Indigenous self-determination in Māori education and reactionary responses from 1960 to 1992

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1990, a national controversy erupted in Aotearoa, New Zealand, when a series of Hui Tino Rangatiratanga (sovereignty meetings) called for an independent Māori education authority. Citizens, politicians, and journalists accused the organisers of ‘apartheid’, ‘separatism’, and a ‘fanatical takeover’. Such claims coincided with a contemporaneous push against the inclusion of Māori culture, language, and knowledge in the country’s classrooms. Similar debates had emerged in preceding events such as Jack Hunn’s Report on the Department of Maori Affairs in 1961, the Petition for courses in Maori language and Maori culture in 1972, kōhanga reo (language nests) in 1982, and kura Kaupapa Māori (immersion schools) in 1985. This article interprets archival sources from these historical conflicts through critical Māori theorisations, especially Wally Penetito’s sociology of Māori education. I argue that reactionary commentators have consistently misrepresented aspirations for tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty, self-determination) as promised in the Māori version of the Treaty of Waitangi. The conservative backlash attempted to uphold an opposing narrative of the treaty in which the colonial government held unmitigated sovereignty over Māori. Such conflicts have continuing global relevance given recent reactionary movements against Indigenous rights to treaty, education, and self-determination in Aotearoa and many other locations across the world.