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This chapter focuses on the assertion of the Doctrine of Discovery in Aotearoa/New Zealand. First discovered by Maori, Aotearoa/New Zealand had been their home for hundreds of years before the British began to visit and eventually claim sovereignty of the lands via a treaty of cession that was steeped in a Discovery mindset. The chapter discusses the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and traverses the early case law.

This chapter explores how Discovery and its elements have continued to haunt contemporary legal and political reasoning in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It focuses on case law post 1970, Treaty of Waitangi claim settlements concerning national parks and the foreshore and seabed, and the constitutional standing of the Treaty of Waitangi. These case studies highlight the still permeating influence of the Doctrine of Discovery in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

This chapter argues that New Zealand’s national apologies, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries –those produced by the modern Treaty of Waitangi settlements process, as well as more recent declarations of regret – are evidence of its little-acknowledged historical role as a colonising power and imperial force. It considers a number of case studies in which the New Zealand nation-state has willingly engaged in public acts of contrition as a way of coming to terms with a less than ideal past, suggesting that such moments are characteristic of the ways in which the brutality and violence of the colonial past have been successfully silenced and increasingly estranged from the past.

This concluding chapter focuses on Maori sovereignty. Just as Europeans have drawn from their own social and political histories to claim sovereignty as a fundamental political principle with practical legal consequences, Maori can make a similar, equally valid claim for rangatiratanga (autonomous authority) from the basis of tikanga Maori (Maori custom law). Maori society lived in accordance with this principle long before 1840, when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. Thus, “sovereignty,” whether inherent or otherwise, is not a tuturu (genuine) starting or end point for Maori discourse about their right to exercise authority over their own existence and territories, either as distinctive tribal groups or collectively as Maori.

Treaty making was a potentially powerful technique for structuring colonial relationships and authority. However, the constitutional revolutions of the 1840s and 1850s in British settlement colonies significantly altered the way governors, colonists, and indigenous peoples might construct and contest notions of political subjecthood. In New Zealand reference to the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) formed an important strand of certain Māori and Pakēhā political positions during this period, but disputes over Māori attempts to enroll to vote in early colonial elections illustrate the way a variety of discursive and political factors limited the resonance of treaty arguments. In particular, this chapter highlights the importance of the “householder” qualification for Māori enrollment and the debate about the assessment of housing material and living arrangements as indicators of “civilization” and civic capacity. These discursive strands were more apparent at the magistrates’ court level than in parliamentary or imperial administrative contexts.

Chapter 5 takes the story of indigenous activism to New Zealand where it chronicles how Maori activists contested the terms of their incorporation into a symbolic national story. Beginning with protests against the interpretation of the colonial Treaty of Waitangi (1840) as making one people in the settler state, it follows young activists as they joined with older leaders to demand land rights and asserted their distinct identity. The chapter explores the significant reinterpretation of the treaty as recognizing Maori sovereignty in the context of a newly created commission of inquiry, the Waitangi Tribunal, established in 1975 to examine Maori grievances. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the 1987 Lands Case in the context of radical neoliberal reforms to New Zealand’s economy and considers how and why judges in that case recognized Maori as partners with the Crown.

In 1858 the first Maori King was installed. Although Europeans commonly depicted the Kingitanga (the Maori King movement) as a challenge to British sovereignty over New Zealand, supporters saw nothing incompatible between allegiance to their own indigenous monarch and ongoing adherence to the person of Queen Victoria (colonial governments were another matter). For Maori the relationship was a deeply personal bond, cemented through the Treaty of Waitangi that had established Victoria as a great chief of New Zealand. Long after the British government had ceased to have any meaningful role in the governance of New Zealand, Kingitanga supporters continued to look to the monarch to honour the undertakings entered into on Queen Victoria’s behalf at Waitangi in 1840. This belief in a special relationship with the British royal family survived war and land confiscations in the 1860s and endures today, giving rise to Queen Elizabeth II’s unprecedented involvement in a 1995 apology to the Kingitanga for past Crown actions.

This chapter considers key dimensions of Māori conflict resolution and how they differ from orthodox Western approaches. It examines the ongoing negotiation of Indigenous–Settler relations through the Waitangi Tribunal. The tribunal, a permanent commission of inquiry established in 1975, hears claims arising out of Māori concerns about implementation of the Treaty of Waitangi, originally signed with representatives of the British Crown in 1840. In an analysis that resonates with that of the previous chapter, this chapter shows that tribunal processes have been able to combine Māori and Anglo-European conflict resolution approaches. Such blending may even hold promise for mediating across difference in other settings.

This chapter turns to some remarkable examples in the colonial history of the Bible’s reception. In the seventeenth century, Roger Williams opposed Puritan national allegories by adopting the Persian imperial imaginary in order to secure Indian rights on Rhode Island. Wiremu Tāmihana advanced a similar anticolonial purpose in nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand by embracing the law of kingship from Deuteronomy. Whether in ancient or modern times, the sheer complexity of intergroup conflict in colonial contexts is not always reducible to binary contrasts between elites and subalterns, or imperialists and nativists. The more subtle postcolonial readings will attend to the details of mimetic circulation, both in the compositional layers of the Bible and in its reception. The discussion includes historical reflections on the settler colonial context within which this book was written, Australia.

Anglican beginnings in New Zealand were led by Samuel Marsden and the Church Missionary Society, with active involvement from the beginning by Māori. Missionaries were heavily involved in the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 which led to the British crown claiming sovereignty. George Augustus Selwyn, the first bishop, oversaw the emerging Māori church and the growing settler/colonial church. Increasingly Māori were swamped by European migrants, provoking war and reaction movements. Anglicans became an autonomous province, pioneering synodical government while valuing their English roots. Selwyn began the Melanesian mission; Anglican work in Fiji and Tonga became linked with the New Zealand Church.