In Aotearoa New Zealand, assertions of Indigenous sovereignty in the late twentieth century propelled a nation-wide reform known as ‘biculturalism’. This chapter contributes to the task of historicizing ‘biculturalism’ by examining its emergence in anticolonial and anti-racist activism of the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on the interplay between ideas of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ in activist discourse and theories of settler colonialism. Opposing statist assimilation, a radicalised, younger generation of activists found common cause in political Blackness. Yet, without the means to implement anti-colonial revolution, Māori activist intellectuals pursued another idea: that Pākehā (white settlers) who could not be forced out, might instead become ‘bicultural’ in the way that Māori already had to be in a white majority country. However, this activist biculturalism was predicated in the recognition of Māori, not settler, sovereignty as the basis for authority. The chapter highlights the contradictions and equivocations in emergent threads of a discourse of biculturalism, staying close to the distinctive dilemmas of anticolonial Indigenous politics in majority settler states.