by Miranda Johnson
What Mahmood Mamdani once called “culture talk” proliferates in New Zealand: insidious discourses that perpetuate ideas of cultural difference established and fixed by colonial rule. My university’s staff training course, Te Rito, is a fine example. “Te Rito” is a Māori word that refers to the young, center shoot of the harakeke or New Zealand flax bush, representing the source of new life. The course aims to “help people develop their own bicultural competencies and gain a better understanding of Māori perspectives through deep reflection as well as action.” Such programs will be broadly familiar to academics abroad. In New Zealand, the distinctive framing in terms of “biculturalism” speaks to a particular idea of the nation, or “social imaginary,” in Cornelius Castoriadis’s sense—that it has been founded by two distinct cultures of equal value, those of the Indigenous Māori and Pākehā (British settlers).
Since the 1980s, the discourse of biculturalism has had an enormous impact in New Zealand. It is not simply a cognate of multiculturalism, and theories of the politics of difference and recognition cannot capture the symbolic and affective drive of this concept, either. Rather, biculturalism is a way of reimagining nationhood in an ahistorical way. As a result, commentators politically and analytically separate the burgeoning economic success of Māori in recent years from the history of Indigenous economic thought and practice.
Mamdani argued that “cultural explanations of political outcomes tend to avoid history” (2002, p. 767). This critique can help us address the problem of history in contemporary New Zealand, which demands nuanced accounts of the intellectual, political, and economic histories of Indigenous people and concepts of indigeneity. Without such nuanced historical approaches, colonialist notions of “people without history” return in contemporary culturalist frameworks, both in public discourse and academic work. Historians have a particularly important public role to play in this regard, for we know that remembering and forgetting are crucial to history’s function in the public sphere. In the current moment of political polarization, it is critical that we think about how to tell a politically relevant story that seeks to hold a pluralist society together, a project that Mamdani has also called for.
Three problems plague current understandings of the recent past in New Zealand. First, many assume that the idea of biculturalism is a culturally progressive discourse, one in which non-Māori come to a “better understanding” of this Indigenous people, as the training course puts it. But that tends to exaggerate the disjuncture between this symbolic notion of nationhood—that is, biculturalism—and the nationalist discourses and symbols of the past. New Zealand has long been imagined as a land of two peoples. Proponents of biculturalism seem to believe that it is only within that discourse that these peoples can interact positively.
Second, by overstating biculturalism’s transformation of the idea of New Zealand, we overlook a key argument by Māori leaders in the 1980s that biculturalism could enhance the economic development of tribes, which built on earlier arguments they made for modernization.
Third, such misappropriations of history have led to an impasse in contemporary political discussion in New Zealand. Both Māori and Pākehā progressives tend to focus on the dispossession and loss caused by settler colonialism and to juxtapose a reified notion of Indigenous culture with the history of capitalism. But such an account cannot explain Māori economic development, which the political right, including some Māori, represents as a success story. Given that many Māori still suffer from social and economic disadvantage, we need stories that can acknowledge economic development without masking what remains to be done.
The framing of Te Rito reflects some of the social changes in New Zealand over the past forty years. In this period key components of biculturalism have shifted the symbolic imagining of the country to award Māori language and protocols a higher status. Signs of this change are manifold. Māori language is spoken more widely, and New Zealand English now includes many Māori loan words. Indigenous cultural protocols of welcome are expected in public life. Schools, museums, and other public institutions affirm biculturalism through dedicated Māori units tasked with addressing specific issues believed to be of concern to Indigenous people, such as language, cultural protocols, and repatriation.
These symbolic changes in New Zealand’s public life, commonly described as a transformation from state-driven policies of assimilation or monoculturalism to those of biculturalism, were bound up with economic and political reforms. By the early 1980s, intensifying Māori activism (which was inspired by global anticolonialism and advocacy from legislated Māori bodies as well as tribal leaders that advanced the historical claims of their people) had come to have a major impact on national debate. At the same time, New Zealand’s geopolitical and economic relationships were moving away from Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular, and towards Asia and the United States (although the relationship with the latter had been damaged for a time by New Zealand’s “nuclear-free” policy of the mid-1980s). Finally, a political crisis in 1984 and the radical reforms undertaken by a recently elected Labour Government created a space for change that Māori leaders pushed further open. The restructuring of state services and globalizing of the New Zealand economy along neoliberal lines promised new opportunities for tribes as corporate entities but also increased domestic inequality.
Tribal leaders pressed for their claims largely through the courts and a specialized commission of inquiry, the Waitangi Tribunal, which was created in 1975 to investigate Māori claims of breaches of the historic Treaty of Waitangi. After the Tribunal was authorized in 1985 to hear claims of breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi dating back to its signing by British and Māori representatives in 1840, it began investigating wide-ranging historical claims. These inquiries eventually forced the New Zealand government to negotiate major monetary settlements with iwi (tribes). The government also found it necessary to negotiate with Māori over fisheries, a huge asset for an island nation. In 1992, it created the Māori Fisheries Commission to manage a 50% stake in New Zealand’s largest fishing company, the assets of which were to be distributed among iwi. And in a key court case in 1987 Māori leaders won a further concession: recognition that the Treaty of Waitangi had created a “partnership” between the Crown (executive government) and Māori, thereby obliging the Crown to consult with Māori over issues of importance to them.
These symbolic and material changes of the 1980s and 1990s—the valuing of Māori culture, the political recognition of Māori as partners with the Crown, and the conclusion of monetary settlements—are commonly held to have inaugurated a broadly defined “biculturalism” that marks a rupture with the colonial past. Te Ara, New Zealand’s publicly funded online historical encyclopedia, asserts that for “a long time… New Zealand was unofficially monocultural”—until, that is, the Māori-led protests of the 1970s and 1980s “brought about important changes in how New Zealand saw itself.” Similarly, James Belich, in the second volume of his revisionist general history of New Zealand, Paradise Reforged (2002), regards the end of the twentieth century as a period of cultural decolonization, in which the country’s ties to Britain were finally cut loose. Likewise, according to Michael King, author of a bestselling general history of the country (2003), a true indigenization of the settlers occurred in this period. Both authors emphasize a high regard for Māori culture, “enacting” biculturalism through their writing, as Jacob Pollock notes.
Yet in addition to acknowledging these significant changes, we should note the deep continuities between the recent and more distant past. The dominant “culture talk” fostered by biculturalism as a progressive vision of reconciliation with Indigenous people reiterates rather than undoes older claims of national exceptionalism—notably, that the country had the best race relations in the world. In symbolic terms, New Zealand has long been imagined as hosting two cultures, albeit in paradoxical terms. At the same time as the state insisted that Māori children learn English and assimilate to Western norms, images of what was known in the early twentieth century as a romanticized “Māoriland” were key to tourist marketing campaigns. This tension between exotification and assimilation persists today.
Emphasizing biculturalism as a radical historical break has other, more pernicious, consequences. It elides a deep history of Māori economic thought. Even in the assimilative vortex of the early-to-mid twentieth century, Māori leaders pursued optimistic visions of indigeneity that tended to focus on encouraging land reform and economic development in rural areas where tribal culture could be sustained.
Engaging with modernity seemed to require Māori—like other minority Indigenous peoples—to become individualists, sloughing off their commitments to communal life in the pursuit of success in a capitalist order. But these leaders insisted on the vital importance of their people upholding a strong collective life and endeavored to persuade government to provide the conditions to make this possible. By the interwar period, the Māori population had recovered from its late-nineteenth century nadir, and evidence of dynamic engagement with the modern economy was becoming clearer, if still limited by the poor quality and quantity of land in Māori ownership.
The preeminent Māori leader, Āpirana Ngata, who served for nearly forty years in the New Zealand parliament and held significant ministerial portfolios, proposed a cultural project of holding fast to important Māori cultural practices and loyalty to tribe while engaging in the Pakeha economy as individuals. As he put it in 1927, the “time is at an end when the Maori will be satisfied merely to ape the Pakeha.” Māori were “demanding more allowance for [their] racial peculiarities, and a deeper appreciation by the pakeha missioner [sic] for the ngakau Maori [the Māori heart].” Ngata would go on to develop “alternative routes” for Māori development in subsequent years (see Jeffrey Sissons, 54). Thus was modernity “indigenized,” as Marshall Sahlins would have argued.
As Māori urbanized in the mid-to-late twentieth century, renewed questions of how to sustain cultural connection came to the fore of protest and public debate. Younger, urban-based activists expressed a sense of alienation from their culture and language, which was not widely taught in schools or universities. Some of these needs were met through grassroots Māori-led initiatives such as immersive “language nests” for Māori children. At the same time, anthropologists applauded how, as Ralph Piddington (264) put it in 1968, Māori had “condensed centuries of material progress into a little over a hundred years” without “renouncing their cultural heritage.”
Māori continued to adapt, which included building their own institutions, such as marae (meeting grounds), in urban as well as rural settings. This long-term evolution is evinced by the reflections of Mason Durie, a leading Māori psychiatrist and political thinker, that the 1980s witnessed a “renewed determination by Maori to retain tribal structures and cultures while at the same time embracing the challenges of a global economy.”
Today, what is being called the “Māori economy” is booming and is predicted to make up one quarter of New Zealand’s GDP by 2030. (In the most recent national census, around 17% of the population identified as being of Māori descent, and a portion of this percentage identify with other ethnicities too.) Since 2000, class dynamics have changed, with the balance of Māori employment shifting away from low or unskilled work. Today, 60 percent of the Māori labor force is in skilled or highly skilled employment. Tribal asset bases are exponentially increasing. In the South Island, the major iwi Ngāi Tahu manages a capital asset base of over NZ $2 billion which includes extensive investment in extractive industries such as dairy farming and plantation forestry. Recently, Tainui Group Holdings, the corporate arm of a North Island iwi, announced an NZ $1 billion partnership with the global investment firm Brookfield to invest in “the iwi’s industrial and logistics hub.”
How the tribal economy has made the most of opportunities offered through neoliberal devolution and globalization needs to be understood historically—that is, in relation to older genealogies of thought and practice that refused to see the relationship between modernity and indigeneity as some kind of zero-sum game. Yet the story I have briefly told here of Māori modernity and its contribution to the changes wrought under the name of biculturalism are seldom given their due in contemporary “culture talk.” In its most progressive framing, this culture talk of the post-neoliberal era emphasizes instead the loss and denigration that Māori experienced in conditions of settler colonialism and, at the same time, tends to idealize Indigenous cultural values as alternatives to mainstream capitalist life, such as via a unique Indigenous connection to nature or an orientation towards community above the individual.
This is the story told in the Te Rito training course. By forgetting the history of economic development as key to Māori support for biculturalism—which is rooted, as I have shown, in longer histories of adaptation and engagement—culture talk is deployed to avoid a confrontation with the moral problem that tribal wealth poses to the social imaginary, which premises itself on a representation of Māori as poor and dispossessed.
Furthermore, the cultural values espoused in such courses seem to be in conflict with the corporate decisions that are actually made by iwi leaders in managing and expanding their asset bases. The assumption that reified cultural values diverge from or even exist beyond the long and complex history of Māori engagement with the colonial capitalist economy prevents one from understanding much of contemporary Māori economic life. (There are alternative theoretical approaches that criticize Māori corporate capitalism and instead aim to indigenize Marxist thought, such as Simon Barber’s essay on “Māori Marx”).
In turning culture against economics, such progressive approaches endanger the very cause they espouse. New Zealanders can see that tribes are doing well, or at least much better, economically. The insistence of progressives that Indigenous culture somehow exists outside of history, whose arc bends only toward further injustice, starts to look like bad faith.
Even some center-left voters have been alienated by the premises of culture talk. The previous Labour government angered some of its own constituency with what they saw as race-based privileges. In the most recent national election in 2023, a right-wing coalition government was elected in part on a platform protesting separate rights. This government is now undoing key policies of biculturalism. The main ideological thread in currently proposed reforms seems to be that Māori no longer need “special treatment.” However, even as the Māori economy expands, many Māori (and, even more so, Pasifika) continue to face social and economic disadvantages vis-à-vis the rest of the population. Since the rise of neoliberalism, political support for those at the bottom of the heap has steadily eroded. Such a fragile political moment demands politically relevant histories that explain Māori economic development without neglecting ongoing structural inequality.
This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
Miranda Johnson is an associate professor of history at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her first book The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State (OUP, 2016) won the W. K. Hancock prize for the best first book in any area of history from the Australian Historical Association. She has published widely on the history of Indigenous rights and the politics of history in settler states. She is currently working on a new book tentatively titled Redemptive Visions: Postcolonial Predicaments in a Southern Settler State.
Edited by Zac Endter.
Featured image: A Maori man and Joseph Banks exchanging a crayfish for a piece of cloth, Tupaia, 1769, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
