People Against Prisons Aotearoa

Abolitionist Demand 27: Institute tikanga Māori.

This is a part of No Pride in Prisons’ Abolitionist demands. These demands were originally published as a book. To see a pdf of the book, click here. To buy a copy, please email info@noprideinprisons.org.nz

The one and only reason tikanga Māori have not retained their status as the first laws of Aotearoa has been the invasion, genocide^[1] and military occupation of Māori by first the British and then New Zealand states. The imposition of another people’s legal system has been devastating for Māori. Secured through conquest and maintained through structural violence, the judiciary is a weapon to secure the New Zealand state’s sovereignty on unceded Māori land. From the Native Land Courts, which used the individualisation of title to allow the occupational New Zealand government to buy and steal land against the wishes of wider Māori family groups,^[2] through to the present day discrimination against Māori in the criminal justice system,^[3] the administration of law has been used to destroy Māori communities and their efforts to achieve tino rangatiratanga.

Even unsubstantiated suspicions that Māori may be attempting to organise their life-worlds according to tikanga Māori are responded to with extreme military force, as was demonstrated by the 2007 Operation 8 raids. Prior to the Operation 8 raids, a number of Māori and leftist activist groups held social and teambuilding gatherings in Te Urewera. In response to these gatherings, the colonial government wildly exaggerated statements obtained through illegal wiretapping to misconstrue these exercises as precursors to an uprising. As a result, mass raids were conducted of any and all groups associated with the supposed ‘terrorists,’ with Armed Offenders Squad officers engaging in illegal mass detainment and warrantless searches.^[4]

The extreme force deployed by the New Zealand state is a response to Māori assertion of tino rangatiratanga. Crown law cannot coexist with tikanga Māori – the New Zealand state only allows tikanga to exist insofar as they are subordinated to colonial law. Anything more and armed police are called in. Even if the Urewera gatherings had been the precursors to a revolutionary movement, they would have represented nothing more than a return to tikanga Māori as a political system – a return which No Pride in Prisons demands.

Various tikanga Māori as distinct legal systems have emerged from a thousand years of Māori inhabitation of these islands, as complex regulatory mechanisms for maintaining balance between individuals, whānau, hapū and iwi, between people of all genders, between generations, between the physical and spiritual aspects of our world.^[5] By contrast, the New Zealand legal system is a mechanism for ensuring imbalance – between rich and poor, between Māori and Pākehā. The colonial legal system is in fundamental opposition to tikanga Māori. Where tikanga Māori nurture and restore not only the relationship between perpetrators and victims of social harm, but also the social context in which the harm occurred, colonial law severs those relationships to fuel the system of mass incarceration. The communities to which these people belong are not restored to balance, they are torn apart. Emerging as they do from community, tikanga Māori experience colonial law as a process of violence. To end the violence colonial law enables, it must be dissolved and tikanga Māori returned to the status of first laws.^[6]

^[1] Ani Mikaere, “Three (Million) Strikes and Still Not Out: The Crown as the Consummate Recidivist,” in He Rukuruku Whakaaro: Colonising Myths, Māori Realities (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2011).

^[2] Richard Boast. Buying the Land, Selling the Land: Governments and Māori Land in the North Island 1865-1921. (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2008), 38.

^[3] Department of Corrections, Over-representation of Māori in the Criminal Justice System: An Exploratory Report, (Wellington: Department of Corrections, 2007).

^[4] IPCA, OPERATION EIGHT: The Report of the Independent Police Conduct Authority, (Wellington: IPCA, 2013).

^[5] Ani Mikaere, “Te Tiriti and The Treaty: Seeking to Reconcile the Irreconcilable in the Name of Truth,” in He Rukuruku Whakaaro: Colonising Myths, Māori Realities, 157.

^[6] For further analysis of the role of tikanga Māori in the abolition of the criminal injustice system, see demands 11, 48, and 49.