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Article Excerpt
Newcomer governments claim to be forging historic new relationships
with indigenous nations, relationships based on mutual respect, sharing, sovereignty, and our inherent rights. Economic development, modern treaties, self-government, compacts, revenue-sharing, and co-management have become the watchwords of the "post-colonial" age. But beyond the words, is the promise holding? --Taiaiake Alfred
The struggle for indigenous self-determination within the context of settler-states continues to strain the liberal democratic ideals and supremacy of European cultural values upon which states such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States were founded and to which other states within Latin America have more recently aspired. (1) Multiculturalism has developed to offer the status of ethnic minority to all nonmajority cultural groups within these states, constrained by the limits of an individual-rights rhetoric. The quest by indigenous peoples to find workable alternatives to ethnic minority status within their own homelands has led some to seek group rights within their own settler-states. (2) However, many liberals consider the collective rights proposed by indigenous-rights activists as antithetical to the supremacy of individual rights within liberal democracy. (3) This search for an avenue through which indigenous rights might be expressed must push us beyond multiculturalism toward other options.
The first aim of this article is to briefly investigate multiculturalism with specific regard to contemporary criticisms of its effectiveness in relation to indigenous peoples' rights. While multiculturalism's efforts to recognize the rights of minorities within polyethnic states offers the appearance of supporting the group rights sought by indigenous activists, its inevitable failure in the face of liberal-democratic opposition to addressing the needs of national minorities has become apparent. With the failure of multiculturalism to provide a foundation for indigenous rights, some, particularly in New Zealand, have described a biculturalism that would recognize the unique relationship between indigenous nations and various settler groups.
The second aim of this article is to explore biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand as an (albeit incomplete) alternative to the failures of multiculturalism in addressing the sovereignty claims of indigenous peoples as national minorities. Whereas liberal multiculturalism restricts minority rights to the protection of cultural differences, biculturalism (and its stauncher successor binationalism) recognizes indigenous peoples as partners with colonizers in the exercise of sovereignty within settler-states and thus recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples to the exercise of self-determination in the areas of cultural preservation, resource management, and the protection of land. It is primarily this final aspect of biculturalism that is having an observable effect on the landscape of New Zealand and that offers the greatest opportunity to enhance the struggles of other indigenous peoples around the world.
As Augie Fleras and Paul Spoonley observe in Recalling Aotearoa, "Only the exercise of tino rangatiratanga [indigenous self-determination] provides tangible evidence of its existence." (4) This exercise of indigenous self-determination does not occur in metaphoric "sites of resistance" but in, as Donald Moore states, "a politics of place 'on the ground.'" (5) By reading the landscape for evidence of the exercise of indigenous self-determination, it is possible to glimpse places outside of the hegemonic control of the settler-state. These landscapes lie somewhere between the settler and colonized, creating thirdspaces, holes in the fabric of the state that sit outside of this binary relationship.
The third aim of this article will be to discuss how the exercise of indigenous self-determination, observed in specific places, is beginning to transform New Zealand society into the long-promised bicultural and binational partnership, altering the meaning of citizenship for both Maori and Pakeha (white New Zealanders).
Multiculturalism
Over the past several decades, liberal-democratic settler-states such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States have struggled to cope with increased calls for civil rights by various ethnic minority groups. The political and cultural concerns of these diverse communities are no longer silenced under the hegemonic din of settler majority culture and political structures. Calls for equal political rights and for the recognition and respect of cultural differences for various groups have coalesced under a common banner: multiculturalism. Within multiculturalism, the calls for civil rights by both national minorities and ethnic groups have coalesced with similar calls by women, the gay community, and the disabled.
Political theorists have examined the effectiveness of multiculturalism in representing the civil-rights concerns of these various groups, primarily though from within the constraints of liberal theory. Will Kymlicka has been the most effective at critiquing multiculturalism broadly and more specifically with regard to indigenous peoples' rights. Kymlicka's criticism of multiculturalism is twofold: first, that multiculturalism attempts to address the issues of too many groups with vastly different agendas/needs, and second, that addressing the individual rights of members of these groups may be sufficient for ethnic minorities, but collective rights may be necessary to address the needs of national minorities, including indigenous peoples. (6)
The primary critique of multiculturalism that I want to focus on here is the struggle between individual and collective rights. This struggle between the collective rights called for by indigenous communities and the individual rights supported by liberal multiculturalism is perhaps the greatest hindrance for indigenous self-determination faced in white settler-states. Mary Ellen Turpel, writing specifically about Canada, observes that "the collective or communal base of Aboriginal life does not really, to my knowledge, have a parallel to individual rights: the conceptions of [Canadian and Aboriginal] law are simply incommensurable." (7) If it is true that the conceptions of rights based in Western and indigenous conceptual frameworks are incommensurable, then what hope does liberal multiculturalism hold for indigenous self-determination? Several indigenous and nonindigenous scholars have addressed this question with responses that vary from a redefinition of liberalism to an embrace of wholly indigenous models of political philosophy. (8)
Richard Day, in his article "Who Is This We That Gives the Gift? Native American Political Theory and The Western Tradition," hits upon many of the same critiques concerning multiculturalism. (9) The central question raised in the title to his article hits upon the central issue concerning who has the power to grant self-determination to a people and who qualifies under international law as a politically recognized group capable of holding this right.
Day recognizes that many indigenous peoples continue to assert, and have maintained an assertion of, their self-determination through the many centuries of European colonialism. These indigenous nations, such as the Mohawk that Day mentions and several different iwi (tribes) and hap (subtribes) in New Zealand assert "a path to self-determination that involves neither a recovery of a partial remnant of a sovereignty lost in the past, nor a futural project of a totalising nation-state." (10) These nations assert that they had sovereignty over their territories when Europeans arrived and have continued to assert their sovereignty ever since.
Certainly whether or not indigenous nations have continued to assert their sovereignty, Day recognizes that they continue to have the right to assert their self-determination. One of the primary arguments articulated through liberal multiculturalism is a support for cultural pluralism. This pluralism recognizes that while there is a cultural core to the state there are also numerous other groups requiring recognition by the bureaucracy of the state. Through pluralism these groups may find recognition within the structure of the state. Day observes that many indigenous authors have moved beyond pluralism to envision parallel expressions of self-determination allowing the settler-state and indigenous nations the right to form separate institutions to govern their lands and citizens even where overlapping claims exist. (11) Day draws upon the material depiction of the historical agreements between the Mohawk nation and European settlers, known as the Gus-Wen-Teh, or Two-Row Wampum, which symbolizes the Mohawk understanding of the treaty agreements signed between the tribe and European nations. As described by Grand Chief Michael Mitchell, Gus-Wen-Teh has two rows of purple shells separated by three beads
symbolis[ing] peace, friendship, and respect. These two rows will symbolise two paths, or two vessels, travelling down the same rivers together. One, a birch bark canoe, will be for the Indian people, their laws, their customs and their ways. The other, a ship, will be for the white people and their laws, their customs and their ways. We shall each travel the river together, side by side, but in our own boat. Neither of us will try to steer the other's vessel. (12)
This description of parallel and separate systems is common not only in the writings of Native American authors but can also be found in Maori writing on issues of self-determination in Aotearoa/New Zealand. (13) The bicultural and binational nature of the description of the two rows of wampum and its implicit critique of liberal multiculturalism leads to a discussion of one particular option that has gained an upper hand in discussions of cultural difference and indigenous self-determination in New Zealand.
Biculturalism
The growth of a global indigenism movement and the...
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