Abstract:
The Maori tribal elite are identified and their political and economic ambitions discussed
with reference to recent strategic documents. Framing and supporting those ambitions
is an indigenous discourse that has been crucial to the elite’s success. Five discursive
strategies are analysed: (1) constructing the indigenous collective as tribal Maori; (2)
constructing indigeneity as ‘the logic of the gift’ in contrast to the ‘‘‘Western’’ logic of
the commodity’; (3) promoting indigeneity as an ahistorical primordial category to
counter the social reality of ethnic fluidity in New Zealand; (4) promoting a vocabulary
in order to control the meaning of key ideas; and (5) constructing indigeneity as a polity
in opposition to the nation. ATreaty ofWaitangi ‘partnership’ is promoted as the means
by which the indigenous–colonizer dualism is brokered. Despite its efficacy to date, the
discourse is undermined by inherent contradictions, including the elite’s privileged position
as a capitalist class, the growing inequalities within the tribal collective and the
incarceration of indigenous people in an ahistorical timelessness.