Land-based resistance: Enacting Indigenous self-determination and kai sovereignty
A brief summary of my recent publication, co-authored with Pania Newton and Nicola Short. The full text is available (open access) here.
For those unfamiliar, a glossary of all terms in Te Reo Māori can be found at the bottom of the article.
In 2015, the Indigenous-led campaign Save Our Unique Landscape (SOUL), now known as #ProtectIhumātao, set out to stop a commercial housing development on unjustly confiscated whenua tūpuna at Ihumātao. This whenua is part of a rare cultural heritage landscape, in the Ihumātao isthmus, in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter Aotearoa). Ihumātao is the ancestral home of ahi kā — those who have ancestral ties to the whenua and who keep the home fires burning. Over time, the campaign progressively took action to reclaim the whenua and enact ahi kā aspirations for the whenua including kai sovereignty.
In our paper, Pania Newton, Nicola Short and I explore the significance of the #ProtectIhumātao campaign for understanding the role of land struggles in pursuing food sovereignty in the settler colonial context that is Aotearoa New Zealand.
In the paper, we propose that in these kinds of contexts it is vital that food sovereignty — and the land sovereignty which is a key part of it — take a critical approach to questions of the state, sovereignty, and property relations. And, in doing so, they must centre Indigenous struggles for territorial authority and self-determination. Why? Because settler states are fundamentally characterised by a contestation over sovereignty. In Aotearoa, while the settler government continues to insist that colonisation resulted in the cession of sovereignty by Māori to the British Crown, this ‘fact’ has been continually contested by Māori since the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi nearly 200 years ago — a position explicitly supported by the Waitangi Tribunal. As a consequence of these tensions over sovereignty, the role of the state in enabling food sovereignty is also thrown into question; action through and by the settler state is often in direct tension with Indigenous needs, desires, and struggles for self-determination.
Core to the settler state’s claims of territorial sovereignty is the “ownership model” of property (Singer, 2000), which is imposed upon Indigenous territories through the process of colonisation. Non-Western, Indigenous relationships to land are made unrealistic and invisible, obscured beneath the hegemony of settler power and the “settler sovereign landscapes” it produces (Palmer, 2020). In Aotearoa, this has involved ongoing attempts to replace Māori relationships between people and the land with Western norms and rules of private and state ownership, through legal, commercial, and military processes.
What all of this means is that, without deep, constitutional transformation of the very nature of the state and of sovereign authority, the settler state may be an “impossible space” (Kepkiewicz, 2017) within which to build food sovereignty. We look to the findings of the Matike Mai report throughout the paper to inspire our vision of what such a constitutional transformation might entail.
To illustrate the above points, we explore land-based resistance movements — including the #ProtectIhumātao campaign — which have included food production as part of their methods of land reclamation. These land-based resistance movements have involved an element of mahinga kai, but their focus has been on the reclamation of whenua. This speaks, we argue, to the profound connection within Māori ontologies between people, kai, and whenua; and to the central importance of whenua within the political landscape of Aotearoa. Not only that, but when we look at the histories of land relations and contestations in Aotearoa, we cannot escape the fact that much of the land in question has been unjustly taken from Māori. As such, we argue that food sovereignty in Aotearoa has to be embedded within Māori land sovereignty and territorial authority. That is, that to pursue food sovereignty in a way that is grounded in justice, and that genuinely upholds the principles set out in the Declaration of Nyéléni, it is necessary to centre Māori-led movements to reclaim mana motuhake and rangatiratanga.
Finally, drawing on the work of Christian Lund, we propose that the struggle to protect Ihumātao demonstrates how land-based resistance can rupture the apparently ‘settled’ nature of property relations, the state, and sovereignty. In doing so, we suggest that this struggle has contributed to the articulation of new modes (and the renewal of existing Māori modes) of land governance, as well as to opening space for new constitutional arrangements that are more conducive to Māori aspirations for land management and stewardship — including food sovereignty.
For example, the reclamation of Ihumātao subverted the Crown-established parameters for legitimate political and legal engagement in terms of the type of property that could legitimately be contested (privately owned property, not Crown land), and the forum within which land debates could be contested (using direct action when recourse to Treaty settlement and other legal approaches were unsuccessful). The campaign also produced a discursive rupture, highlighting and unsettling the deeply political work that goes into legitimising and maintaining settler property relations and the settler state. Thirdly, the campaign disrupted the colonial capitalist territorialisation of Ihumātao as privately owned property, asserting the authority of ahi kā to determine the nature and future of the land as embodying a source of identity, relationships and wellbeing.
We argue that these ruptures have profound implications for the reparation of colonial injustices and the establishment of “just relationships between Māori and the Crown outside of the Crown-dictated settlement process” (Carwyn Jones, in press). By materially challenging existing colonial capitalist power structures of sovereignty, statehood, and private property ownership, as well as the narratives which sustain them, we suggest that ahi kā can be understood to have opened space for the development of alternative visions of the land, of food production, and of Tiriti-based governance more broadly — in line with proposals of relational constitutionalism held within the Matike Mai Report.
Ahi Kā: people with ancestral connection to the land; those who keep the home fires burning; continuous occupation of land
Kai: food
Mahinga kai: food cultivation
Mana motuhake: Māori self-determination, autonomy
Rangatiratanga: chieftainship/full chiefly authority, often translated as sovereignty
Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Tiriti): the Treaty of Waitangi; a treaty between some Māori and the Crown in 1840
Whenua: land, placenta
Whenua tūpuna: ancestral land
