The government is set to endorse the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Good. As a country which thinks of itself as having got its relationship with Māori right (or rather, a lot less wrong than anywhere else), we should have been supporting it all along. Instead, we clubbed together with Australia, the US and Canada - countries whose treatment of their indigenous peoples is charitably described as "racist", and more accurately as "genocidal" - to oppose it.
The declaration affirms human rights recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international law, and highlights the right against discrimination. It affirms collective and community rights against genocide, dispossession, assimilation, integration and relocation - all wrongs which have been inflicted on indigenous peoples in the past. It includes rights to maintain their own language and culture and traditional ways, to education in their own language, and to protection of their traditional medicinal plants. None of this is controversial, and these are already well-respected in New Zealand.
What is controversial are the provisions in two areas: land and self-determination. On the former, the declaration affirms the right of indigenous peoples to maintain their lands, and to receive restitution and just compensation where they have been forcibly dispossessed of them. That's what our Treaty process is about (though the compensation is hardly just), but you can see why countries such as Australia (where the process is less advanced) and the US (which is still in deep denial about their genocide of native Americans) have a problem with it. On the latter, the declaration affirms that indigenous peoples,
as a specific form of exercising their right to self-determination, have the right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, including culture, religion, education, information, media, health, housing, employment, social welfare, economic activities, land and resources management, environment and entry by non-members, as well as ways and means for financing these autonomous functions.We've come a long way in our recognition of iwi self-government. But we haven't quite gone this far yet. But it is already there in the Treaty's guarantee of rangitiratanga. The complicating factor is that unlike many countries where indigenous peoples live exclusively on their lands, past dispossessions and internal migration mean that Māori and Pakeha are well mixed. So we are not going to be able to use the same sorts of solutions as Brazil, for example. Instead, our solution is likely to involve more devolution of educational, health and social services to iwi - something we are already doing simply out of pragmatism. Some iwi, such as Tūhoe, which have maintained a distinct and largely exclusive territory, may be able to take this further into a more territorial-based autonomy - but very few others will.
