Māori might be the ‘luckiest’ Indigenous people – but that’s not down to New Zealand exceptionalism
Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, once wrote that “power always stands in need of numbers”. That insight, made in the context of a study into the nature of violence, is one that commentators often turn to when explaining why Māori appear to fare so much better than Indigenous peoples in other parts of the Anglosphere. Māori make up more than 15% of the New Zealand population – more than five times larger than the Aboriginal Australian or Native American share of their national populations – meaning Māori are in a better position to press for guaranteed representation in parliament and local government, for dedicated television channels and radio stations, for native language schooling, and more. Indigenous peoples in other countries, to paraphrase Arendt, stand in need of numbers.
The argument is seductively simple. Social scientists sometimes call it the 3.5% rule. In other words, if enough people engage in active struggle – from workers’ strikes to street protests – the disruption they cause is almost always enough to guarantee political change. In the 1980s socialist organisers were turning out tens of thousands of people on the streets to protest the Springbok tour, nuclear warships, and racism against Māori. It’s impossible to measure whether the 3.5% threshold was met, but it’s obvious enough that the many thousands who took part in demonstrations and advocacy were enough to cancel any further Springbok tours, to prohibit nuclear warships from New Zealand waters, and to strengthen the Treaty of Waitangi’s position in the New Zealand constitution.
And yet this explanation also strikes as terribly grey, reducing history to a mere numbers game. That reductiveness is probably what attracts politicians to the argument. In 2004 the then race relations minister Trevor Mallard, who is now speaker of the House, told media that Māori party co-leader Tariana Turia was encouraging Māori teenagers as young as 13 to get pregnant in order to build the base for “Māori ownership of the country”. The accusation was transparently false, but it did neatly foreshadow the political right’s obsession with birthrates a decade later. White people are having too few babies, and brown people are having too many. In this calculus politics – or rather, power – is a mere numbers game and as soon as Māori birth enough babies to outmuscle or outvote the white majority then the country is theirs.
Even the most charitable reader can identify that as racist. But it’s also, as a historical explanation for why Māori enjoy the power that they do, inadequate. History so often relies on contingencies.
Not in the empiricist sense that some historians enjoy – AJP Taylor once made the tickling argument that what made WWI possible was railway timetables – but in the sense that certain institutional forms and movement configurations (with numbers added in) guarantee success. In New Zealand the Māori activists of the 70s and 80s were successful not so much because they had countless thousands on their side but because they brought together a necessary coalition of iwi, trade unions, university students, and politicians. In short, enough allies to cause enough disruption.
In the retrospectives to the activist groups of the 70s and 80s it’s often ignored that the people we consider movement darlings – Hone Harawira, Annette Sykes, and the many others – weren’t so popular in their day. As the scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith explained at the Ngā Tamatoa 50th reunion “you would not have invited us to dinner. You would have been embarrassed because we would have caused a fight. We would have caused a fight about the Treaty [of Waitangi]. We would have caused a fight about the survival of our people”. That confrontational approach meant many of the more conservative kaumātua (Māori elders) and iwi (tribal) leaders were either uncertain or outright hostile to younger groups like Ngā Tamatoa. Dun Mihaka, a Marxist and one of the best-known activists of the time, memorably condemned his older, conservative opponents for exercising the “traditional tyranny of kaumatuatanga [elders]” by continually “nodding [their] heads in agreement” with Pākehā politicians and wagging their fingers at the younger people demanding better.
Of course, that binary – the young v the old – is equally reductive as the numbers argument. Ngā Tamatoa was made up of more than just the broad category of “young people”. The great Ranginui Walker, who was a kaumātua even in the 1970s while in his 40s, was one of the group’s founders and intellectual leaders. Even the older, conservative leaders of institutions like the Māori Council were happy to use the younger activists when it suited contrasting the vocal outsiders with their demands (Ngā Tamatoa et al) to the insiders with their readiness to cut a good deal (the Māori Council). And that brings us closer to why Māori are perhaps in a comparatively more powerful position than other Indigenous peoples. Radical movements and conservative institutions were working not necessarily in concert, but certainly toward the same aim: recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi.
In the early to mid-20th century politicians would often praise New Zealand for enjoying “the best race relations in the world”. Nowhere were two races so well “integrated”. Māori, then an even smaller minority than they are today, were leaders in politics – enjoying at least four seats in parliament at all times – workplaces, and sport. In the Pākehā (white) imagination that race relations boast was thus self-evidently true. Had it not always been so? Even in the 19th century political and intellectual leaders were extolling the virtues of Māori and their Pākehā compatriots. In his general history of the young dominion William Pember Reeves wrote of Māori as “the finest race of savages the world has seen”. This was part of a long, sleazy lineage claiming that Māori – and by extension, New Zealand – were somehow exceptional. In 1885 the surveyor Edward Treagar argued that Māori were descendants of Aryans.
In a droll observation a century later one of the leading historians of his generation, James Belich, noted that Treagar’s argument was a convenient cover for colonisation allowing the British to argue that their taking of New Zealand was simply a family reunion. Māori had fallen a few branches down, the argument went, but with British tutelage they could claim their rightful place at the top of the racial tree. It’s a claim that collapses upon the slightest interrogation. And so too do all of the arguments that grew from it. Māori did enjoy guaranteed representation in parliament, to take one example, but that representation wasn’t tied to their share of the population. When the Māori Representation Act 1867 came into force the number of Māori seats in parliament was capped at four when, on a population basis, Māori were entitled to more than a dozen.
To the activists of the 70s and 80s this injustice and the many others were becoming intolerable. In 1975 more than 60,000 New Zealanders put their name to a petition calling for an end to the alienation of Māori land. This protest, often framed in the press as a mere nuisance, had been bubbling below the surface for at least 20 years. In 1953, the same year Her Majesty paid her first visit to the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, the then National government made sweeping changes to Māori land law allowing, in Aroha Harris’s words, “the compulsory alienation of uneconomic Māori land interests”. This property seizure clause was the root of ongoing resentment into the 60s and 70s with several groups, from conservatives to radicals, organising protests, petitions, and pleas against it.
At this point in time Māori were hardly better off than Indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, or the United States. The New Zealand government could seize Māori land under a tissue-thin pretence. Customary practices like adoption were folded into general legislation in the same decade as well, taking the country one step closer to “assimilation” between Māori and Pākehā. But the mid-20th century is where Māori perhaps begin to diverge from their seniors in Australia and Turtle Island. In 1977 the great rangatira (Māori chief) Joe Hawke and the Ōrākei Māori Action Committee (OMAC) led hundreds in an occupation of Takaparawhā. Known to Pākehā as Bastion Point Reserve, the land was victim to compulsory acquisitions over several decades and come the 1970s the government was planning to develop a housing estate for wealthy Aucklanders.
This was a typical story. Yet Hawke and OMAC made an atypical response. They went back to the land and rebuilt a pā – a village, essentially – publicly declaring their intention to take back what was their ancestral right. The letters to the editor writers were wild. The then prime minister Robert Muldoon took regular cracks at the occupiers, whipping the letter writers into a frenzy. In ordinary times pressure from the top of government might have been enough to dissuade the occupiers. But OMAC had a genuine movement on its side: first, in a large majority of Māori; second, in the local (if not necessarily national) residents who according to one poll were overwhelmingly opposed to the development; and third, in the form of the trade union movement.
When Muldoon sent in the police and the army to evict OMAC hundreds of workers in Wellington walked off the job in a wild cat strike. On the same day the Auckland Trades Council reconfirmed that its construction members would adhere to a “green ban” on the site. That meant the government had no practical means to pursue its development plans. No union members would accept the job and the local residents, who weren’t necessarily proMāori, were anti-development.
This organising model was taken up
across the country in the decades following. In 1988, 10 years after the eviction, the crown made its first honourable retreat, returning the land to its rightful owners in Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei. In a rare act of contrition the crown acknowledged its breach of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.
But that is quite a curious formulation. The government was sorry for breaching the “principles” of the treaty. What of its text? As it happens the conservatives of the Māori Council (who were generally of the older generation) had carved the crown’s tracks to retreat. In 1987 their leaders took the government to the court of appeal over its privatisation policy arguing that transferring land from public ownership to the new “state-owned enterprises” was “inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”. The court agreed and in a landmark decision conferred form and content on those principles. Today the principles – known colloquially as partnership, participation, and protection – bind the crown. In the 90s and 2000s the principles were responsible for helping force the government to negotiate over rights to land, fisheries, broadcasting, and more.
In this context, then, what made the victory at Takaparawhā possible was a two-track strategy. The radicals in OMAC demanding nothing less than the return of the land and the conservatives like the Māori Council and the insiders like Labour MP Koro Wetere providing the institutional means for doing so. But 30 years later this arrangement is proving increasingly inadequate. Although it was mostly successful at Ihumātao with Save Our Unique Landscape demanding the return of the South Auckland headland and institutions like the Kīngitanga and Labour MP Nanaia Mahuta working to provide the means for doing so, it comes at an unacceptable cost. Why should Māori activists submit years of their life to a cause that should happen as of right?
And so Waitangi Day 2021 is marked by a new series of land battles: at
Shelley Bay in Wellington, at Ōpihi Whanaungakore in the Bay of Plenty, and at iwi checkpoints across the country as Māori in the north, east, and west insist on their right to protect their borders against Covid-19. It’s this battle – against the virus and government inertia – that indicates maybe the insider-outsider strategy is at its end. No amount of Māori inside the Ministry of Health, for example, could stop that agency from monopolising vaccine procurement, distribution, and outreach. Even Māori organisations outside the ministry such as the Waipereira Trust, the largest single vaccine provider in Auckland, struggled to force the government to share data in its efforts to reach unvaccinated Māori. In the end the trust CEO John Tamihere had to turn to the courts for a partial victory. Perhaps this reaffirms Arendt’s argument that power always stands in need of numbers. This seems especially true in a majoritarian democracy.
But what if, as Waitangi Day seems to remind us, we can source power in social movements? Ihumātao is a reminder that, in Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s words, there is power in causing a fight.
Morgan Godfery (Te Pahipoto, Sāmoa) is a senior lecturer at the University of Otago and a columnist at Metro