Indigenous Claims: Hearings, Settlements, and Neoliberal Silencing

Abstract

This article investigates the double‐edged potentiality of the Waitangi Tribunal, an indigenous claims forum in New Zealand, and combines an ethnographic background to a recent claim with an anthropological interpretation of the meanings and outcomes of this encounter. I suggest that the legal justice framework of the claims proceedings and the political aspect of settlements are distinct yet contingent phenomena. Both are inherently embedded in the neoliberalization of society. I suggest that marae (meeting‐house complexes where tribunal hearings are held)—albeit symbolizing singular Māori spaces and distinctive loci where indigenous identity is reproduced—are equally sites where cultural and economic struggles articulate with neoliberal logics. I draw attention to the persistence of alienation in Māori society irrespective of the comparative generosity of the reparative justice program; I also consider the contradictory spaces opened for indigeneity under neoliberal governance and their unintended consequences, inventions, and creative hybridizations. I argue that a fruitful way to foreground the precarity of this engagement is by paying attention to silences. Such silences are multilevel, prefigure the claims process, are expressed as inequalities in the hearings, conscribe a particular version of a postcolonial economy, and reference a broader pattern of economic deprivation.

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