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November 20, 2024 - 4:00pm
Last week, a video went viral of Maori politicians in the New Zealand Parliament performing a silly piece of political theatre. In protest against a proposed bill that would revise the terms of the 184-year-old Treaty of Waitangi, which makes unique allowances for Maori people in exchange for British rule, MPs tore up copies of the bill and did a traditional haka dance in defiance. The politician who proposed the bill, David Seymour of the libertarian ACT party, argued it went against the principle of equality in favour of special group rights. This week, more than 40,000 protestors demonstrated in Wellington against the bill.
The premise of the treaty presumes that New Zealand is a binational state composed of a white Anglo-settler community — which, due to recent waves of mass immigration, has become much more multi-ethnic — and an indigenous Maori community. The Maori are a confederation of various tribes who have to share sovereignty with each other, especially over land rights and political representation.
Some on the very online Right have mocked Maori protests as an odd show of ethnonationalism. There is clearly some truth to this claim. A lot of indigenous rights activism is premised on romantic notions that people like the Maori are noble savages who have a “unique” way of life and relationship with “the land” by dint of their ancestry that ought to be recognised and preserved by the state. As Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, the MP who led the protests, stated in a recent rally: “We are the kingmakers and the sovereign people of this land”. But those on the Right aren’t objecting out of any honest liberal principle. Their opposition is pure hypocrisy: it is simply because it is against their ethno-national group (white Anglos).
The concept of “indigeneity”, which has been trendy among some parts of the Left, post-colonial academia and decolonial activists for some years, has become toxic. Both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict use this rhetoric as the basis for their people being the “true” proprietors of the Holy Land and it has legitimised a racial war mindset. Its use has allowed for racial essentialism and outright racism for a generation. It is simply reactionary, as it posits that particular pieces of land “belong” to a particular volk, and a particular volk “belong” to a piece of land because of a supposedly unique ancestral-spiritual connection only they have. This notion, it mustn’t be forgotten, was key to proto-fascist nationalist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It is no surprise that the proponents of the Great Replacement Theory and the French New Right have long appropriated Left-sounding phrases to rebrand their racism as “ethnopluralism”. This idea, almost acceptable in our times of multiculturalism, suggests that each group should have its unique and ancient heritage preserved against global capitalism and liberalism which are nefariously diluting them through mass immigration and globalisation. Here, you can see ethnonationalists adopting the tone of victimised minorities by claiming that “indigeneity” is sacred.
The Maori protests have revealed the strangely unthinking currents on both extremities of the political aisle. One’s liberty and sense of belonging to a land does not and should not depend on “racial” ancestry or an ethnocentric understanding of sovereignty, but on the simple fact of being human.
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SubscribeI don’t think I agree with this, not least because there are multiple ways of ‘belonging’. My identity is strongly bound up in being native English – my ancestors lived here. But I know people whose ancestors came from other parts of the world who also are English, not just in the nationality of their passport, but in the sense of feeling and expressing Englishness in their attitudes and behaviour. And some of those people also have a strong identity as belonging to another nation or ethnic group eg Armenian, Indian, Mexican, Serb. I think the writer, like too many commentators today, has a rather simplistic either/or view of nationality and identity.
I think we need to stop fighting the ideological battles of the last century and look at what is happening now. What I see happening is an effort to demolish the idea of nationality and of belonging – at least for those who are white and British!
I don’t think you can compare Britain to newer countries like Canada, NZ, Australia and America. Large indigenous populations were displaced in these countries. For that reason, I believe there should be some form of recognition. Natives were mistreated in Canada back in the day. The pendulum has swung wildly in the other direction though with genocide narratives etc. However, natives should not have a defacto veto over national projects that impact the vast majority of people living in a country.
IDK. I don’t feel more informed about this issue after reading this.
It’s a complex issue in NZ. To massively (overly) simplify it essentially the Treaty of Waitangi was a peace treaty between Māori and the Crown, and it gave Māori some special privileges (ownership of land, natural resources etc) in exchange for accepting the Crown as Sovereign of NZ. However due to the English and Maori versions of the document not being an exact translation of each other there’s always been a few arguments over certain aspects of the Treaty.
The MP in question was proposing some changes to the Treaty (under the guise of clarifying the parts which are contended) which would essentially take away the privileges Māori receive (and in my view earned) as a result of them fighting the British Empire to a standstill all those years ago. This was the reason behind the large nationwide protests.
Unfortunately all anybody sees is the posturing in Parliament. The Maori Party who performed the Haka, and Seymour the MP who proposed the changes to the Treaty originally are all minor parties who achieve nothing but attention seeking
Thanks BB. I feel better informed now.
The interdependence and irony of freedom and belonging! Historically, a free man, in England anyway, was defined by his detachment from the land, as compared to a peasant’s entailment to it. He who strives to free himself shall find himself clamouring for bondage? Yes, it’s silly but informative too, and might explain where some get confused?
I think you are right to point this out. I’m sympathetic to the Maori who are a minority in the land they dominated before because my ancestors were also a minority culture perpetually. However there seems to be a level of hypocrisy involved on the part of the left.
You can find posts on X getting traction saying that Jews don’t belong in the middle east because their DNA is not tied to land. They don’t even know of those mizrahi jews who always lived in the middle east.
But it is saying the same as nazism that said Jews didn’t belong in Germany because they weren’t aryan.
Only yesterday I saw a post of a image of a DNA test proving that a Palestinian should be the actor of mother mary in a film rather the Israeli they picked as Palestinians were closer genetically to a single dna sample of a person who lived in that region 2000 years ago.
How far do you take this? Should the now majority Bengali tower hamlets remember the cockneys that dominated there before?
Spectacularly clear and truthful insight.
If you read pages 72-73 of Adam Rutherford’s book ‘How to Argue With a Racist’, you will learn that the global isopoint means that every white person living in New Zealand today is descended from people living in New Zealand , 3400 years ago.
The ‘settlers’ were literally returning to the lands that their ancestors lived in.
Nobody was in NZ 3400 years ago. The Maori (and possibly Moriori) were the first settlers on the islands, and they’ve only been there for around 700 years
I might be wrong about this, but I thought the Maori wiped out the true indigenous population of NZ.
Thanks for the info. I never knew that! Such ignorance! I stand corrected. (What I and Adam Rutherford said still applies to Australia)
700 years.
That’s less time than the Anglo-Saxons have been in England.
Do we get to call ourselves Indigenous?