Indigenous Identity and Resistance by Brendan Hokowhitu

Author:Brendan Hokowhitu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Otago University Press

Elsewhere in the British Empire, native races were supposed to enjoy the status of British subjects, although they were not always treated accordingly. What was remarkable in New Zealand was that this was explicitly stated and the expression of humanitarian idealism thus publicised. However, the implications of accepting the ‘rights and privileges’ of a British subject (that Maori would be subject to British law and committed to certain responsibilities) were not emphasised.8

Perhaps the most significant implication of Article Three was the inclusion of Māori in the franchise and the creation of the four Māori seats in Parliament from 1867. But the ‘certain responsibilities’ Māori also acquired have been the price that Māori paid for those rights. Māori attempts to assert their chiefly authority under Article Two of the Treaty were generally greeted with hostility by the settler society. As Cox’s study of Māori political unity reveals, the state resisted independent Māori expression of self-determination in the late 1800s, such as the Māori Parliament and the King movement, and made provision instead from time to time for Māori participation within the state in a variety of ways.9 Through the late 1800s, as Māori rapidly lost the land from which to express their chiefly authority, their British rights and privileges became an assimilating force that framed Māori expressions of culture and identity outside the state as radical and divisive.

It is difficult to quantify the full impact of Article Three on Māori since 1840, but some of the obvious outcomes are more readily apparent when the New Zealand case is compared to the experiences of First Nations in colonial Canada. The 1763 Royal Proclamation (which set the boundaries for the new colony of Quebec) refers to British protection for Indian Nations, but also sets them apart from ‘all our loving subjects’. The treaties subsequently signed with First Nations were written in the language of land ‘surrender’ and did not convey the rights of British Subjects to First Nations as the Treaty of Waitangi did for Māori. These treaties often, however, set aside reserved lands which First Nations retained with considerably more success than the reserves set aside for Māori which were largely lost by 1910.10

In 1867, the same year that the Māori Representation Act was passed in New Zealand, the British North America Act provided Canada’s federal government exclusive authority to legislate in relation to reserved lands. The subsequent 1876 Indian Act ended any confusion about the place of Aboriginal people in the new colony; ‘status’ Indians were not enfranchised, so had different rights. From this time, laws and policies encouraged First Nations to relinquish their ‘Indian’ status and embrace the rights and privileges of Canadians (which First Nations resisted).

It is this combination of factors – Māori inclusion in the state and lack of geographic isolation and First Nations’ physical and political exclusion from the developing society – that makes the respective forms of representation in contemporary society unsurprising. What is harder to explain is why Māori attempts at self-government and calls for guaranteed representation for First Nations have been unsuccessful.

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