The veneer is radical, the substance is not

Ranginui Walker\u27s history of the Maori struggles for tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) was first published during New Zealand’s sesquicentennial year. The 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi provoked intense public debates around issues of nationhood and the place of the Treaty of in managing contemporary relationships between Maori communities and the Crown

Indigenous identities and the politics of authenticity

The very question of Indigenous authenticity, as Jeffrey Sissons reminds us, ‘‘…has deep roots within colonial racism’’ (2005, 43). Racialisation and the practice of creating and imbuing racial categories with seemingly impermeable boundaries and indestructible meanings has, after all, underpinned a range of colonial practices from the systematic alienation of Indigenous land and resources to child abduction. Regimes of biological and cultural authenticity continue to shape state policies and practices that regulate the everyday lives of Indigenous people around the world. Indeed, in some contexts, expectations of Indigenous cultural purity or environmental naturalness exist alongside the imposition of varying degrees of blood quantum as criteria for citizenship, political recognition and access to resources and services

Emergent identities: the changing contours of Indigenous identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand

This chapter explores the changing contours of contemporary indigenous identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It challenges essentialist notions that Māori have ‘‘…singular, integral, altogether harmonious and unproblematic identities’’(Calhoun 1994, 13). It will be argued that rather than conceptualising Māori identities as the continual transmission of fixed cultural essences through time, ‘‘being Māori’’ should be approached as part of a more discontinuous process in which culture and tradition are continually made and remade

Aotearoa - New Zealand

“Race relations” and the place of the Treaty of Waitangi as a blueprint for nation building were very much at the forefront of the national political agenda in 2004. The broad political consensus shared by both National and Labour-led governments in New Zealand over the past decade collapsed in the wake of the soaring political popularity of Don Brash, the new leader of the National Party, the main opposition political party in the New Zealand Parliament. The legitimacy of policy initiatives and programmes that specifically target Mãori in order to reduce the relative socio-economic disparities that exist between indigenous communities and other New Zealanders, and the role of the Treaty of Waitangi in managing contemporary relationships between indigenous communities and the Crown, have come under sustained attack

He pokeke uenuku i tu ai: the evolution of contemporary Maori protest

Historically, the intensity and momenlUm of Maori political activism has never been consistent. Upturns in protest activity are followed by downturns in struggle and vice versa. 1lle 1970s were witness to a dramatic upsurge in Maori activism which had a profound effect on New Zcaland society. The political turbulence created in the wake of the 1975 land march on Parliament, Bastion Point, Raglan and the regular protests at Waitangi once again revealed the exploitative and oppressive foundations on which capitalism had been established in Aolearoa. The decline of working-class movements internationally and the fisc of the New Right coupled with the logic of identity politics lured many Maori away from political activity throughout the 1980s. However. the recent upsurge in naxfools Maori activism in opposition to the fiscal envelope and the Sealord deal is the most significant since the series of land occupations and marches of the 1970s

Ethnicity and class

Class does not exist as an isolated dimension of our social lives. A range of factors such as ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexual orientation intersect and collectively shape our experiences of class. Furthermore, as active and conscious historical beings, we experience class and class struggles through our own inherited set of cultural values and social expectations