Terra in our Mist: A Tuhoe Narrative of Sovereignty and State Violence

Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship between Indigenous sovereignty and state violence in the Aotearoa New Zealand context. To do so, I explore the following argument. The settler colonial state is founded upon the perpetual negation of Indigenous sovereignties, their peoples, and ways of life. This process is necessarily on-going: despite significant efforts at extermination, Indigenous peoples have survived - albeit on terms dictated by the state. Ngai Tuhoe, the illustrious 'people of the mist' of Te Urewera, in New Zealand's Eastern Bay of Plenty, are bearers of a superior, adamantine sovereign claim over their homelands. As I demonstrate, however, this prerogative is irreconcilable with settler sovereignty. Unable to completely eradicate Tuhoe in the initial stages of British colonisation, the contemporary New Zealand settler colonial state periodically reasserts its existential legitimacy, predominantly through repeated shows of force upon Tuhoe communities. In the last ten years, this has manifested in four major paramilitary police operations targeting Ngai Tuhoe, violently raiding whanau (family) homes with reckless abandon. The overwhelming force used by the police in instances such as these, demonstrates that Tuhoe exist within what Giorgio Agamben has described as the 'state of exception' (2005). Drawing on the thinking of Michel Foucault (2003), I suggest that Tuhoe are rendered biopolitical 'contaminants' that threaten the health and wellbeing of the social body, and must be expelled by any means necessary. This distinctly colonial project is most ardently manifest upon the frontier - the threshold between 'civilisation' and 'savagery' - to which the state deploys its most violent machines of war in the circumscription of Indigenous existence. Central to this has been the colonial depiction of Tuhoe as savage, primitive, inferior, and simple beings, a system of representation that continues to inform the manner in which the state interacts with Tuhoe today. In this matrix, Tuhoe are 'known' by the state through an exclusively violent and hostile lens, but in this thesis I urge that manifold alternative portrayals of Tuhoe exist, untethered to these colonial convictions. To this end, I use ethnography and photographs of the dailyness of Tuhoe life to rupture such colonial stereotypes, in giving voice and sight to alternate ways of 'knowing' - and hopefully, interacting with - Ngai Tuhoe.