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.

This chapter reviews the history and development of Māori and Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand, focusing on both segmental and suprasegmental aspects of their phonetics/phonology. We review evidence that Māori English has higher pitch and more syllable-timed rhythm than Pākehā English, and suggest that a distinctive Māori English voice quality is not yet well understood. L1-type and L2-type varieties of Pasifika English are distinguished, highlighting the role of transfer in the formation of these varieties. The differences between Pākehā, Māori and Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand are a matter of frequency of use, rather than of absolutes, both in terms of the linguistic features and the social variables with which they co-occur. We problematise any straight-forward description of these varieties as revolving solely around ethnicity, given the interconnectedness of ethnic identities in New Zealand.

This chapter presents a case study on New Zealand, examining the paradigm of giving nature legal standing within the country’s judicial and legislative framework. It begins with an introduction that sets the stage for the discussion. This chapter then explores the Māori philosophy of a relationship with nature, emphasizing the profound connection and inherent value Māori place on the environment. It delves into the ways in which New Zealand law has affirmed this philosophy, particularly through the roots of the country’s environmental achievements as anchored in the Treaty of Waitangi. The chapter then presents two case studies – the Te Urewera Land Legislation and the Whanganui River Legislation – showcasing the innovative approaches taken to grant legal personhood to natural entities. It further explores the incorporation of Māori Indigenous traditional knowledge in sustainable development practices, highlighting Māori trade and the introduction of new measures of well-being and environmental protection. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the significance of giving nature legal standing and the implications for both Māori and New Zealand’s approach to sustainable development.

Expanding citizenship characterised New Zealand in the late twentieth century, when ruptures in the very meaning of New Zealandness obliged people to adapt to new ideas about who belonged to the nation and what belonging entailed. The country reshaped political institutions to reflect that its people and culture had grown more diverse and connected to the world and to accommodate the concept of biculturalism.

So deep was Aotearoa in the watery world of the Pacific that it remained for a long time unknown to Europeans, other than as a part of the mythical great southern land, Terra Australis. Surely there had to be a continent in the South Pacific to balance the weight of land in the Northern Hemisphere? As it proved, there was not. New Zealand is immersed in the Pacific, surrounded by 2000 kilometres of ocean, a fact that is reflected in Māori waka (canoe) traditions. Only in the late eighteenth century did its full outline register in European consciousness through the process of physical discovery.

Wartime controls ended in 1950, allowing New Zealanders to look forward to an era of postwar growth and change. The 1950s and 1960s are often recalled as a ‘golden age’. In many respects they were, for the baby boomers born from 1945 to 1961 who enjoyed a childhood unburdened by depression and war, and for the parents responsible for their upbringing. Broadly, however, the internal dynamics of the Pacific region were in flux. Playwright Bruce Mason captured the mood in The End of the Golden Weather (first performed in 1960), his dramatic solo performance about a summer in a boy’s childhood.

The final three decades of the twentieth century bore witness to the most violent ruptures since colonisation and the two world wars. Revolutions in economic, defence, and public policy altered how this small country related to the world, shook the political landscape into new patterns, and unsettled the settler society. New Zealanders found themselves gasping from the change of water in their fishbowl, their ways of life buffeted and transformed. Suddenly – but not inevitably – governments demolished institutions that had been political defining features. It was as if, overnight, everyone lived in another country, so radical were the shifts in values.

If the governor’s decision to wage war in Taranaki over Waitara in 1860 was heavy-handed and aggressive, the invasion of the Waikato launched by Sir George Grey in July 1863 amounted to a blatant lunge for power. Indeed – as a narrow victory of numbers – it presaged the takeover by settler New Zealand that deluged Māori. From the 1860s the scales of power tipped to the settler society. Within a generation, Māori shrank from being most of the population to a small minority. The amount of land in Māori ownership, already much diminished, halved between 1860 and 1891. But pockets of resistance nurtured a proud legacy that would recalibrate relations a century and more later.

How and when did New Zealand Aotearoa begin? In human history the short answer is recently. New Zealand was the last major landmass settled by people, which is fundamental to understanding New Zealand’s distinctiveness. Before humans arrived, birds and lizards were the dominant land animals. Archaeologists have agreed, after decades of debate, that the first humans arrived from the late thirteenth century, about 750 years ago. These adventurers undertook epic, oceanic voyages in large, double-hulled waka hourua (voyaging canoes) from their legendary homeland of Hawaiki, in East Polynesia, southwards to the temperate region of ‘South Polynesia’, a term coined to encompass both New Zealand’s main islands and its outlying islands. Today, the indigenous people trace their ancestors to over 40 celebrated waka (canoes). South Polynesia as a concept reminds us that New Zealand is a far-flung archipelago that stretches from Raoul Island, in the subtropical Kermadec group, to the subantarctic Auckland Islands, and to the Chatham Islands, which lie 800 kilometres to the east of the South Island.

A changed attitude to globalisation emerged out of the aura of crisis: now there was a growing trend to manage it. The Australasian colonies resolved to seize opportunities to develop new commodities for export and to manage the social outcomes by building an edifice of progressive liberal ‘state experiments’. Led by Premiers John Ballance (1891-3), Richard Seddon (1893-1906), and Sir Joseph Ward (1906-12) – two of whom were Irish-born and all of whom were immigrants – a series of Liberal governments from 1891 to 1912 set out to transform New Zealand into a democratic social laboratory. In doing so, they enacted an Australasian model of state development.

Globalisation has always shaken the kaleidoscope of connections between people into new patterns. In the greatest global shift of power since the United States assumed Britain’s former role in the world, China and India returned to global supremacy in the twenty-first century. By 2000, China loomed on the horizon as the next global juggernaut. Half a millennium after Europe rose to dominance, the world witnessed a fundamental rebalancing of West and East from the developed countries to the developing powers of North and South Asia. This metamorphosis in economic and power relations reshaped New Zealand’s export economy.

Struggles for land have swirled around the Treaty of Waitangi ever since it was first signed, on 6 February 1840. An instrument unique less in its making than in what it has become, as a constitutional document and guarantee of indigenous rights, it met grand goals at minimal cost. Beforehand, on 30 January, Captain William Hobson, who had landed in the Bay of Islands the previous day, read three announcements at the Anglican Church in Kororāreka (Russell). The first extended the boundaries of New South Wales to include New Zealand, the second declared him lieutenant-governor, and the third established that land titles would derive from the Crown. To secure annexation to the British Empire by consent Hobson next drafted a treaty, as instructed by the Colonial Office.

Uncertainty and disaster lurked despite New Zealand’s remoteness, for danger lay within. In March 2019, mass shootings at two Christchurch mosques shocked the country and the world. New Zealand was supposed to be a peaceful place; it enjoyed a reputation for peace, not violence. Terrorism and mass murder were alien, except for episodes in the colonial New Zealand Wars or the invasion of Parihaka, a forerunner of passive resistance, in 1881.

The 1930s and 1940s witnessed a formative era in nation-building, through the conscious ‘making’ of New Zealand. At the same time, New Zealanders had to ‘make do’ through depression and another world war, and these global onslaughts only intensified the quest for security at home and abroad. Making do and creating a nation moved in symbiosis, because, as often happens with the evolution of a sense of national identity, panic, crisis, anxiety, or rupture produces stories and rituals to soothe and explain. This context saw the rise to power of the first Labour government, which resolved to pick up where the 1890s’ Liberal model of state development left off.

‘In New Zealand more than in any country in the world we find justification for the words of the Bible, “All flesh is as grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field”’. So began the issue on pasture land of the Making New Zealand pictorial survey to mark New Zealand’s centennial, in 1940. This biblical phrase had multiple meanings for New Zealanders, in relation to ‘ecological imperialism’, feeding Britain, and the sacrifice of its best young men in war.