Māori Co-Governance and the Creolisation of Political Thinking: Matike Mai Aotearoa (2016) and He Puapua (2021)

Indigenous peoples have pursued a myriad of strategies to enact and express their self- determination. These have varied across geographical contexts and throughout history. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, demands for constitutional transformation and co-governance have been at the forefront of Māori (the common label for Aotearoa’s Indigenous peoples) contemporary politics. At the heart of these demands is the goal of designing a new political model for the entire country that would ensure the recognition of tino rangatiratanga, a Māori concept of power and authority often translated as "Māori sovereignty". This political agenda has constituted one of the most topical issue in Māori-Crown relationships in the last five years, and has reached a tipping point in the context of Indigenous rights backsliding following the right-wing 2023 electoral success. This paper posits that the radically transformative co-governance political projects envisioned by some Māori sectors amount to a creolisation of sovereignty. In order to illuminate this potential pathway towards a decolonial reformulation of sovereignty, this paper discusses the most recent Māori project of co-governance under the light of philosophy and political theory scholars’ accounts of creolisation. It engages the political thought behind this Māori political agenda by drawing from the results of first-hand interviews conducted with Māori advocates of co-governance systems, as well as from document analysis focused on the public reports of the two main recent co-governance proposals: Matike Mai Aotearoa’s report (2016) and He Puapua (2019). Through an analysis of their political discourse and ideal configuration of authority, the conceptualisation of sovereignty and tino rangatiratanga deployed by these Māori co- governance advocates are particularly interrogated. They reveal, this paper argues, two main orientations towards a creolisation of political thinking. First, a creolisation of sovereignty through the entanglement of Māori and Euromodern political modes. Second, an aspiration towards an open-ended and plural form of sovereignty, a "creolising sovereignty". In so doing, these Māori socio-political actors are radically transforming the dominant paradigm of sovereignty and pointing towards a potential decolonial rearticulation of its discourses and practices.