Sustaining Indigeneity in New Zealand: Efforts to Assimilate the Māori 1894-2022 - Hardcover

by Steven S. Webster (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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.