Maori and the State: Crown-Maori Relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1950-2000

This book is the companion volume to the author's State Authority, Indigenous Autonomy, which covered Crown-Maori relations in first half of twentieth-century New Zealand. Focussing on a complex series of interactions between the principal institutions of both state and indigeneity, Maori and the State analyses Maori aspirations in terms of the longstanding quest for Crown recognition of rangatiratanga. In doing so, it examines both continuities and changes, and pays special attention to the ways in which the search for autonomy adapted to the massive post-war migration by Maori to the large towns and cities. Maori and the State charts the Crown's attempts to contain the energies of rangatiratanga and appropriate them for its own purposes, as it had done ever since early colonisation. The book analyses the ways in which Maori leaders and communities have utilised numerous opportunities to pursue rangatiratanga, including efforts to reappropriate the state institutions established to control them. In illuminating the interactions between Maori and state over a crucial half century, one in which the official pursuit of assimilation was superseded (under pressure from the Maori Renaissance) by bicultural policies, Maori and the State provides an essential background to Crown-Maori relation in New Zealand in the twenty-first century.