Introduction
The introductory chapter to the thesis offered a brief overview of the July 2002 General Election, some of the political commentary that surrounded it, and some seemingly paradoxical observations around the issue of national identity that emerged through the election process. They are paradoxical because, on the one hand, the resulting largest ever proportion of Maori Members of Parliament seemed to lend credence to the claim that AotearoalNew Zealand is indeed 'well on its way' to becoming a successful bicultural nation. At the same time, however, generalised support both from political parties and from the voting public for an overarching, equalising and final identity as ' New Zealanders' , indicated the ongoing presence of a powerful monocultural conservatism. That political leaders are aware of the crucially important relationship that exists between national identity positioning and political party popularity, is evidenced in the myriad of debates that fuel attempts to find an acceptable resolution that will accommodate the tension-ridden positions of Maori claims for due recognition as tangata whenua and kaitiaki 0 te whenua and the discourse of 'one nation, one
people' that characterises current state bicultural arrangements. One of the latest incarnations of this search (for both a 'resolution' and popular support) was posited by the former leader of the National Party, Bill English.
In response to a particularly poor election result, and amidst personal criticisms of lacking boldness and failing to provide strategic direction and focus for both his party and the nation's voters, English sought to address his critics by taking a firm stand against what he terms the current Labour Government's "politically correct approach to the Treaty of Waitangi". In asserting his "one rule for all" position, he signalled the possible reversal of National Party support for the separate Maori seats in Parliament (of
which there are seven) , viewing them as one of a plethora of "separatist" bicultural arrangements that currently contribute to Maori having the potential to veto decision making and thus corrupt the equality, democracy, and "one sovereignty" that the Treaty of Waitangi established (in Young 2003: A24). Renaming existing state bicultural arrangements 'separatist' moves them into alignment with what are publicly viewed as the more 'radical' and ' dangerous' claims of Maori for tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake. Not only do such sleights-of-hand unnecessarily and irresponsibly provoke already flammable tensions between Maori advancing such claims and those who are fearful about the future implications of such claims, it potentially regenerates the conservative 'one nation, one people' position as the preferable and perhaps rightful middle-ground. Moves that establish the terms of debate as between a purportedly ' separatist' biculturalism and a conservative monoculturalism obfuscate their supplementary and circuitous relationship. As outlined in the previous two chapters, it is a relationship generated by and through the assimilationist monocultural fantasies that unconsciously support state-advanced biculturalism. Moreover and significantly, debates around the just recognition and expression of Maori claims again become marginalised as being 'beyond reason' , as beyond any conception of good sense and good government, and thus as a position to be actively and vociferously denied.
What is also of particular interest for the discussions of this chapter around identity, is that these statements were made by English to (re)produce political support and interest in the National Party. His confidence in this as a successful strategy would seem reasonably justified given the overwhelming and unanticipated success of New Zealand First and the United Future Party in the 2002 General Election - both parties who placed the ' one nation, one people' notion at the centre of their election campaigns. Indeed, as Glotz (in Habermas 1 989: 24) points out "neo-conservatism is the net into which the liberal can fall when he [sic] begins to fear his own liberalism" - a safety net, in this instance, of an imagined unifying national identity which many ' New Zealanders' have felt, and continue to feel, compelled to seek out or retreat into and be grounded by. The metaphor of a net in relation to national identity here is very apt, for they both require attention, maintenance and repair to remain effective despite the apparent 'hardiness' of the materials, and both are made up of 'gaps' that are able to accommodate significant resistance.
The point to be made here is that the assertion by English of a singular 'bicultural' New Zealand nation, and the subsequent criticisms of and challenges to such a position, particularly those interjected by Maori claims, highlights the centrality of competing
notions of identity that are at play in the current 'biculturalism' debates - debates that
have become a constant and key site of political contestation in the country's media. Importantly then, a claimed national identity is never merely that which is ' self-evident' but is more an effect or product of specific modalities of (discursive and fantasmatic) power (Hall 1 996: 4). Moreover, these acts of power sustain popular fantasies about the possibility of a harmonious social or natural 'bicultural' national identity. They do so by disallowing or incorporating the ' disturbing intrusion' of a Maori identity which could lead to its dislocation (Zizek, in Stavrakakis 1 999: 65) . This fantasy was particularly evident in the print and television media surrounding this years Treaty of Waitangi 'celebrations' that claimed the start of new 'more peaceful' era of biculturalism in AotearoalNew Zealand. Not present in media reports, however, was the heavier than usual police presence and the highest number of protester arrests in at least five years (Sykes 2003) .
Given the political power of a national 'bicultural ' New Zealand identity that operates both as hegemonic discourse and psychically through powerful unconscious popular fantasies to subsume a Maori identity within and to itself, bolstered by the law which specifies an equality through common citizenship, questions arise as to how such a subsumption might be challenged and disrupted, and significantly, why such an endeavour might be important and indeed, necessary. As Wendy Lamer (1996: 162) points out, many authors, politicians and activists recognise the importance of identity because it is understood to be the basis of political claims. Thus for Maori, the aspiration for tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake to be understood and expressed in their own culturally-located terms, are underpinned and propelled by and through claims to a Mliori identity (Jackson 1 998; Smith, L.T. 1 999: 72-74). It is an identity that emerges in and through a myriad of spiritual-human-environmental whakapapa relationships. The title of this chapter then - 'te wai 0 te awa' - re-invoking the metaphor of the opening whakataukI (Lake 2003) , speaks to such an understanding of identity that is both enduring and open, always-already beyond the colonising grasp of rational explanation. Necessarily then, the claim is to an identity that is undetermined by, or emancipated from, colonising (neo) liberal conceptions of nationhood, selfhood
and development that have been imposed by and prescribed within the euro-centric institutions of science and law that have been part of AotearoalNew Zealand's colonial inheritance (Tie 1 999: 4, 256-257) . Thus it is a claim for a Maori identity that exceeds the reductive rationalistic terms on offer from a 'knowledge society ' which government and tertiary education institutions offer as a 'gift' of 'bicultural freedom' .
The questions raised above - which coalesce around challenging and interrupting the assimilatory power of the modernist 'one-world' view that justifies nationally-imagined identities, and the possible socio-political consequences and effects of doing, or not doing so - provide the major strands of the discussions for this chapter. Before this, however, and taking heed of Stuart Hall's (1996: 4) reminder that debates around identity need to be situated within historically specific developments and practices, the discussion begins with an overview of the processes of colonisation which have disturbed and traumatised whanau, hapu, iwi structures and the whakapapa relationships between nga atua 1 , tangata whenua and whenua through which Maori culture and identity are articulated.
Colonisation and the Generation of ' Otherness'
It may seem to some readers unnecessary to bring up the fact of AotearoalNew Zealand's colonising past, given that past ' exclusions' on the basis of racial/ethnic identity have been superceded by an inclusory biculturalism which 'confirms' the equality and recognition of Maori as New Zealand citizens in what may be termed a 'post-colonial ' present. It is this assumption of an achieved or at least achievable 'progressive shift' - the transcendence of the oppressive regulatory binarism of coloniser/colonised by and through the creation of a new singular bicultural identity as ' New Zealanders' - that justifies claims such as those made by English that 'we' can indeed be one nation and one people, and do so without recourse to 'corrupting' illiberal protections. Given that such an assumption has been roundly critiqued in the previous chapters of this thesis as a contemporary form of colonial-inspired assimilation, it would then seem that a discussion of colonial processes that sought to generate an excluded
and reviled ' Other' is warranted because such processes have not been (and cannot be) superceded by a reductive bicultural national identity that purports to be inclusive. The invitation or expectation, made by and through a state-advanced biculturalism, that Maori should come to enunciate a shared and 'liberating' national identity as included subjects of (neo-liberal) freedom, or alternatively remain stuck in the impoverished margins of mainstream society, does not transcend any centre/margin dichotomy, it reconstitutes and confirms its oppressive racist existence.
In Barbaric Others: A Manifesto on Western Racism (1993), Ziauddin Sardar, Ashis
Nandy and Merryl Wyn Davies identify a long Western tradition of generating Otherness centred around an analysis of the texts of its two constitutive pillars, Christianity and classicism, who "each invented Otherness" to define their own "triumphalist self image" (ibid. : 38). The attitudes toward nature and to people living beyond the West's frontiers were, in large part, shaped by the Old Testament's hostile view of nature as a "cursed adversary . . . not a power with which one could establish a celebratory, reverential relationship. On the contrary, it was a power from which one sought deliverance. Nature had to be subdued, controlled and put to better use by man's [sic] efforts" (ibid.: 25) . Inherited by Christianity, it mandated a similarly hostile attitude towards the gods and sacred notions of Other cultures, which as adversaries to the ' true' god, were to be destroyed (ibid.: 26) . The teachings derived from classical Greece were seen to contain similar distinctions, particularly regarding separateness from Other People and, note the authors, served to reinforce the pillar of Christianity. The word barbarian, often used to denote the inferior Other, comes from the Greek word
barbaroi which was used to describe all non-Greek speakers. The inference here was
that this inability betrayed a person or race as vastly inferior in reason, logic and intellect, and as such, unable to control their passions (ibid.: 26-27) .
Through such strands of scholarship have come enduring Western notions, supported by anthropological and scientific ' knowledge', of a defining civilised and Christian human nature at the European centre that exists in sharp contrast to an uncivilised, inferior, irrational, and heathen sub-human Other located in the 'wilderness' beyond Europe's borders. Importantly, however, point out the authors, arising from the idea that the Other could exist within the bounds of Europe itself and threaten its self-image, came a powerful suppressive impetus for the Other's civilisation. Conversion to Christianity,
through a doctrine of 'constructive persecution', came to provide the vehicle for the transformation of the barbarian to that of the fully human citizen (ibid. : 27-39) .
By the century of Christopher Columbus then, Western civilisation was possessed of deeply entrenched and long established 'knowledge' of the inferior and demonic 'Other' - which sailed with Columbus and his contemporaries to the 'New World' that came to be known as the Americas. With this journey, the process of generating Otherness made a new departure: it became a mass-repeated global project of violent destruction of both the 'uncivilised' ways of Other Peoples and their 'non-productive' natural environments (ibid. : 40, 51 -52) . It is a project that accompanied European explorers, missionaries, officials of the British Colonial Office, and settlers who sailed to the shores of Aotearoa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In AotearoalNew Zealand, as with elsewhere, the coalescing of ' truthful' and 'righteous' Eurocentric binarisms civilised/uncivilised, reason/nature, christianlheathen, master/slave, teacher/student, independent/dependent, centre/margin - sanctioned by both established ' knowledge' and the church, propelled and justified Maori being offered the (non) choice between being assimilated through conversion to Christianity or remaining excluded (ibid.: 7 1 -75). Conversion, however, did not put the new Christians on par with their 'natural' superiors, it would make them merely second class citizens, not fully-human, so that in reality, "the masters perennially deferred the passing-out examination" (ibid.: 72). The truthfulness of Maori as 'by nature' inferior and dependent slaves or children, was also crucial in justifying the elaboration and imposition of a European sovereignty over newly acquired territories and peoples. In being so defined, through that which they lacked, Maori were able to be located intellectually and legally outside the bounds of civil society, and thus as having no rights to determine either their lands and resources or their selves (ibid. : 48-49, 62) . The dispossession of the rights of Maori to self -determination is thus founded on and justified by the dehumanising definition of being sub-human, that there is in fact ' no self' to determine, and as such are to be granted merely sub-rights (Jackson 2001 ) - including the right to be 'well governed' by Europeans (Walker 1 990: 1 43) . It is here that the intersection between definitions of identity and political claims comes
powerfully to the fore, in this case, the power of a hegemonic liberalism to advance particular political ends (colonisation) through a particular 'truth' about Maori identity. Such colonial discourse has more recently become, for liberal governments such as those operating in AotearoalNew Zealand, a "source of deep embarrassment and concern" (lackson 200 1 ) . Assertions of a progressive inclusive biculturalism, based around an ostensible Treaty 'partnership', does not supplant its destructive assimilatory effects on a Maori identity and the claims to self -determination that are made in its name, as such claims are still resolutely denied serious consideration. Indeed, many Maori writers have sought to point out that a relationship exists between a state advanced biculturalism and the "culture of colonisation which has made it possible", such that the bicultural state "grew out of and is still sustained by, and benefits from" what is now a repudiated colonial discourse (lacks on 200 1 ; and also Mead, L.T. 1997; 10hnston 1 998) . Thus, while it is important to note that the development of state discourses of biculturalism in AotearoalNew Zealand are given distinctiveness through the signing of Te Tiriti 0 WaitangifThe Treaty of Waitangi and their irreconcilable terms2, they remain continuous with "the culture of colonisation".
The desire of both governments and mainstream society to suppress and divorce themselves from a history, and present, of colonial violence through forms of "social amnesia" (Bell 1 996: 1 53) was most poignantly demonstrated when Prime Minister Clark, in her last term of office, placed a public ban on the word ' colonisation' after MP Tariana Turia (2000) talked publicly of the "holocaust of colonisation" in Aotearoa. The massive destruction or loss of life that holocaust describes apparently refers only to those horrendous events in places other than here. The current state-advanced biculturalism, in specifying a singular and overarching bicultural national identity, however, continues this destruction by disallowing recognition of a Maori identity in its own evolving terms, and instead translates such quests for recognition into a reductive and culture-blind notion of equality.
'Progress' and the Ideal of the Liberal Subject
The invention of Other Peoples that had remained static and 'unenlightened' confirmed Europe's view of its own spiritual, intellectual and physical 'progression' into a new modernist era (Sardar et.al. 1 993: 70). A prevailing European view was that prescriptive and debilitating traditions had been ' overcome' by an increasing focus on the 'complete' individual subject, who in being essentially endowed with the capacities of reason, consciousness and action, was able to ' objectively' come to know the world and thus be 'freed from' rather than merely being defined by it (Hall 1 992b: 275-276; Solomon and Higgins 1 996: 1 75-178) . In this play, explain Sardar et.al. ( 1 993: 84-85) , Europe's past was systematically represented as the present of the non-Western world, and necessarily then that Europe's present was rewritten as the future of Other Peoples. Accordingly, such a theory of progress specified that the Other could indeed achieve this goal of self -mastery provided they were able to attain a level of rational maturity through the internalising of Western values and conventions, through transforming themselves into the self-identical subjects of liberal humanism. While governments such as New Zealand's, operating within the frameworks of such colonial discourse, continue to interpret this offer to become 'fully human' or 'one of us' as a "graceful, even generous liberal gesture" (Morrison, in Pihama 2001 : 1 46), it might also be interpreted as perhaps the most insidious of colonising intentions - the destruction of the Other's self. Moreover, the colonial discourse of a 'progressively' objective Western gaze allows it a superior understanding of the rest of the world, for the rest live only in their present which the West has transcended, allowing the West to authoritatively 'know' the Other's future better than they do themselves (Sardar et.al. 1 993: 85).
The modernist investing of history with a singular and purposeful notion of progressive change or development works to entrench the ideal of a universal and thus unified (or at least able to be unified) humanity existing in one common world. Leading this charge into the future would be the idealised liberal subject who, once unencumbered from the stifling limitations and obligations dictated by culture, tradition, religion, and the natural environment, would embody the liberal v irtues of equality and individual freedom - particularly the freedom to rationally choose their own version of the good life
(Kymlicka 1 989; Taylor 1 994a) . As outlined in chapter three, this would be a subject both free to be self-governing, and capable of doing so through rationally-gained introspection, foresight, calculation, and judgement (Rose 1 999: 78) . Such sovereign selves would form an orderly and consensual national community of self-determining citizens, but one where the self is deontological, i.e. fundamentally irreducible to notions of community (Behabib 1 992: 7 1 ) .
The neo-liberal subject of today - argued by post-Foucauldian writers on governmentality to be more the effect of governmental powers to produce such a sovereign subjectivity than as emanating from some fallacious notion of autonomy as a pre-given and 'true' quality of humankind - continues this charge towards securing a