Māori political initiatives

Māori politics is the politics of the Māori people, who were the original inhabitants of New Zealand and who are now the country's largest minority. Modern Māori politics can be seen as a subset of New Zealand politics in general, but has a number of distinguishing features.

Before the arrival of Pākehā (European settlers) in New Zealand, Māori society was based largely around communal units. A common misconception is that pre-colonial Māori governance was structured into the "rigid and static structural models" (p. 19) proposed by early ethnologists, such as Elsdon Best (1934):

The tribal organisation of the Maori included three different groups – the tribe (iwi), the clan (hapu), and the family group (whanau).... The clan or sub-tribe was composed of a number of family groups, and the sum of the clans (hapu) formed the tribe. (p. 89)

Twentieth century research "modified this model of tribal organisation, emphasising the role of the hapū ... as the largest effective corporate group which defended a territory or worked together in peaceful enterprises" (p. 19). Therefore, it is now understood that hapū were responsible for administering resources, land, and important community buildings, and were also responsible for warfare (particularly maintaining the waka). The iwi typically functioned more as a federation than as an administrative structure.

Political leadership or governance in Māori society has traditionally come from two different groups of people – the Ariki and the Rangatira. The Ariki are "persons of the highest rank and seniority" (p. 58). Ariki did not operate in simple hierarchical orgranisations; despite what later "government officers were inclined to believe", Ariki have never been "the apex of a structured hierarchy of institutionalised tribal authority" (p. 264). Many positions overlap with Ariki holding multiple roles, including "head of an iwi, the rangatira of a hapu and the kaumatua of a whanau" (p. 197).

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