Sustaining Indigeneity in New Zealand

Steven S. Webster

Sustaining Indigeneity in New Zealand Efforts to Assimilate the Māori 1894–2022

PETER LANG
Lausanne • Berlin • Brussels • Chennai • New York • Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Webster, Steven S. (Steven Sebastian), author.

Title: Sustaining Indigeneity in New Zealand : efforts to assimilate the Māori, 1894–2022 / Steven S. Webster.

Other titles: Efforts to assimilate the Māori, 1894–2022

Description: New York: Peter Lang, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023004423 (print) | LCCN 2023004424 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433198878 (hardback) | ISBN 9781433198885 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433198892 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Māori (New Zealand people)–Government relations. | Māori (New Zealand people)–Social conditions. | Māori (New Zealand people)–Cultural assimilation. | New Zealand–Social conditions.

Classification: LCC DU423.G6 W43 2023 (print) | LCC DU423.G6 (ebook) |

DDC 305.899/442093–dc23/eng/20230307

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004423

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004424X

DOI 10.3726/b20045

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG

ISBN 9781433198878 (hardback)

ISBN 9781433198885 (ebook)

ISBN 9781433198892 (epub)

DOI 10.3726/b20045

© 2023 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne

Published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, USA

info@peterlang.com - www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilization outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

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This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the author

Steven S. Webster has a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, based on field research in an indigenous transhumant society in highland Peru. Since the early 1970s he has undertaken field and ethnohistorical research with the Māori of New Zealand and taught social anthropology and Māori studies at the University of Auckland.

About the book

Sustaining Indigeneity in New Zealand is a revised collection of ten essays by Steven Webster, all written since 1998. Collectively they address national policies and indigeneity movements through a lens of class inequality. Webster describes efforts to assimilate the Māori since the advent of neoliberal policies in the 1980s, with a particular focus on the ways the Māori and their supporters have resisted or subverted these policies.

Topics covered include: how an idealised version of Māori culture obscured assimilation of the Māori in the 1850s; the Māori renaissance of the later twentieth century; neoliberal subversion of Māori fishing rights; the struggles of Nāi Tūhoe, who won control of their ancestral lands under a benevolent administration, lost it under a predatory successor, but then finally regained it in 2014; and commodity fetishism and the ways commodification is resisted and even turned back against the government by the Māori.

Covering key episodes of Māori indigeneity movements, the book will be of interest to activists and scholars, as well as undergraduate and graduate students of anthropology, history, sociology, political studies, and ethnic studies.

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