Sustaining Indigeneity in New Zealand: Efforts to Assimilate the Māori 1894-2022

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 Mā
ori since the advent of neoliberal policies in the 1980s, with a particular focus on the ways the Mā
ori and their supporters have resisted or subverted these policies.

Topics covered include: how an idealised version of Mā
ori culture obscured assimilation of the Mā
ori in the 1850s
the Mā
ori renaissance of the later twentieth century
neoliberal subversion of Mā
ori fishing rights
the struggles of Nā
i Tū
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 Mā
ori.

Covering key episodes of Mā
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.