The Treaty of Waitangi and Its Relationship to Contemporary American Indian Sovereignty Issues

Abstract

In 1993 my dissertation fieldwork took me to the North Island of New Zealand, where I collected the life history of an elder Maori woman. While there, I also began comparing the national indigenous policies of New Zealand to those of the United States.' It was interesting to discover that the historical relationships between American Indians and Maori and their respective colonizing governments bear striking similarities in terms of treaty relationships and cyclical policy waves. In this essay, I review these parallels and their legacies, and then concentrate on questions of sovereignty that are at the heart of a political comparison between the United States and New Zealand. I suggest that indigenous sovereignty is composed of three parts: economic, legislative, and political. Legislative and political sovereignty, on the one hand, are periodically enhanced or limited by the paternalism of federal governments, which continually circumscribe the uncertain boundaries of tribal authority. Economic sovereignty, on the other hand, is among other things the mechanism by which a human community successfully commands its own history. Economic sovereignty initiatives are what that the Tainui 3 45 tribe of Maori have distilled from interpreting their treaty, the Treaty of Waitangi. This interpretation has relevance to American Indian tribes who are grappling with the same difficult questions and social problems the Tainui faced for most of the twentieth century. The Tainui are thus an appropriate example for those American Indian tribes who want to reclaim and retain tribal authority.