Indigenous Rights and the Politics of Self-Determination: the Case of Aotearoa/New Zealand

Abstract

This chapter begins with a brief review of the debates surrounding the rights and standing of indigenous peoples within both national and international law, with particular emphasis on the issues surrounding the nascent but burgeoning politics of indigenous self-determination. Various supranational and national developments in relation to indigenous rights will be discussed, but particular attention will be paid to the Aotearoa/New Zealand context where the indigenous Māori, or tangata whenua (people of the land), have increasingly adopted a postcolonial politics of self-determination in their social and political relations with the dominant Pākehā (European) group. The implications of such developments in the Aotearoa/New Zealand context will be discussed and evaluated in light of the wider trends evident in supranational and other national contexts.

Aotearoa (land of the long white cloud) is the original Māori name for New Zealand. The term ‘New Zealand’ itself derives from the Dutch origins of the explorer Abel Tasman, the first European to ‘discover’ the area in the seventeenth century. The conjoint use of both names has been increasingly adopted in recent years to signify the bicultural origins of the country as well as, by implication, political support for this (see also below).