Maori Urban Migration and the Assertion of Indigeneity in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1945–1975

This essay examines the exercise of indigenous agency during extensive Maori urban migration within Aotearoa/New Zealand in the decades following the Second World War. It argues that, contrary to official expectations and despite many difficulties, the longstanding indigenous quest for the state to recognize rangatiratanga (broadly, Maori autonomy) adapted successfully to the new urban and suburban environment. This defied the belief firmly held by governments and their officials, one shared by most within the British-derived dominant culture, that urbanization would greatly speed up a supposedly inevitable process of assimilation. The many modes of resistance to assimilation, and the great deal of organizational change which accompanied the urban migration, contributed eventually not to disappearing but to enhancing the cause of rangatiratanga – despite seemingly unpropitious circumstances. State-provided adjustment measures, for example, which had aimed at appropriating Maori organizational energies in ways which would accelerate assimilation, were in turn reappropriated in the pursuit of rangatiratanga. By the mid-1970s, this period of momentous politico-cultural turmoil for Maori had established a sound base for a ‘Maori Renaissance’ so powerful that the state was already abandoning its assimilation policies.