The Maori tribal elite are identified and their political and economic ambitions discussed with reference to recent strategic documents. Framing and supporting those ambitions is an indigenous discourse that has been crucial to the elite’s success. Five discursive strategies are analysed: (1) constructing the indigenous collective as tribal Maori; (2) constructing indigeneity as ‘the logic of the gift’ in contrast to the ‘“Western” logic of the commodity’; (3) promoting indigeneity as an ahistorical primordial category to counter the social reality of ethnic fluidity in New Zealand; (4) promoting a vocabulary in order to control the meaning of key ideas; and (5) constructing indigeneity as a polity in opposition to the nation. A Treaty of Waitangi ‘partnership’ is promoted as the means by which the indigenous–colonizer dualism is brokered. Despite its efficacy to date, the discourse is undermined by inherent contradictions, including the elite’s privileged position as a capitalist class, the growing inequalities within the tribal collective and the incarceration of indigenous people in an ahistorical timelessness.
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