Pandemaurium: Māori Experiences, Understandings and Responses to the State Management of Covid-19

Abstract

The establishment of the state in Aotearoa/New Zealand was premised on a wrongful, illegitimate assumption of sovereignty, ‘the power and the capacity to decide who may live and who must die’ (Mbembe 2003:11). The assumption of sovereignty galvanised the state into fulfilling the obligations necessary to legitimise its authority and use of power; a tripartite arrangement of territory, securitisation and population. Through these historical processes, the state was constituted and operationalised an assemblage of agencies, of ‘conflicting people and objects in a myriad of sites, held together, sometimes very uncertainly, at particular key sites and through the actions of key actors and processes, human and non-human’ (Joyce and Mukerji 2017:1). The constitution of the state in this way contributed to the social and legislative architecture that stripped away Māori agency over Māori health matters, a whakapapa that reveals a gradual loss of sovereignty over Māori health, concurrent with the rise of the state’s mandate. This whakapapa informed the ways in which sovereignty, power, citizenship was constituted throughout Covid-19, and the ways in which Māori communities understood and experience the state’s management of the pandemic. In this thesis, I argue that Māori communities continue to experience the state as a punitive institution, based on the absence of appropriate care, a politics of exclusion, and the expansion of state power and violence; warranted under the exceptional conditions of Covid-19 (Agamben 2005). These experiences are in dialogue with a whakapapa that criminalised Māori attitudes to health. Simultaneously however, Māori continued to assert tino rangatiratanga, actions which unwittingly threatened to undermine the state’s claim to sovereignty; over territories, security forces and population. These experiences laid bare the structural fault lines in the negotiation of sovereignty, between Māori and the state, and its response to Covid-19.