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This article draws on the personal experiences and state documentation of Stan Coster (Ngāti Kahungungu) whose life has been characterised by different forms of state confinement, including over 25 years in prison serving both short and long lags. Through the use of the Official Information Act, Stan recovered state documentation on himself spanning over 40 years. Stan is not a research participant, but a full research collaborator and is engaged in all elements of this paper, so while not a writer he is both auteur and author of this piece. Stan’s story is his own and yet many of its features speak to a much broader collective experience. His prison identity and gang identity can be seen as being both informed and generated by state sponsored activity. By traversing the issues that pertain to the crisis of mass imprisonment, Māori disproportionality in the prison system, the contribution of the state to prison, and gang identity, we look at the possibilities of drawing on knowledge acquired under conditions of state constraint.  

Social scientists attached to the Centre for Applied Cross Cultural Research at Victoria University of Wellington examine issues of New Zealand identity.

Contemporary Issues in Māori Demography

This chapter looks at the impact on Māori that colonial and neo-colonial practices of dispossession and immiseration have had on elevated family violence rates in Aotearoa New Zealand. In reflecting on interpersonal violence, it seeks to locate systemic forms of violence, such as legislative violence, institutional violence, and economic violence, and their relationship with family violence. It draws on David Nixon’s (2011) notion of slow violence to look at the intergenerational harm of poverty, racism, and entrenched negative social issues. The focus then moves to Indigenous solutions to family violence that demonstrate the power of lived experience and social and cultural expertise to support healing and transformation in Māori communities.

This chapter examines settler colonial crime control and its impacts on Indigenous women. High rates of victimisation and high levels of over-policing and over-incarceration mark Indigenous people’s experience of settler colonialism. This chapter explores the historical and contemporary conditions of colonialism through a gender lens, exploring in particular the impact of prison on Indigenous women’s lives. The chapter is based on an interview with and subsequent written notes by Professor McIntosh in 2020 discussing women, incarceration and settler colonial control in the Aotearoa New Zealand setting.

Following the annexation of Aotearoa/New Zealand by the British in 1840, Māori, as the Indigenous people of that country, experienced loss of sovereignty through the imposition of and application of new and transformative policies, including the law and unfamiliar legal and social codes. This paper considers the state and the influential legacy of an imposed, Settler-state social welfare and criminal justice system on Māori. An explicit, insider narrative will highlight how suppression, disconnection and abandonment, made manifest through particular and abusive state policies, has informed and constructed the life pathway of a member of a culturally and socially-submerged population, the Mongrel Mob gang.

The ways in which we understand bodies and fatness are complex. While coloniality unduly influences and shapes normative meanings of the body in everyday contexts, Maori conceptualisations of the body and of fatness remain inscribed within the moana, the whenua, te reo Maori and our whakapapa. These understandings provide insight into fatness and bodies from a Maori worldview. Our whakaaro in this article speaks into Maori ways of being and knowing, including meanings of momonatanga as bountiful, rich, fertile, and powerful. This article develops an expansive and holistic Maori understanding of bodies and fatness from the whenua, from the moana, from our whakapapa.

The Covid-19 lockdown over March to May 2020 meant households became their own “bubbles”, with residents physically interacting only with those in their household and staying close to home. Māori leaders recognised the potential of the lockdown to exacerbate whānau vulnerability due to confinement, financial hardship and, depending on their household, issues of crowding or isolation. Steps were quickly taken to support households with care packages, health care and social connectivity. This paper describes these initiatives as mahi aroha and argues that housing is a foundation from which Māori go out into the world and add meaning and quality to the lives of others. If the mahi aroha of Māori during a lockdown or other crisis is to be sustained into the future, then access to quality, affordable housing must be ensured for Māori essential workers.

Māori knowledge, memory and cultural strength will only enhance New Zealand’s economic recovery planning – if they are listened to.

"Since colonisation, New Zealand has been mythologised as a 'land of milk and honey' - a promised land of natural abundance and endless opportunity. In the twenty-first century, the country has become literally a land of milk and honey as agricultural exports from such commodities dominate the national economy. But does New Zealand live up to its promise? In this introductory textbook for first year sociology students, some of this country's leading social scientists help us to make sense of contemporary New Zealand. In 21 chapters, the authors examine New Zealand's political identity and constitution; our Māori, Pākehā, Pacific and Asian peoples; problems of class, poverty and inequality; gender and sexualities; and contemporary debates around ageing, incarceration and the environment. The authors find a complex society where thirty years of neoliberal economics and globalising politics have exacerbated inequalities that are differentially experienced by class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age. These social divides and problems are at the heart of this text. For sociology students and for a wider audience of New Zealanders, A Land of Milk and Honey? is a lively introduction to where we have come from, where we are now, and where New Zealand society might be headed."

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"Since colonisation, New Zealand has been mythologised as a 'land of milk and honey' - a promised land of natural abundance and endless opportunity. In the twenty-first century, the country has become literally a land of milk and honey as agricultural exports from such commodities dominate the national economy. But does New Zealand live up to its promise? In this introductory textbook for first year sociology students, some of this country's leading social scientists help us to make sense of contemporary New Zealand. In 21 chapters, the authors examine New Zealand's political identity and constitution; our Māori, Pākehā, Pacific and Asian peoples; problems of class, poverty and inequality; gender and sexualities; and contemporary debates around ageing, incarceration and the environment. The authors find a complex society where thirty years of neoliberal economics and globalising politics have exacerbated inequalities that are differentially experienced by class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age. These social divides and problems are at the heart of this text. For sociology students and for a wider audience of New Zealanders, A Land of Milk and Honey? is a lively introduction to where we have come from, where we are now, and where New Zealand society might be headed."