Graham Adams: India’s view of ‘indigenous’ rattles Māori advisers

A month before 2023’s election, Winston Peters ignited a brush fire in the media after he told a campaign meeting in Nelson that Māori were not indigenous to New Zealand.

His reasoning was simple: “We come from Hawai-iki. Where's our Hawai-iki? We think it is in the Cook Islands. We think it’s in Rarotonga... but we’re not from here.”

He noted that his tribe Ngāti Wai “came to Aotearoa about 900 years ago or longer”.

And “if our story says we came from Hawai-iki or this place from the Pacific, then it means we’re not indigenous. I’m not trying to kid anybody, so why are we trying to kid each other?”

He also pointed out that Māori in New Zealand don’t have anything like the long history Aboriginals have of living in Australia that makes them truly indigenous.

“54,000 years in Australia might do, but not 800, 900 years in New Zealand.”

Three years ago, publicly asserting that Māori are not indigenous was seen as deeply heretical. The claim was widely reported — and dismissed instantly by Christopher Luxon.

When asked about Peters’ statement, the soon-to-be Prime Minister answered: "He’s wrong. They are [indigenous]."

Fortunately for Luxon, the journalist didn't go in for the kill by asking him whether he thought the kumara and rats that arrived on the settlers’ waka were also indigenous.

It’s the question that instantly exposes the fragility of the claim by Māori to be indigenous because no one can logically argue that a vegetable and mammal that first arrived in New Zealand on the same boats as the East Polynesians can have a different status than them. If kumara and kiore are not indigenous, as they obviously aren’t, then their human shipmates can’t be either.

That is unless, of course, commentators adopt the UN’s hazy definition of “indigenous” as peoples who have “a historical continuity with a given region prior to colonisation and a strong link to their lands” with “at least in part, distinct social, economic and political systems” — while conveniently sidestepping the key definition of “no obvious other origin”.

On RNZ’s Morning Report, co-host Corin Dann — who seemed affronted by Peters questioning the received wisdom — pushed back with an Oxford University definition of “indigenous”.

Peters was unmoved. He firmly rejected the “wider definition” Dann offered and the view that people who had ancestors who had arrived in a country before colonisation should be able to derive special rights on account of it.

In mid-2026, raising the question of Māori indigeneity would not prompt nearly as much outrage as it did three years ago. To many voters, it would not seem to be even a radical proposition.

Commenters on social media are quick to remind us that Māori not only know where they came from in the relatively recent past, but they also know the names of the boats their ancestors arrived on. And it is often mentioned that Cape Reinga has always been known as the place where the spirits of the dead launched themselves back to their homeland in Hawai-iki.

However, questioning indigeneity is still kryptonite to Māori nationalists. After all, it is an essential plank in their attempts to turn New Zealand into an ethno-state, in which ancestry creates two classes of citizens — those with even remote Māori ancestry and those without.

While the core of Māori nationalism rests on the Treaty, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — endorsed by John Key’s administration in 2010 — provides a powerful international mechanism to pressure the government into embedding indigenous rights into law and policy.

UNDRIP is so important to the nationalist project, in fact, that a clause “affirming” our commitment was somehow slipped into the India-NZ Free Trade Agreement, apparently without the knowledge of even the Trade minister, Todd McClay.

The stealthy insertion has been seen by critics as a Trojan horse for constitutional — and anti-democratic — change. Fingers have been pointed at Māori activists within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade but none of our politicians seem interested in finding out who put it there.

Gary Judd KC noted in his submission last month to the select committee inquiring into the FTA: “In 2007, Helen Clark’s government told the United Nations it could not endorse UNDRIP because endorsement would imply special rights, a veto over democratic decision-making, and different classes of citizenship.

“It said those outcomes were incompatible with New Zealand’s democratic and constitutional arrangements.”

Judd remarked: “He Puapua shows those concerns were not fanciful.”

He Puapua arose from the development of a working plan in 2019 to chart a path for New Zealand to fulfil what Jacinda Ardern’s government saw as the nation’s obligations under UNDRIP. Commissioned by Nanaia Mahuta and its development approved by the Labour-NZ First Cabinet, that plan was completed later that year and named He Puapua. However, it was considered to be so inflammatory that the full text was kept secret before the 2020 election and not made public until May 2021.

Ardern insisted it represented only blue-sky thinking and wasn’t official government policy but critics pointed out the many measures her government took that followed its plans for co-governance — from illegal iwi roadblocks in Northland during Covid to the establishment of a Māori Health Authority which, initially at least, was to be granted a power of veto over the health plans made for all other New Zealanders.

For Māori nationalists, a lot rests on New Zealanders continuing to believe they and their kin are correctly classed as indigenous — and they therefore share similar grievances with indigenous people around the world, with their concerns backed by the United Nations via instruments such as UNDRIP. They cannot countenance that status being questioned.

That was made obvious by the reaction of the advisory group Ngā Toki Whakarururanga to the India FTA before the text had even been made public.

The collective was established in 2021 following a Mediation Agreement with the Crown “to ensure that Māori have genuine and effective influence over every stage of the development of trade policy and conduct of negotiations by Aotearoa New Zealand” and that agreements are consistent with Te Tiriti.

Its members were certainly aggrieved that India had denied them the opportunity to engage during negotiations with the groups on the subcontinent they regarded as indigenous — and that they hadn’t been shown the text in advance of signing.

More remarkably, nearly 20 years after the event, they were still plainly horrified that when India endorsed UNDRIP in 2007 it declared all Indian citizens are indigenous — a position India reiterated in the FTA.

In an “interim assessment” in January, Ngā Toki Whakarururanga wrote: “We have been unsuccessful in seeking equivalent engagement and dialogue with Indigenous Peoples (Adivasi) in India in a manner consistent with the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

“In that regard, we note with dismay and disbelief the reservation made by India when it voted in favour of the Declaration that, following the Independence of India from the British Crown, all Indians are considered Indigenous. The Indian Government therefore, inconceivably, does not accept the concept of “Indigenous Peoples” — and therefore the UNDRIP — is applicable to India.

“We are deeply concerned that India’s state of denial regarding Indigenous Peoples in its territory may have affected the recognition of Indigenous Peoples in this FTA, and their response to proposals to give effect to the responsibilities and rights of Māori and to Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”

The Adivasi have a history dating back 50,000 years in India, yet the Indian government decided that by defining everyone as indigenous it could avoid domestic tribal policy being subject to international oversight mandated by UN conventions. It also intended the all-embracing definition to thwart “indigenous” secessionist movements.

Ngā Toki Whakarururanga’s fears over UNDRIP in the FTA must have been allayed when they discovered New Zealand’s commitment had been affirmed because the topic wasn’t mentioned in its submission to the select committee.

Nevertheless, they can't have been best pleased by Todd McClay’s promise that he would do his best to ensure UNDRIP was not similarly affirmed in future trade deals.

And Seymour tweeted on July 5: “Whoever is the next [trade] minister must watch woke MFAT bureaucrats like a hawk so we don’t get signed up to more than trade agreements — such as sneaking in UNDRIP provisions nobody asked for.”

However, the nationalists have another knotty problem to worry about with Seymour and that is his promotion of a narrative of New Zealand as a successful settler nation, populated by waves of migration in which no citizens can claim legal or political primacy by virtue of having arrived before any of the others.

Certainly, a story of enterprising immigrants arriving from around the globe on waka, ships and planes over 900 years to forge a better life in the South Pacific with everyone enjoying equal rights will be far more attractive to most people than a nation made up of “indigenous” Māori — with the rest of us tacked on as an afterthought.

Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist.