How does militarism reshape indigenous peoples’ relationships with settler states? In this article, we explore how military service both opens up and forecloses avenues for indigenous groups to claim new modes of responsibility, care and relationality from the state. Through a discussion of New Zealand Māori nuclear test veterans’ recent legal claims through the Waitangi Tribunal, we detail the range of ways that Māori veterans utilize and rework ethnic identity categories to encompass wider notions of citizenship, care and responsibility, and challenge neoliberal models of reparations. Claimants argue that their ongoing wellbeing sits at the centre of their partnership with the state, revealing how uneasily the Māori military body fits within mainstream logics of Treaty claim-making. Seeking healthcare and wellbeing here does not demand greater autonomy or independence, but requires ongoing interdependence, practices of care and attention to ongoing intergenerational obligations that, like radiation harm, have no clear endpoints.
As an anthropologist working outside of academia, I have observed the potential for anthropology to influence and to be influenced is constrained by publishing restrictions. In this article, I discuss how we might address this by opening a flow of knowledge between researchers, research participants/contributors, and decision makers. Through the lens of an indigenous research paradigm, Kaupapa Māori, I consider how this opening up of a knowledge commons can support more ethical explorations of the roles and responsibilities of anthropologists to students, participants, decision makers, business, and communities. In particular, I highlight how anthropologists should create a knowledge commons that expands opportunities to ease structural inequality.
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