Dancing with the state: Māori creative energy and policies of integration, 1945-1967

Abstract

This thesis considers Maori-state relations in the post-war period up to 1967. It focuses on the complicated and congested nexus at which tribal committees, branches of the Maori Women's Welfare League and the Welfare Division of the Department of Maori Affairs met and negotiated the particulars of the Maori-state relationship. Underpinning that relationship were the tensions inherent in the Maori world's ongoing task of balancing the old and the new, the traditional and the modem, the rural and the urban during a time of unprecedented change. The thesis draws on a mix of oral histories and documentary sources, especially government archives, to examine the motivations of Maori and the department in their interactions. It presents the department's broad integrationist philosophy and examines Maori peoples' drives for both engaging with the state and undertaking a range of development projects that built on Maori tribal concepts to mark out Maori socio-cultural spaces in modem environments. Maori policy and legislation including the Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act 1945 and the Hunn Report of 1961, and the major demographic changes associated with urbanisation, presented enormous challenges for Maori. Implementation of the Hunn report in particular fractured tense but workable co-operation apparent in 1950s Maori-state relations. The thesis illustrates how Maori creatively negotiated those challenges and progressed their own projects undeterred by the onerous constraints of integration. It achieves that by restoring the Maori narrative and the Maori concepts at its base. It finds intelligent, critical, vibrant Maori leadership involved in highly nuanced and complex interactions with state.