Indigenous Peoples and the Language of Sovereignty: Strategic Entanglement in Māori Politics

Scholarship in critical International Relations has increasingly revealed the Eurocentric and colonial roots and ramifications of the paradigmatic understanding of sovereignty. Both in public debate and mainstream academic literature, sovereignty has become associated with political models, ontologies, and values originated in the Western hemisphere and Euromodernity. What is more, the concept was historically framed by the colonial invasions and deployed as an instrument of colonisation itself. As a result of the naturalisation of a racial and civilizational divide within the doctrine of sovereignty, it was simultaneously asserted by settlers and colonial powers while denied to and rendered impossible for indigenous peoples. More than a semantic twist, this was key in enabling and justifying indigenous dispossession. Today still, the prevailing international legal order built on colonial legacies deems indigenous peoples to be non-sovereign, a legal fiction often reinforced by national courts. Thus, sovereignty has been appropriated by the West, both politically/materially through colonisation processes and conceptually by conflating the concept with the particular Euromodern conception. Paradoxical as it may seem, sovereignty nonetheless remains an appealing ideal for many colonised peoples, one towards which they maintain “affective attachments” fuelling their contemporary politics. More particularly, the indigenous international movements of the mid-20th century onwards represented a significant intervention in the discursive politics surrounding the concept. Many indigenous activists and scholars, especially in settler colonial contexts, actively re-appropriated the language of sovereignty to encapsulate and advance indigenous political aspirations. Since then, this indigenous re-appropriation has been fraught with debates over its adequacy, its complexities and its potential pitfalls. This paper explores how Māori, Aotearoa/New Zealand’s indigenous people, navigate their relations to the concept of sovereignty in their contemporary political discourses pursuing self-governance. Sovereignty is arguably one of the most contested political terrains in the Māori-Crown relations since the signing of the treaty of Waitangi. According to the English interpretation, Māori ceded their sovereignty to the British Crown in 1840. However, “Māori sovereignty” became a rallying cry for Māori activism and protest in the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, the Waitangi Tribunal asserted in its conclusions to the Te Paparahi o te Raki inquiry (WAI1040) that Māori did not cede their sovereignty by signing the treaty. This paper starts by briefly introducing the Western/Euromodern appropriation of the language of sovereignty and the place of this concept in state-indigenous relations in Aotearoa. It then discusses indigenous scholarship originated in settler colonial contexts in order to map its engagement with the idea of sovereignty. This will reveal an ambivalence towards the concept oscillating between rejection and rearticulation. Building on interviews conducted with Māori leaders, academics, and activists, as well as on WAI1040 claimants’ submissions, this paper then delves into the concrete conceptual strategies deployed by Māori today in their search for self-determining governance. Finally, I propose to use Yarimar Bonilla’s notion of “strategic entanglement” as a lens to understand these socio-political Māori actors’ relation to the concept of sovereignty, and possibly that of indigenous peoples beyond Aotearoa.