16 May 2026
MY POSITION
I oppose the inclusion of Article 13.2 of the New Zealand–India Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which expressly affirms the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
I ask the Committee to recommend the removal of Article 13.2(a) before ratification.
JUSTIFICATION
Article 13.2 uses the contemporary meaning of the term 'indigenous' in the interests of retribalisation politics and against liberal-democracy.
This contemporary use can be traced to the United Nations in the 1960s. Previously 'indigenous' was mainly confined to anthropology. It referred to autochthony [Gk sprung from the land itself; khthon – land;].
In the 1960s a United Nations committee investigated the employment conditions of two groups of pre-industrial peasants that become distinguishable during industrialisation. It applied the term 'indigenous' to those who had remained in situ to distinguish them from those who migrated to the cities or to other countries.
It is likely that 'indigenous' was brought from the UN to New Zealand in the 1980s by academic Aroha Mead. Its meaning was conflated with autochthony, despite the fact that Māori were 14th century settlers.
By the end of the 1980s, 'indigenous' (and 'tangata whenua') spread from the universities (helped by influential anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond) into retribalisation politics and commonplace parlance. It became a truism that Māori were indigenousi with economic and political rights attached to the essentialised status. The 2000 establishment of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues strengthened the word's permanent place in our speech and in our minds. It was reified as truth; a position cemented when New Zealand formally endorsed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2010, despite having refused to do so in 2007ii.
Language is the means by which ideologies are inserted into peoples' minds. The conflation of 'indigenous' with autochthony and its subsequent reification has proved one of the most successful. Its true meaning – that of a blood and soil ideology – is very well concealed.On a final note: I recommend that today's politicians look closely at all retribalisation language. There is much that warrants consideration.
For those on the Select Committee who wish to take up this challenge, I recommend my two scholarly publications which examine the ideological use of language in the interests of retribalisation politics. They are:
The Transformation of Indigeneity, published in Review, A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilisations, XXV, 2, 2002, 173-95. 380.
Discursive Strategies of the Maori Tribal Elite, Critique of Anthropology, 31(4), 2011, 359–380.
Both are available at www.elizabethrata.com.
Professor Elizabeth Rata is a sociologist of education in the School of Critical Studies, Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland where she is Director of the Knowledge in Education Research Unit (KERU).
REMINDER: Submissions close 11.59pm Sunday 17 May – full details can be seen HERE.
i The history of 'indigenous' (and also 'ethnicity') are sober reminders about the importance of knowing etymology. Thank goodness the Knowledge-Rich English Curriculum (October 2025) includes etymology. Vocabulary acquisition must always include details about a word's history so that no word is taken for granted and able to acquire an undeserved potency used to capture minds.
ii I would like to see this endorsement withdrawn, for the reasons I give concerning the FTA Article 13.2
8 comments:
An impeccable erudite and evidence=based analysis. to hope that Select Committees still operate on this basis. The failure of ACT's TP Bill in 2025 proved that political correctness trumps fact.
People must realize: a non- legally binding
UN document can acquire legally binding status if it becomes part of the national legislation of a sovereign state. This legal step explains the inclusion of the UNDRIP reference in the NZ/India FTA. This will have dangerous consequences for NZ's democracy and race relations. It must be removed now.
Absolutely correct summary. Indigenous from the Latin: Indigena: meaning sprung from the land or soil and native to.
The word has been hijacked to serve the radical agenda. It does have potency as many people, including it seems our politicians, now consider Maori to have special rights and privileges. In reality they are early settlers.
What on earth a trade agreement has to do with indigenous rights is anybody's guess.
As we can see, this infiltration into legislation always has ramifications down the track.
Maori people are indigenous to Taiwan. They are descendants of a Taiwanese tribe that fled Taiwan thousands of years ago. They travelled down through Melanesia and settled in the Pacific Islands. More recently they travelled to New Zealand and settled here .
They have Taiwanese DNA, and also their language is very similar to current Taiwanese dialect.
That this provision (Article 13.2(a)) must be removed from the Indoia FTA is a no-brainer. Let's see if the committee has a brain?
That word 'indigenous' is so problematical - it has no standard meaning according to the UN. So UNDRIP was an UNGA Declaration about people whose identity is nebulous. Now that really helps.
Just how silly things can get was shown by the Saramaka case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2007 when the court held that these descendants of Negro slaves had the same rights in relation to land that they had occupied since the 17thC as 'indigenous' people.
What I'm hoping is that one of these days a group of Amerindians will put in a claim for that land on the basis that they are more 'indigenous' than the Saramaka.
The trouble with Doug's argument is that the 'indigenous' people of Taiwan had to have come from somewhere as well. You end up with a chain of regression ending somewhere in Africa where the first hominins appeared.
A practical definition of 'indigenous' that I favour is a people who have been in a place long enough to have developed a unique culture and language. Maoris are indigenous by that definition but so are my own crowd, the Dutch, at least the ones who live in Holland.
Can't win, can you?
How does such wording get into the Trade agreement in the first place? Is their no one totally indepenant of maori who compiles or reads this stuff through? Will they be censured for oversight? Will anyone on the committee trouble to fathom exactly what Rata with her unfamiiar words is stating?
Actually Barend, maoris imported their language and culture to NZ, it didn't develop here, and I presume it remained little changed until European/English influence so your argument doesn't really hold water. In fact they are no more 'indigenous' to the Eastern Pacific islands from which they came, as was pointed out by another commentator. As you noted, the truly indigenous in a biological sense are African human populations, from whence the rest of us benighted hominids arose.
Allen, you are assuming that Maori culture and language did not change significantly over some three quarters of a millennium, despite having come to an environment quite different from the one they left. That's pretty unlikely. Anyway, where had they sojourned and for how long between leaving Taiwan and arriving here? It was probably an island-hopping migration, not a direct beeline from Taipei to Wellington. There would have been adaptational changes along the way.
Another issue here is how much change amounts to 'significant change'. The inferential stats meaning of 'significant' is not applicable here - it comes down to an arbitrary judgement.
Exactly the same questions arise for any group of people descended from migrants long ago. My lot (Dutchies) came from Germanic tribes who had 'originally' come from Scandinavia who had 'originally' come from the Caucasus who had 'originally' come from...... say 'when'!
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