Ka mua, ka muri. Changing the narratives.

When Aotearoa (New Zealand) shut it doors on 26 March 2020, the moment marked a significant turning point in the history of this country. The motivation to lockdown noble and necessary for human health and wellbeing. Yet, we won’t know its multidimensional impact until we cast our gaze backward in the months and years to come. 

The world is currently observing the mass dampening of trade and economic activity. As State imposed lockdowns dissolve the glare of the daily grind the periphery comes into view. More of the worlds populations see how close they are to its edges. The present but previously ignored disparities sit perched on picket fences. The paint suddenly aged and peeling away to reveal the fragility of the palings holding up an old and tired economic order.  

For some, this uncertainty and disorder signals a rare but much needed opportunity to embark on an economic reset. While for others its indicative of the likely reinforcement of the existing regimes.

In Aotearoa, many industries, businesses, and workers are enduring the pain of actual or impending lost revenues and jobs and more are still stumbling out of the debris. While the government attempts to manage those optics through a staged re-entry to a new normality, many individuals, whanau, and businesses confront the potential of a future underpinned by fear and economic insecurity.  

While it is critical that we contain the virus in order to secure a stronger future, we are undoubtedly heading toward hard times. Like previous economic crises, the periphery expands pushing the marginalised further out while the formerly untouchable edge closer to those margins – scorched by a system that promised them safety, security and prosperity. A promise unkept. Indigenous Peoples know that promise versus the reality story all too well. The socio-economic hits Māori have endured since the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi exacted intolerable harm personally and collectively on their four dimensions of wellbeing: taha wairua (spiritual), taha tinana (physical), taha whānau (family) and taha hinengaro (mental). The introduction of new industries to local or regional economies that were doing it tough with the promise of new jobs and decent infrastructure to build a new and prosperous community purged when the State’s purse strings got too tight creating generations of harm to economic security, social wellbeing and in many cases environmental sustainability. We only need to look over the past 35 years of State economic decisions to observe the strobing effects of its economic violence and the disorientation and fragmentation it wrought on many communities throughout this country. 

So as we approach these times of uncertainty for the whole nation, we cannot allow Māori, or indeed our marginalised groups and communities of colour to be the collateral damage of the State’s economic decisions. Māori economies and futures cannot be the trade-off for the preservation of the middle class and the permanence of the unscrupulously wealthy.

A central challenge for Māori and the government will be overcoming the colonial narratives that have been propagated for far too long. Narratives that portray Māori entrepreneurialism and enterprise as infantile compared to the industries established through their capitalist expansion. The narrative that Māori were too primitive to engage in economic dialogue or to understand how to develop their natural assets. The agenda to pre-empt their justification for the annexation of Māori lands and resources. Narratives that evade the truth that prior to settler arrival and well into the early contact period, Māori were not only economically prosperous but thriving. They had established trade routes across the country and internationally, adopted and adapted new technologies into their cultural frameworks, practiced new agricultural methodologies to provide food staples for the new settlers and their settlements across the country, owned and operated coastal and international trading vessels, built flour mills, roads and bridges, held contracts for almost all the state-regulated postal carriage, attained high levels of literacy, and travelled internationally to learn about foreign markets, and goods and economic systems bringing home with them new innovations and ideas for the advancement of their communities (Reid & Rout, 2016 citing Toft, 1984 and Petrie, 2006; Leoni, 2019).  The colonial narratives prevailed as more settlers arrived and corrupted the ability of whānau and hapū to sustain their flourishing economies. The narrative became central to the imposition of the settler government in Aotearoa and its corresponding legal, political and economic institutions (Leoni, 2019; Reid & Rout, 2016).  

Jointly we can revisit, unpack and dispel those narratives and the stories we are told that keep us separated and our economies submerged. We must upend the poisoned stakes of colonial narratives that prevent the ascension of indigenous rights, wellbeing, knowledge and economies: disinformation, distortion, and denial. Because Māori futures depend on the lifting of those masks.

Image: Introduction to the three poisoned stakes of colonial narratives

This year marks the 10th Anniversary for Aotearoa signing up to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Our record for implementation is not much to celebrate. But anniversaries also present opportunities for reflection. There is a whakatauki in Te Ao Māori “ka mua, ka muri” that speaks to the idea of looking to the past to inform our future. With that in mind, the economic violence of the recent and distant past and the decisions to be made over the coming weeks and months could change the trajectory for Māori. We could perhaps view this timing as a tōhu. The coinciding of two related events on one side, the risks of yet another decade of intergenerational harm to Māori as Aotearoa threatens to slip into an economic downturn of unknown proportions, and on the other, a government endorsed declaration to protect the social, cultural, economic and environmental rights and interests of Māori.

There seems no better time for the government to demonstrate its commitment to retire outdated and harmful narratives to make way for new and shared possibilities.  A time for the government and its departments to examine their own distortions and denials about indigenous economies and autonomy and to create space for Māori to collectively address the conceptual tensions between our traditional and contemporary identities and our mutual understandings about trade and economic activity into the future. 

The prospect of Aotearoa potentially modelling how indigenous economies can ascend in spite of generations of State imposed economic violence should not be underestimated at a time where its global reputation for leadership potentially holds the political capital for a major economic pivot.

The recommendations below attempt to open dialogue rather than provide a prescription. They offer a useful starting point for thinking about Māori economies and futures and why the opportunity is now and how we might act on it. 

Cited sources:

Leoni, G. (2019). The use of Te Reo Māori in economic activities in the 19th Century. MAI JOURNAL. VOLUME 8, ISSUE 1.

Reid, J., Rout, M. (2016) Maori tribal economy: Rethinking the original economic institutions. In T. Anderson (Ed.). Unlocking the Wealth of Indian Nations (pp. 60-83). London: Lexington.