Sustaining Indigeneity in New Zealand

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 M?ori since the advent of neoliberal policies in the 1980s, with a particular focus on the ways the M?ori and their supporters have resisted or subverted these policies. Topics covered include: how an idealised version of M?ori culture obscured assimilation of the M?ori in the 1850s; the M?ori renaissance of the later twentieth century; neoliberal subversion of M?ori fishing rights; the struggles of N?i T?hoe, 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 M?ori. Covering key episodes of M?ori 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.