Claiming Indigenous Rights to Culture, Flora, and Fauna: A Contemporary Case from New Zealand

Abstract

Maori individuals and groups in New Zealand have been active for many years claiming rights to property and resources guaranteed to them by the Treaty of Waitangi 1840. An important contemporary case, Wai 262, extends the scope of these claims to include ownership of Maori culture and its products. The tendency in this claim to reify culture, and to assert indigenous ownership of it, is common. However, New Zealand's approach to the issue of cultural rights is unique. The state has established a quasi‐judicial forum, the Waitangi Tribunal, to hear claims about violations of Maori Treaty rights. In this particular instance the Treaty ‐ Tribunal framework has shaped indigenous claims in ways that paint the claimants into a corner. Their position at the hearings’ closings comes into conflict with the kind of liberal democratic values that provide Maori iwi (tribes) opportunities to make their case. It is therefore unlikely that Wai 262 will afford a solution to the problems of cultural appropriation and marginalization that exist in contemporary New Zealand. As such, this long‐running case leaves the claimants, and those sympathetic to their plight, with some unfinished business. It also provides an important new window into the contradictions facing indigenous peoples who seek redress through law.

Sovereignty in Postcolonial Aotearoa New Zealand: Ambiguities, Paradoxes, and Possibilities

“…In claim Wai 262, six iwi claimed that the Crown breached its treaty obligations by failing “to protect traditional knowledge (arts, crafts, oral tradition, language, healing practices, etc. ), cultural property, intellectual rights to this knowledge and property, and ownership and guardianship of natural resources” (Levine :36). This would include all Māori ceremonies, including haka (dance) and waiata (song).…”

Anthropology Becoming … ? The 2010 Sociocultural Anthropology Year in Review

“…Outside of the Cultural Anthropology essay cluster and the two other articles on which we have chosen to focus, there were many fine works probing the political, legal, and social lives and struggles of indigenous peoples throughout the world (Arndt 2010; Darian‐Smith 2010; Dussart 2010; Engle 2010; Forte 2010; Idrus 2010; Levine 2010; McCormack 2010; Metz 2010; Norget 2010; Poirier 2010; Schuster 2010; Sillitoe 2010; Simon 2010; Thom 2010; Trigger and Dalley 2010; Watson 2010; Widmer 2010). We emphasize here, however, the ethnographic engagement with indigeneity itself.…”

Editor's Introduction: Anthropology at Many Crossroads

“…In this case, she argues that use of law permitted the Orang Asli to “reconfigure” their relationship with the state, turning what had been conceived as a failure on the part of the Orang Asli into the state's failure. At the same time, it created a new model of citizenship that reconciled claims to individual and group rights through a recognition of what Idrus calls “multiple positioning.” Her conclusion creates an interesting counterpoint to Hal Levine's article on the Waitangi Tribunal (2010), in which he expresses concern that appeals to ownership of an indigenous culture itself can undermine other indigenous claims based on more universalist conceptions of rights.…”

“…Indeed, one of the ways recent issues of PoLAR offer a crossroads of intersecting themes is in their presentation of an array of differing national responses to “indigenous” peoples’ claims to land and other rights. In our 2010 Spring Supplement issue, Hal Levine (2010) discusses the role of the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand, expressly established to acknowledge New Zealand's violations of treaty rights and to help to remedy those violations. In this issue, Schuster describes the Argentine state's attempt to remedy past grievances through establishment of the National Institute for Indigenous Affairs (INAI), designed to oversee the enforcement of rights stipulated by the 1994 constitutional reform.…”