Pakeha, Identity, and Indigenous Politics: Towards a relational practice of justice

Abstract

In this study I examine Pakeha New Zealanders' responses to contemporary indigenous Māori claims in the context of the Treaty of Waitangi over the past four decades. I examine the relationality between Māori and Pakeha New Zealanders as a practice of justice and the potential for this relationality to inform a wider democratic theory/practice of justice. My engagement also constitutes a critical geography envisaged as a politically located practice whose arguments form a part of these relations and have already been published locally. I explore three key questions that emerge without assuming comprehensivity: 1. How are these contemporary Pakeha identity politics implicated in relation to justice within an arena marked by hegemonic struggle? A critical account of 'histories of injustice' relating to the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi suggests that what later emerge as justice and injustice are inextricably linked through complex relations. Drawing on the theory of Laclau and Mouffe, my response is to move beyond a simple notion of hegemony understood within local postcolonial discourse as dominant group ‘rule by persuasion' to understand hegemonic struggle as the ambivalent condition of all human spaces that delimits closure or solutions and under which democratic justice must operate. 2. What value should be afforded to culture and to cultural claims within a democratic practice of justice, particularly indigenous claims to self-determination? Despite formal adoption of biculturalism I contend this discussion is still to be had in New Zealand Rather than beginning with theory, I examine the potential for the local practice of justice emerging through the difficult relationality and jurisprudence surrounding Treaty claims over the past four decades to inform a 'relational' theory of democratic justice. 3. What new understandings of democracy provide a more just alternative to the simple rhetoric of equality and inclusion? While Anglo-American geographies continue to discount representation in favour of a return to everyday lived spaces the naturalisation of a basic lived equality of the everyday has been a major source of injustice in New Zealand. I contest an uncritical local ‘politics of solutions' which argues for a return to a simple inclusive nationalism and basic equality in the post-Treaty Settlements era as the ultimate goal of local democratic justice. Drawing both on local relations, and on the recent spatial and discourse theory of Derrida, Massey, Lefebvre, Laclau and Mouffe, I propose a more difficult and contingent relational democratic justice (or relational ethics) as an ethico-political practice encompassing autonomy and interconnectedness, a justice in some sense always to come. I investigate possible implications for local politics and for democracy in a wider sense I suggest the pressing need to add relational justice to existing democratic understandings and approaches justice.