Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Maori (New Zealand people) – Ethnic identity'

Indigenous peoples around the world have been involved, especially since the 1970s, in nationalist or sovereigntist movements, as well as in struggles for decolonization, self-determination, and recognition of their rights. Maaori of Aotearoa/New Zealand are engaged in just such processes and, particularly since the 1960s and 1970s, as part of the Maaori "cultural renaissance". Since about 70% of Maaori live in urban areas, cities---Auckland in particular---have become important sites of affirmation and struggle. This study, which falls within the field of urban anthropology, is an investigation of what being Maaori today means and how it is experienced, in particular in the city. The sense of place of Maaori living in Auckland and the appropriation of space in the urban context are important dimensions of this study. It explores the complexity of Maaori relationships to the urban milieu, which is often perceived as an alien and colonized site; the ways they create places and spaces for themselves; and the ongoing struggles to (re)affirm Maaori identities and cultural aspects considered important elements of these identities. The focus of this research is on everyday life and "ordinary" Maaori (in contrast to elites). It reveals the significance and importance to Maaori affirmation and resistance of the extended family and certain types of "city houses" which are based on "traditional" marae (Maaori traditional meeting places) principles. In contrast to many studies that have stressed the assimilation pressures of the urban milieu and global forces on indigenous societies, this research underlines processes of (re)affirmation. It shows how indigenous visions, and ways of being are maintained and even strengthened through changes and openness to the larger society. Coming to understand these processes also led to the exploration of Maaori realms of interpretation or figured worlds, the heteroglossic and complex ways people engage in or rel

In 2007 the Curriculum Council of Western Australia (CCWA) introduced a new Visual Arts Course of Study (2007), which contains a postmodern perspective and is inclusive of social criticism, multiculturalism, feminism and non-Western art forms. In keeping with the new Visual Arts Course of Study in this Creative Visual Arts Project, I have used the CCWA course outcomes as a framework to develop a visual arts program that is a vehicle for exploring individual personal identity, and has the potential to increase self-esteem in students in Western Australian secondary schools. The research stems from my personal view that students can benefit significantly from investigating their identity, enabling them to situate their self in a stronger position in their present day life-world when they have a more definite sense of who they are and where they come from. I have placed myself in the position of ‘the subject’ in order to transfer the process into a visual art program that can be utilised within the classroom. The visual arts program is underpinned by Efland’s expressive psychoanalytic model for aesthetic learning, which posits that art is self-expression, a form of learning that contributes to emotional growth. Visual art awakens intellectual inquiry in an individual, increases cognitive potential through enabling personal liberation, and is an adjunct to informing society and culture. The research project culminates in an exegesis and an exhibition of artworks that communicate personal memories and significant historical events exclusive to my whakapapa (Maori genealogy). The artworks are a vehicle for exploring my individual self-identity, enabling me to connect more deeply with my Maori cultural roots. The research paradigm utilised is narrative inquiry, a process of collecting and structuring stories that is characteristic of the traditional Maori practice of storytelling. This project has resulted in a reinterpretation of the perception of myself within my personal life-world. I have a deeper understanding of my cross-cultural roots, a stronger sense of who I am, and a sense of empowerment. I believe Year 11 students can also achieve this outcome through the visual arts program, using it as a tool for investigating their own identity, challenging cultural, social and gender limitations that impact on them, and ultimately empowering their personal life-world.

Thesis (MA--Maori Development) -- AUT University, 2007.
Includes bibliographical references. Also held in print (v, 105 leaves : col. ill. ; 30 cm.) in the Archive at the City Campus (T 305.899442 RAE)

Following the end of World War II and the formation of the United Nations organization, indigenous minorities who had fought on behalf of First World nations--including record numbers of New Zealand Maori and American Indians--pursued their longstanding efforts to assert cultural and political distinctiveness from dominant settler populations with renewed vigor. In the first decades after the War, New Zealand Maori and American Indians worked largely within dominant discourses in their efforts to define viable contemporary indigenous identities. But by the late 1960s and early 1970s, both New Zealand and the United States felt the effects of an emerging indigenous "renaissance," marked by dramatic events of political and cultural activism and by unprecedented literary production. By the mid-1970s, New Zealand Maori and American Indians were part of an emerging international indigenous rights movement, signaled by the formation and first general assembly of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP). In "Blood As Narrative/Narrative As Blood," I chronicle these periods of indigenous minority activism and writing and investigate the wide range of tactics developed for asserting indigenous difference in literary and political activist texts produced by the WCIP, New Zealand Maori, and American Indians. Indigenous minority or "Fourth World" writers and activists have mobilized and revalued both indigenous and dominant discourses, including the pictographic discourse of plains Indian "winter counts" in the United States and the ritual discourse of the Maori marae in New Zealand, as well as the discourse of treaties in both. These writers and activists have also created powerful tropes and emblematic figures for contemporary indigenous identity, including "blood memory," the ancient child, and the rebuilding of the ancestral house (whare tipuna). My readings of a wide range of poems, short stories, novels, essays, non-fiction works, representations of cultural and political activism, and works of literary, art history, political science, and cultural criticism lead to the development of critical approaches for reading indigenous minority literary and political activist texts that take into account the complex historical and cultural contexts of their production--local, national and, increasingly, global.

Dissertation (MHSc--Health Science) -- AUT University, 2008.
Includes bibliographical references. Also held in print (xi, 132 leaves : col. ill. ; 30 cm.) in North Shore Campus Theses Collection (T 362.108999442 PAE)

Settler colonisation produced particular colonial subjects: indigene and settler. The specificity of the relationship between these subjects lies in the act of settlement; an act of colonial violence by which the settler physically and symbolically displaces the indigene, but never totally. While indigenes may be physically displaced from their territories, they continue to occupy a marginal location within the settler nation-state. Symbolically, as settlers set out to distinguish themselves from the metropolitan 'motherlands', indigenous cultures become a rich, 'native' source of cultural authenticity to ground settler nationalisms. The result is a complex of conflictual and ambivalent relations between settler and indigene.This thesis investigates the ongoing impact of this colonial relation on the contemporary identities and relations of Maori (indigene) and Pakeha (settlers) in Aotearoa New Zealand. It centres on the operation of discursive strategies used by both Maori and Pakeha in constructing their identities and the relationship between them. I analyse 'found' texts - non-fiction books, media and academic texts - to identify discourse 'at work', as New Zealanders make and reflect on their identity claims. This investigation has two aims. Firstly, I map the terrain of discursive strategies that bear the traces of colonial domination and resistance. Secondly, I seek to explore the possibilities for replacing colonial relations with non-dominating forms of relationship between Maori and Pakeha.The thesis is in two parts. Part I focuses on theories of identity, centring on essentialism and hybridity. I argue that both modes of theorising bear the traces of colonial relations and neither offers the means to 'escape' colonial relations. Part II focuses on theories of intersubjectivity, bringing relationality to the fore. I argue that epistemological relations (including identity relations) always involve a degree of violence and exclusion and that, consequently, these necessary relations must be held in tension with an awareness of the ethical dimension of intersubjective engagement. Utilising the ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas, I argue that a combination of an ethical orientation towards the other and a 'disappointed' orientation towards politics and epistemology, offers the means to developing non-dominating relations with the cultural other.

"Warriors and Wanderers: Making Race in the Tasman World, 1769-1840" is an exploration of the development of racial thought in Australia and New Zealand from the period of first contact between British and the respective indigenous peoples to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. It analyses four groups of primary documents: the journals and published manuscripts of James Cook's Pacific voyages; An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales by David Collins published in 1798; documents written by and about Samuel Marsden, colonial chaplain in New South Wales and the father of the first mission to New Zealand; and the Reports from the British House of Commons Select Committee into the Treatment of Aborigines in the British Empire from 1835 to 1837. This study employs a transnational methodology and explores the early imperial history of the two countries as a Tasman world of imperial activity. It argues that ideas of human difference and racial thought had important material effects for the indigenous peoples of the region, and were critical to the design of colonial projects and ongoing relationships with both Maori and Aboriginal people, influencing the countries; and their national historiographies, right up to the present day. Part 1 examines the journals of James Cook's three Pacific voyages, and the ideas about Maori and Aboriginal people which were developed out them. The journals and published books of Cook's Pacific voyages depicted Maori as a warrior race living in hierarchical communities, people who were physically akin to Europeans and keen to interact with the voyagers, and who were understood to change their landscape as well as to defend their land, people who, I argue, were depicted as sovereign owners of their land. In Australia encounter was completely different, characterised by Aboriginal people's strategic use of withdrawal and observation, and British descriptions can be characterised as an ethnology of absence, with skin colour dominating documentation of Aboriginal people in the Endeavour voyage journals. Aboriginal withdrawal from encounter with the British signified to Banks that Aboriginal people had no defensive capability. Assumptions of low population numbers and that Aboriginal people did not change their landscape exacerbated this idea, and culminated in the concept that Aboriginal people were not sovereign owners of their country. Part 2 examines debates informing the decision to colonise the east coast of Australia through the evidence of Joseph Banks and James Matra to the British Government Committee on Transportation. The idea that Aboriginal people would not resist settlement was a feature not only of this expert evidence but dominated representation of the Sydney Eora community in David Collins's An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, such that Aboriginal attacks on the settlement were not said to be resistance. A report of the kidnapping of two Muriwhenua Maori men by Norfolk Island colonial authorities was also included in Collins Account, relaying to a British audience a Maori view of their own communities while also opening up further British knowledge of the resources New Zealand offered the empire. The connection with Maori communities facilitated by British kidnapping and subsequent visits by Maori chiefs to New South Wales encouraged the New South Wales colonial chaplain Samuel Marsden to lobby for a New Zealand mission, which was established in 1814, as discussed in Part 3. Marsden was a tireless advocate for Maori civilisation and religious instruction, while he argued that Aboriginal people could not be converted to Christianity. Part 3 explores Marsden's colonial career in the Tasman world, arguing that his divergent actions in the two communities shaped racial thought about the two communities of the two countries. It explores the crucial role of the chaplain's connection to the Australian colony, especially through his significant holdings of land and his relationships with individual Aboriginal children who he raised in his home, to his depiction of Aboriginal people and his assessment of their capacity as human beings. Evidence from missionary experience in New Zealand was central to the divergent depictions of Tasman world indigenous people in the Buxton Committee Reports produced in 1836 and 1837, which are analysed in Part 4. The Buxton Committee placed their conclusions about Maori and Aboriginal people within the context of British imperial activity around the globe. While the Buxton Committee stressed that all peoples were owners of their land, in the Tasman world evidence suggested that Aboriginal people did not use land in a way that would confer practical ownership rights. And while the Buxton Committee believed that Australia's race relations were a failure of British benevolent imperialism, they did not feel that colonial expansion could, or should be, halted. Evidence from New Zealand stressed that Maori independence was threatened by those seen to be "inappropriate" British imperial agents who came via Australia, reinforcing a discourse of separation between Australia and New Zealand that Marsden had first initiated. While the Buxton Committee had not advocated the negotiation of treaties, the idea that Maori sovereignty was too fragile to be sustained justified the British decision to negotiate a treaty with Maori just three years after the Select Committee delivered its final Report.

This thesis is about seeking empowerment through informed reflection. It articulates changes to Maori identity and culture when whanau leave their traditional homelands in Aotearoa and move across the Tasman Sea to live in Australia. The thesis presents a community narrative derived from autoethnographic reflections, short stories and informal conversations I gathered from youth, families and community groups during individual interviews and focus groups. These storylines help to illustrate how whanau have managed to exist as Maori in another country without their tribal system close by to support the traditional and cultural way of life. The thesis also highlights how the research methods used in this study enable culturally competent practices and it endeavors to describe the self-organizing, dynamic and emerging behaviour of our Maori community. In undertaking this research and through writing the thesis I have chosen to follow a particular format. This is not to flaunt convention, but to find a position, my space, a Maori place amidst the conversations and storylines that articulate living in and between two worlds. In doing this I have sought to manage the research and writing process by having recourse to a conceptual design. The work is informed by Kaupapa Maori and Complexity theory. It is autoethnographic in style moving back and forth between an insider’s passionate perspective and an outsider’s impassive one (Van Maanen 1988) all the while I tell stories and engage in conversation about what I/we see and how this can help me/us to know how trans-Tasman migration has influenced a change in the way we practice our Maori ways of being and knowing. As the inquirer, my role is to be the facilitator of the emergent in which bicultural issues, scholarly insights, and the ‘new’ in the ‘old’ narrative unfolds. I then turn to my Tupuna, Matua Tekoteko who now becomes the kaitiaki or caretaker of this work. He holds it within for safekeeping.

This project investigates how Christian-Māori identity finds expression in contemporary Christian songwriting practice, within Calvary Life Outreach (CLO), an independent Pentecostal church located in southwest Sydney with a predominantly Māori congregation. The thesis explores this church’s diaspora Christian-Māori identity through interviews with Christian-Māori leaders in New Zealand, a focus group with members of the CLO church, and then investigates how the New Zealand perspectives are received by CLO in relation to an album of Christian songs, written as part of the thesis, and for use within the CLO church itself. This album also creates a framework for other diaspora church communities to explore similar cultural realities within their unique contexts. The aim of this project is twofold: firstly, to consider issues that are deemed important to CLO congregants and the New Zealand interviewees in light of their Christian-Māori identity, which draws upon historical and contemporary influences and expressions of Christian-Māori identity and its practice. Secondly, this thesis explores how social and sonic expressions of Christian identity serve to bolster and encourage Māoritanga (a sense of being Māori) within this diaspora community through their musical practice. The theoretical framework of this project draws on a Kaupapa Māori methodology, which seeks to validate and legitimise Māori ontological and epistemological realities in research as research. This approach highlights the necessity of relationship building as a means of effective engagement with Māori communities, alongside the importance of allowing participants to inform and direct the development of such research. To this end, Christian-Māori leaders from New Zealand have shared interview perspectives around what Christian-Māori identity means to them in their contexts, especially within the Christian Church, and how a sense of Māori identity can be expressed through a song album. Further, CLO has highlighted its concerns as a diaspora Christian-Māori community. The issues raised between these two ‘communities’ highlighted how Christian-Māori identity differs in its expression between New Zealand and Australia, and the way that a diaspora community expresses its sense of collective identity through the song album. ix The concerns that have been raised include the legacy of colonialism within church settings, and the importance of all ethnic minority groups, including Māori, to express Christian worship in a way that is not inhibited by the practices of the dominant (Anglophonic) church culture. One of the overriding concerns of the participants is that ‘every tribe and tongue’ has a space afforded them to worship ‘in spirit and truth’ – that is, to use culturally diverse musical manifestations to articulate heartfelt Christian worship within congregational settings. In light of these considerations, a song album has been created by me and members of CLO addressing a range of themes based around Christian spirituality, Christian- Māori/Maltese identity (Maltese being my own background), and the realities of being a Christian diaspora community in South West Sydney, drawn from the focus group responses. The songs cover a range of subject matter, from repentance to jubiliation, and, in keeping with the practice of the CLO community, utilise Christian Scriptures from the Old and New Testaments, in English, Māori and Maltese, as the basis of song lyrics. The resulting Christian album embraces and celebrates rich diversity in the midst of Christian unity. It also aims to capture the confluence of languages and life experiences through a range of traditional and contemporary musical styles, such as pop, reggae and haka, encouraging listeners to express their own culturally-enriched manifestations of worship.

This research studies Pakeha who have engaged with Maori cultural learning contexts. Within a social constructionist theoretical framework, and with a combination of the critical and communicative approaches to cultural identity, the research explores the meaning these Pakeha bring to being Pakeha. Discourse analysis tools of interpretative repertoires and linguistic resources are used to analyse data from semi-structured interviews with six Paheha participants. Participants have experienced Maori cultural learning contexts before or during the research, through learning te reo, tikanga Maori and about nga ao o nga iwi Maori. The research found that, largely, meanings participants brought to being Pakeha were in contrast to stereotypical notions of what it means to be Pakeha. Participants demonstrated that for them being Pakeha meant being connected to nga ao o nga iwi Maori; being aware of Pakeha privilege; mediating and negotiating being Pakeha with dominant notions of Pakehaness; valuing the history of Aotearoa-New Zealand, along with valuing te reo me ona tikanga. Furthermore, the research also found that the consistently postcolonial identity participants brought to being Pakeha shifted according to context, troubling the meanings of Pakeha also.