Maori and the State

Māori and the State charts the Crown's attempts to contain the energies of rangatiratanga and appropriate them for its own purposes, as it had done ever since early colonisation. The book analyses the ways in which Māori leaders and communities have utilised numerous opportunities to pursue rangatiratanga, including efforts to reappropriate the state institutions established to control them. In illuminating the interactions between Māori and state over a crucial half century, one in which the official pursuit of assimilation was superseded (under pressure from the Māori Renaissance) by bicultural policies, Māori and the State provides an essential background to Crown–Māori relations in New Zealand in the twenty-first century.