other people orientated. It argues that the former has generally been emphasized over and above the latter, which it examines principally in terms of the struggle for the rangatiratanga (loosely translatable as autonomy) promised to Maori by the British Crown in the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840. People-based discourse is seen as key to the resilience of Maoridom and its powerful assertions of agency in recent decades. But to argue in this way is not to discount the land discourse, which in the holistic Maori worldview is conflated with the people discourse and rangatiratanga