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Resistance: An Indigenous Response to Neoliberalism, edited by Maria Bargh. Wellington, nz: Huia Publishers, 2007. isbn 978-1-86969-286-5; 213 pages, illustrations, appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. Paper, us$28.00. Distributed by University of Hawai'i Press.
In this recent work (published by Huia, a Mäori press), editor Maria Bargh, a lecturer of Mäori studies at Victoria University at Wellington, elucidates the ways that neoliberal policies espoused by the New Zealand government since 1984 adversely affect Mäori well-being and Mäori pursuit of tino rangatiratanga, Mäori self-determination and sovereignty. Neoliberalism, the prevailing convention that has been successively adopted by most governing bodies around the world since the 1980s, maintains that the development of a place and people "previously organized and governed in other ways" (1), is determined by the growth and accumulation of capital by the free market. The New Zealand government claims that neoliberalism "is an opportunity for long term economic benefits for Mäori" (24).
The contributors who assisted in shaping Resistance are nine Mäori writers from various iwi (tribes), straddling varying professions that include academia, legal advocacy, health care, community organizing, and political activism. Resistance fuses social science analysis with political interviews, literary critiques, memoir, indigenous knowledge, and statistical data to imagine multiple ways to pursue Mäori tino rangatiratanga.
Neoliberal practice is not a new encounter for tangata whenua, "Mäori people in their capacity as indigenous people of New Zealand" (192). Resistance locates the recent neoliberal project within the continuing colonial project of the British Crown's private ownership and redistribution of Mäori lands and resources since Mäori colonization began in the 1800s. Mäori and the British Crown signed the Treaty of Waitangi and its Mäori version, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, in 1840. In Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Mäori transferred protection rights (käwanatanga [government]), to the British Crown, but they never ceded their...