Donna Awatere’s Māori Sovereignty: Reflections on White Supremacy and the Racialization of Crime Control and Surveillance in Aotearoa New Zealand

Donna Awatere’s examination of whiteness within the Aotearoa New Zealand context, specifically white cultural imperialism, has largely been ignored in academic scholarship. For her, white culture, and its articulation through governance and policy, is the starting point and lens to understanding and addressing historical and contemporary Māori dispossession and ensuing strategies of racialized surveillance, control, and containment. In this essay, we argue that Awatere’s attention to past forms of genocide – mapping them to emerging forms of state confinement of Māori, which engender genocidal characteristics, and problematizing “whiteness” – situates the book Māori Sovereignty as an important text in the field of criminal justice, especially that which manifests in settler-colonial contexts.