Whakamoana-ed (Set Adrift)? Tūhoe Māori Confront Commodification, 1894–1926

Abstract

Between 1894 and 1926 the people of the Te Urewera mountain wilderness, the rohe pōtae ‘sanctuary’ of the Nāi Tūhoe Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand, confronted a series of colonial policies that potentially had the historical effect of commodifying their land, kingroups and ancestors. Significantly, these policies were sincerely intended to establish Tūhoe home-rule until about 1908, when they became increasingly predatory in a Crown purchasing campaign intended to put Māori “wastelands” to better farming use by new settlers. By the time of the 1921 Urewera Consolidation Scheme the new policy had become a sophisticated form of commodification intended by some Māori as well as Pākehā ‘European’ innovators to modernise Tūhoe still refusing to sell. This particular ethnohistory will be reviewed by focusing on the colonial dynamics of commodification as it was taking shape in terms of Māori land and kingroups in New Zealand, and some of the ways in which it was effectively resisted by the Tūhoe. Their triumphant statutory recovery of control over their Te Urewera sanctuary in 2014 still faces the embedded contradictions of this history.