The State of Māori Rights | Professor Margaret Mutu

This book documents the state of Māori rights over a thirty-year period and speaks to the determination of Māori as indigenous people. This edition includes fourteen new chapters and a new foreword.

The State of Māori Rights was first published in 2011 and brought together a Māori view of events and issues that occurred between 1994 and 2009 with a direct impact on Māori. This includes the 1994 fiscal envelope policy debate, the 50,000-strong protest march against the foreshore and seabed legislation, the Waitangi Tribunal and its Treaty claims process, and media attacks on Māori MPs.

This edition, revised and updated with new chapters, brings Margaret Mutu’s The State of Māori Rights through to 2024, a time when Māori rights under the Treaty of Waitangi are once again being violated. Mutu covers Māori responses to COVID-19 and to national disasters such as the White Island eruption and the Christchurch Mosque Attacks on the Muslim community. Māori initiatives and success stories run through these years too, which, in Mutu’s words, ‘encourage us not to lose sight of our ancestors’ vision’.

Professor Margaret Mutu (Ngāti Kahu, Te Rarawa, Ngāti Whātua) is head of Māori Studies, University of Auckland, and is an internationally renowned researcher, author and lecturer who has worked on issues around the Treaty of Waitangi, te reo Māori and Māori rights. She is the chair of her iwi parliament, Te Rūnanga-ā-Iwi o Ngāti Kahu, and of two of her marae. She is also a mandated representative of Ngāti Kahu nationally and internationally, including at the United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues, and she is the chief negotiator for the settlement of Ngāti Kahu Treaty of Waitangi claims.