A Few Words about Power and Land: Settler Wronging and Indigenous Belonging

My short whaiwhakaaro (‘account’) begins to think through the settler ontocide of Indigenous belonging, taking as an example the denial of the mana whenua (‘land’ or ‘place power’) of iwi Māori (‘Māori’ or ‘Indigenous peoples’). It contrasts iwi Pākehā (‘“settler” peoples’) and iwi Māori belonging in terms of their relation to place – and attends to the ontological nature of iwi Māori belonging-with-place as mana whenua. It then conceptualises the settler denial of the ontological nature of iwi Māori belonging in terms of Jacques Rancière’s (1999) ontological account of politics as offering ‘remedies’ for a fundamental wrong that institutes a ‘police’ majority (e.g., iwi Pākehā settlers) and a minority ‘party of no part’ (e.g., Indigenous iwi Māori) in society. The wrong divides those who can ‘speak’ – and thus fully exist – from those who cannot; nonetheless, the ‘dis-agreement,’ or contestation (‘tautohetohe’), that constitutes this wrong conditions all politics in society. What most remedies for this wrong aim to do is to neutralise politics, to ‘tame’ the party of no part by speaking for it or silencing it. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, three of these remedies have taken the form of the concepts of ‘monoculturalism,’ ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘ethnonationalism.’ My account proposes an alternative iwi Māori ontological politics that offers a remedy for the fundamental wrong of majoritarianism by allowing for a heterogeneity of political positions to co-exist in the light of a more-than-human cosmopolitics, for a common place (‘whenua’) that is nonetheless a place of contestation (‘whenua tautohetohe’).