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.
