The Waitangi Tribunal and the Regulation of Maori Protest (original) (raw)
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This dissertation is concerned with the ways in which Māori legal traditions have changed in response to the process of negotiated settlement of historical claims against the state. The settlements agreed between Māori groups and the state provide significant opportunities and challenges for Māori communities and, inevitably, force those communities to confront questions relating to the application of their own legal traditions to these changed, and still changing, circumstances. This dissertation focuses specifically on Māori legal traditions and post-settlement governance entities. However, the intention is not to simply record changes to Māori legal traditions, but to offer some assessment as to whether these changes and adaptations support, or alternatively detract from, the two key goals of the settlement process-reconciliation and Māori self-determination. I argue that where the settlement process is compelling Māori legal traditions to develop in a way that is contrary to reconciliation and Māori self-determination, then the settlement process itself ought to be adjusted. iv This dissertation studies the nature of changes to Māori legal traditions in the context of the Treaty settlement process, using a framework that can be applied to Māori legal traditions in other contexts. There are many more stories of Māori legal traditions that remain to be told, including stories that drill into the detail of specific legal traditions and create pathways between an appropriate philosophical framework and the practical operation of vibrant Māori legal systems. Those stories will be vital if we in Aotearoa/New Zealand are to move towards reconciliation and Māori self-determination. The story that runs through this dissertation is one of a settlement process that undermines those objectives because of the pressures it places on Māori legal traditions. But it need not be this way. If parties to the Treaty settlement process take the objectives of self-determination and reconciliation seriously, and pay careful attention to changes to Māori legal traditions that take place in the context of that process, a different story can be tolda story in which Treaty settlements signify, not the end of a Treaty relationship, but a new beginning. v
Aboriginal History, 2011
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Land
Te Tiriti o Waitangi, signed between Māori rangatira (chiefs) and the British Crown in 1840 guaranteed to Māori the ‘full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands’. In the decades that followed, Māori were systematically dispossessed of all but a fraction of their land through a variety of mechanisms, including raupatu (confiscation), the individualisation of title, excessive Crown purchasing and the compulsory acquisition of land for public works. Māori, who have deep cultural and whakapapa (genealogical) connections to the land, were left culturally, materially and spiritually impoverished. Land loss has long been a central grievance for many Māori and the return of land has been a guiding motivation for whānau (extended family), hapū (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe) seeking redress from the Crown. Since the 1990s, many groups have entered into negotiations to settle their historical grievances with the Crown and while land loss and the deep yearning for its return are cent...
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I examine the New Zealand Supreme Court's cases dealing with Maori legal issues between 2004 and 2014 from a critical, comparative and international perspective. I conclude that the Supreme Court cases illustrate: an increasing readiness to incorporate Maori customary law into New Zealand law, albeit in ways that do not challenge the sovereignty of Parliament; that Maori continue to lose on the facts even when legal principles appear to increasingly recognise their rights; that in some instances New Zealand law recognises Maori land rights to a greater extent than Canada; and a willingness to recognise the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Juridical Encounters: Māori and the Colonial Courts, 1840-1852
The Journal of New Zealand Studies, 2019
Juridical Encounters: Māori and the Colonial Courts, 1840-1852 by Shaunnagh Dorsett is an engaging and nuanced study of the development of colonial laws and institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand and the expansion of the jurisdiction of state law that begins in this period. The issues explored in the book – relating to the relationship between the law of the settler state and Indigenous law; the recognition of Māori law by the state legal system; and the authority with which Māori and state law speak – remain live issues today. Studying how those issues were addressed during the Crown colony period helps us to understand the current relationship between Māori law and state law, how we arrived at this point, and, crucially, it helps us to think about how to approach that relationship with legal techniques appropriate to the social and political context and objectives of the 21st century.
Indigenous Claims: Hearings, Settlements and Neoliberal Silencing
Abstract This article investigates the double-edged potentiality of the Waitangi Tribunal, an indigenous claims forum in New Zealand, and combines an ethnographic background to a recent claim with an anthropological interpretation of the meanings and outcomes of this encounter. I suggest that the legal justice framework of the claims proceedings and the political aspect of settlements are distinct yet contingent phenomena. Both are inherently embedded in the neoliberalization of society. I suggest that marae (meeting-house complexes where tribunal hearings are held)—albeit symbolizing singular Māori spaces and distinctive loci where indigenous identity is reproduced—are equally sites where cultural and economic struggles articulate with neoliberal logics. I draw attention to the persistence of alienation in Māori society irrespective of the comparative generosity of the reparative justice program; I also consider the contradictory spaces opened for indigeneity under neoliberal governance and their unintended consequences, inventions, and creative hybridizations. I argue that a fruitful way to foreground the precarity of this engagement is by paying attention to silences. Such silences are multilevel, prefigure the claims process, are expressed as inequalities in the hearings, conscribe a particular version of a postcolonial economy, and reference a broader pattern of economic deprivation.