By TDOHASAN SUNRAY
Te Papa Tongarewa. Aotearoa (New Zealand’s) National Museum. The facility is immense, and standing beneath it, one can’t help but notice the clash of its sleek, industrial architecture with the handcrafted wooden framing. The building is purposefully Māori by design. Thanks to a travel award through the University’s Politics and Government Department known as the Pohlad Award, I was able to visit the country and, through places like Te Papa, uncover what New Zealand could teach the United States about Indigenous relations. The direct translation of Te Papa is literally “container of treasures.” Most everything in New Zealand is a taonga (treasure), because everything there inhabits a sacred land — a people’s greatest resource.
This resource and the bulk of other Māori-specific rights are protected by Te Tiriti o Waitangi, or the Treaty of Waitangi. Signed in 1840 between Māori chiefs and the British Crown, the founding legislation regulates governmental relations between the two and for over a century has been a reliable source for mutual cooperation.
Isaac Te Awa is Curator Mātauranga Māori at Te Papa in Wellington. He is one of the few people at the museum specifically tasked with the preservation and reclamation of Māori artifacts.
I make my way into the building and find Isaac standing with a smile and thick pounamu (jadestone) necklace that looks light around his neck. I tell him about how beautiful the country is, not just its land but its people too, and how many internationally look to New Zealand as the gold standard for how Indigenous relations should be conducted. I’ve since learned that boiling human relations down to orchestral metaphors is oversimplification. Still, interactions between the British Crown and Māori have created a symphony of discordant melodies.
This makes him laugh. “Yes, we get that a lot, but just because our flavor of colonization is yummier, doesn’t mean it’s not colonization,” he says. Statistically, Māori suffer worse than any other demographic in the country in key metrics, including life expectancy, sexual abuse, substance abuse and incarceration. Māori represent over 50 percent of those incarcerated, despite being only around 18 percent of the total population. Although it’s half a world away, the case sounds awfully familiar.
When it comes to similar statistics, Native Americans also suffer disproportionately compared to many of their nation’s counterparts. In the United States, Native Americans maintain the lowest life expectancy of any race, and Native women are ten times more likely to die by murder than the national average. All of this to say that in recognizing statistics you aren’t inherently reducing people to them. Indigenous people are more than where they suffer.
The current governing coalition of New Zealand proposed sweeping interpretational changes to the Treaty of Waitangi through what is known as the Treaty Principles Bill, which proponents claimed would end “division by race.” In reality, the bill looked to roll back rights guaranteed to the Māori, rights that helped to ameliorate many of the aforementioned statistics. Nationwide pro-Māori protests erupted in response in 2024.
Isaac now invites me into a room, one that houses thousands of Māori artifacts. He performs a karakia, a kind of chant directed to the ancestors. We scan over the collection of pou — carved wooden posts used to honor ancestors or mark territory. Some have their noses and even genitals cut off. He tells me that British settlers found the pou obscene and that Māori culture, unlike early British colonial understandings of the body, didn’t tend to hypersexualize people. To the Māori, the breath of life comes from the nose.
I ask him about the protests and how active a role Māori have had in political processes since. “They originally guaranteed four seats to be reserved for Māori in Parliament. Some called it the Four Wins, but if we’re adhering to what the Treaty of Waitangi stipulates, we should have half the seats.”
According to the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, “Four parliamentary seats to represent Māori were introduced in 1867, with the intention that they would be abolished after five years.” Despite the expectations, the seats were never abolished. The number of Māori Members of Parliament since 1867 has increased, with 32 Māori currently serving in Parliament. The United States, on the other hand, has only a handful of Native Americans in Congress. In addition, New Zealand’s Parliament approved the creation of what’s known as the Waitangi Tribunal, a commission of inquiry that facilitates breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. The United States has no such commission for tribal claims.
David Seymour, the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand who introduced the Treaty Principles Bill, is of Māori descent. Isaac reminds me, however, that not all Māori are working for their people. “Being Māori is about your whakapapa (genealogy or interconnectedness). But descendancy doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t building up the mana (power or prestige) of the iwi (tribe),” says Isaac with hands outstretched to his sides, trying his best to encompass such an expansive concept. To Isaac, Māori representation means little if those who are representing do little for it.
After a roadie up north from Wellington to the city of Hamilton, I meet with Rahera Bright, her husband, Te Aro, and their family. Te Aro’s mother, Tureiti, helped establish Maori health programming, and his father, a high-ranking Bishop of the Anglican Church. They are all Māori language advocates. As I enter the home and walk up the stairs lined with photos of the family, including one of the family next to Pope Francis, I hear conversation in the living room. They are speaking te reo Māori. I feel like I’m intruding with my English, and it makes me smile to be in a space where for a moment that can be true.
I sit with Rahera and we discuss her understanding of a phrase I keep hearing: tino rangatiratanga. “I can’t speak for Māori generally, but to me, tino rangatiratanga means that we get to make the decisions for our own people, have control over our own resources, and decide our own future. It also means we get to have a say in the broader systems and settings that determine people’s wellbeing in this country.” Put simply, it is sovereignty or self-determination.
Bolstered by this notion of tino rangatiratanga, Rahera explains the progress Māori have made in collectively revitalizing te reo Māori. “The Māori language was once in a very bad way. But in the 1970s, Māori leaders formed a movement. It included the founding of Māori-language preschools, primary schools, high schools, universities, and other courses targeting adults.” Native American communities in the United States have their own equivalency of tribal schooling, from pre-school to universities, although these institutions have experienced immense pushback under the current administration. The Department of the Interior, for example, has proposed cutting Bureau of Indian Education-funded schools’ budgets from $182 million to $22 million.
Rahera tells me that Māori are fighting to retain their culturally responsive schooling systems too and that such schools affect another area of vital importance: visibility. She and her husband, Te Aro, have been leading te reo Māori language revitalization projects for years, and to great effect. Their toddler, Maui, is a fluent speaker himself. “At the same time, activists also campaigned for greater political recognition for the language,” she says. Because of these efforts, New Zealand recognized te reo Māori as an official language in 1987. Since this change, te reo language use has steadily progressed. “One in five Māori can now speak Māori. The language is being increasingly spoken between generations and in the public sphere.”
On the other side of progress is the struggle of retaining it. Despite the prevalence of language competency and visibility, Rahera’s people share a reality akin to that of Native Americans. “There have been a raft of changes designed to weaken or undermine Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi). After so many years of hard-fought progress, it’s totally egregious. We have also seen reforms designed to reduce Māori representation on local councils, and directives to use less Māori language in the public sector and prevent services ‘based on race,’” she says. Not only do these rollbacks manifest themself in political and language repression but also health services. Rahera brushes her fingers through her hair. The incessantness of bigotry can be baffling and stress-inducing. “The disestablishment of the Māori Health Authority (Te Aka Whaiora), which was just in its early stages and was designed to dramatically improve Māori health outcomes, was also deeply frustrating.”
Dan Sherman, professor of environmental studies at Puget Sound, has a degree in Māori Studies from Victoria University of Wellington. He first set foot in New Zealand in the 1990s as a Fulbright Scholar — he jokes to me that it’s been ages since he was last in New Zealand. When he first arrived, his perception of the country and how it treated its Indigenous people was one that he now considers naive. “I think I came in thinking everything I learned about in the United States was pretty depressing and dysfunctional, and I thought, New Zealand is going to be where it all comes together, where they’re doing everything right.” He also recalls the ubiquity with which Māori culture was seen. “It’s everywhere over there. It’s very obvious, upfront, and impossible not to see.” Visibility. Dan’s recognition of Māori visibility is telling. In the United States, many cities have completely replaced any traces of Indigenous existence with that of settler histories. New Zealand has exceeded the United States in its ability to make the first stewards of its land visible.
Dotted along the University of Puget Sound campus, there are a number of permanent signs that showcase the tribal Lushootseed words for specific kinds of vegetation. They are there but not there, seen but not internalized.
Te reo Māori is splashed on every governmental building, haka performances and traditional welcomings are commonplace and even McDonald’s has served up its own bilingual menus. Citizens, whether they are Māori or not, know that Māori are there — loud and proud. It’s not that the Puyallup are quiet or diffident. The culture is very much alive. It’s that the response and engagement from the surrounding community is lacking.
Te Reo Māori is a highly contextual language. Direct translations of words are not easy to come by. They are attached to who is speaking, who is being spoken to and the place in which they are being spoken.
Dan notes that although Native Americans and Māori share similar histories of colonization, their realities — like te reo Māori — differ in context. “Māori have one language as opposed to hundreds over here. They have one treaty as opposed to hundreds over here.” The gains that Māori have made and the opposition that they continue to face are both similar and dissimilar from that of Native Americans.
The Waitangi Tribunal has helped facilitate large-scale land and monetary compensation to Māori iwis, but Dan expresses his discomfort with the finality of such a transaction. “This idea that something can be fully and finally settled is also a part of that flawed basis on which everything rests.” Restitution is, thus, an ongoing procedure.
There is something to learn from looking at the case of Māori that can be applied to Indigenous relations in the United States. If one takes the time to spectate outcomes — and not just procedural remedies or the mass of resistance against them — what remains most encouraging is the possibility for minoritized groups to reinvent themselves through adaptation of, and perseverance in, systems meant to destroy them. “The legal and policy tools at disposal for remedies are themselves born of colonialism,” Dan adds. Indigenous groups across the world have taken that reality and ran with it. The Māori are a case in point. At the same time Māori are struggling, they are excelling. Both can be simultaneously true.
I’m taken back to my evening with Rahera and her family. At this point, I’m stuffed with meat and potatoes. They offer a waiata (song) and gift me a pounamu (jadestone) necklace. It’s heavy around my neck and feels like responsibility, one that I shouldn’t be quick to depart from. They call me their whānau (family) and their song guides me back across the Pacific.