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Internationally, declining voter turnout is a topic of considerable concern in many liberal democracies. In this article, we investigate whether these similar trends can be discerned in the voter turnout for Māori governance entities. We first explore some of the demographic contexts within which Māori governance entities operate with a specific focus on population, residence, and age. We then provide a detailed descriptive analysis of voting data from one particular entity: Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Awa, with whom we worked to understand how their elections inform their aspirations for continuing connectedness with tribal members. In the final section of the article, we present findings from an analysis of publicly available tribal voting data to see whether the trend of declining voter turnout is observable and whether online voting is shown to impact turnout.

Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.

All peoples develop their own academic traditions: philosophies grounded in their experiences over successive generations, and theories for growing knowledge and wisdom. Mātauranga Māori (mātauranga) is the Indigenous knowledge system of these lands. It is dynamic, innovative and generative. The mātauranga continuum is the knowledge accumulated through this system. Government policies and systems have marginalised mātauranga and prioritised Western science, and the past 100 years have seen a slowing in the expansion of the mātauranga continuum. Unless the survival of mātauranga is prioritised, it will cease to flourish. Māori have discussed and written extensively about the ongoing impact of colonisation on mātauranga and tikanga Māori. This paper builds on those discussions, arguing for tino rangatiratanga, including Māori ownership of mātauranga, fulfilment of the government's obligations to Māori, and the reinstitution of mātauranga as a primary knowledge system in Aotearoa. It explains why mātauranga revitalisation is important and outlines some of the steps towards this goal. We are calling for Western academics to support mātauranga revitalisation, with the vision of two functional knowledge systems operating that are unique to New Zealand.

This paper defends the legitimacy-positive impact of a "contextual-participation approach" to indigenous peoples' participation in international law-making. It argues that indigenous peoples' participation should be substantial where the issue being negotiated at the international level is of considerable interest to indigenous peoples and indigenous peoples have not consented to state representation. The "contextual-participation approach" to indigenous peoples' participation realises the justice in indigenous peoples' claims to remedial efforts to recognise their, mostly lost and historical, sovereignty, and to contemporary and evolving legal, and largely democratic, understandings of self-determination, as expressed, for example, in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. At the same time, it balances indigenous peoples' self-determination entitlements to full participation in international law making, as unjustifiably excluded sovereigns, with contemporary political realities.

This paper argues that self-determination to the greatest extent possible is a legitimate aspiration for Maori people. It is argued that in education this requires a philosophical and policy response more focused on Maori autonomy than can be provided within the bicultural framework that has lately informed Maori relationships with other actors in the education arena. The paper considers the place of kohanga reo, kura kaupapa Maori and wananga in relation to broader Maori aspirations for self-determination and discusses proposals that these aspirations be furthered through the establishment of a Maori Education Authority. It is also argued that opportunities for self-determination in New Zealand are compromised by the government's unwillingness to alter a tightly controlled centralised education market to provide genuine Māori autonomy over what type of education might be available and to what end.

In 2004 the appointment of a Coordinating Minister Race Relations, signalled a shift in elite Māori policy thinking from a long-standing cautious bipartisan acceptance of selfdetermination towards a re-emergent assimilationist ‘one law’ for all discourse. The question simplistically posed by the Leader of the Opposition was should welfare entitlements be granted on the basis of need or race (Brash 2004)? Beneath this question lies an ideological assumption which privileges assimilation over indigeneity as the basis of Māori participation in public affairs. This paper therefore asks: are Māori peoples with rights, or individuals with needs? Is there a deeper politics of indigeneity providing a legitimate foundation for rights which are not necessarily superior to the rights of citizenship, but are important and distinguishable adjuncts? These questions transcend the issue of welfare entitlements to wider questions about the nature and terms of Māori belonging to the liberal polity. The paper highlights the political tension between government attempts to remove indigeneity from the public agenda in response to populist pressure and a pragmatic acceptance that New Zealand ‘needs’ Māori to increase their contribution to the national economy and that the realisation of this goal may in fact depend on the fuller citizenship imagined by the politics of indigeneity.

Political encounters between settler governments and indigenous communities are freighted with the unresolved issues of indigenous independence asserted under ongoing conditions of colonial domination. Within political science, these encounters have been primarily theorised and analysed as struggles of indigenous communities for political recognition from settler states. Further, the politics of recognition is widely understood as colonising by indigenous scholars, with some arguing for an alternative politics of (indigenous) resurgence and refusal, a ‘turning away’ from the state. In this article, we argue that in the case of Ma¯ori in Aotearoa ‘turning up’ is the ethical and correct practice of politics, a practice stemming from the relational ontology of the Ma¯ori world. Thus ‘turning up’ rather than ‘turning away’ can, for Ma¯ori, itself be a practice of refusal. We outline the centrality of the embodied, face-to-face encounter within Ma¯ori politics, and identify the ongoing presence of the sovereign’s body and embodiment more broadly within the Westminster tradition, as symbolised in the concept of the Crown. Building on these compatibilities within distinct political ontologies, we argue for the potential and productivity of face-to-face political encounters, and call on the New Zealand Crown to also prioritise ‘turning up’ in its engagement with indigenous communities.

This article examines why and how scholars should acknowledge and name each of the diverse political actors and institutions that typically are objectified as ‘indigenous peoples’ on the global stage, or ‘Māori’ in New Zealand. For instance, rather than suggesting a political relationship or conflict exists between ‘Māori and the Crown’, political scientists and theorists should name the political actors and political institutions for which Māori is a shorthand, for example, ‘Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu (the corporate entity of the Ngai Tahu whanui) and the Committee of Tuahiwi Marae disagreed with the Crown’. A variety of reasons are discussed as to why this objectification of Māori (and any other indigenous population) as a single political actor has occurred, the problems are pointed out, and a range of examples are given. Not every use of the terms ‘Māori’, ‘indigenous peoples’ or similar descriptors in political science stands in for a specific political actor (e.g. sometimes, it is suggesting a cleavage or a group at whom a policy is directed), but where scholars are describing or suggesting political action, they should be careful in their use of ethnic labels. I suggest that it would be more productive to study the specific contexts, intentions and actions of individuals and institutions that might consider indigeneity as being part of their identity.

While there is much research and writing on Māori self-determination, little of it focuses on how Māori individuals and organisations conceive the necessary antecedent to self-determination; Māori political agency. To remedy this research gap, we explored the political aspirations of Māori individuals with a research method built to study such subjective topics: Q method. Combining Q method with some practical innovations from Kaupapa Māori Research method, we developed a unique way of researching the stories our participants tell themselves about politics. Our results suggest some Māori individuals do think of politics as a collective endeavour as the self-determination literature suggests, but just as often Māori collective forums and other non-Māori political institutions are seen as barriers to Māori individual and collective political agency and thus to Māori self-determination. We also found that Māori view the political autonomy and participation necessary for self-determination as possible in numerous diverse spaces, suggesting the focus on low voter turnout amongst Māori in the literature is missing the point: the stories told by this research suggest Māori individuals perceive their political agency to be hindered, not by majoritarian politics of non-Māori, but by Māori and non-Māori elites.

The New Zealand government has been globally praised for its response to Covid-19. Despite the global accolades, little attention has been given to the swift and innovative Māori response to Covid-19. This paper will detail some of this rapid Māori response to Covid-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand and argue the response can be understood as key examples of Māori exercising tino rangatiratanga (self-determination), independent of the government's measures and policies. We suggest that this exploration of tino rangatiratanga during Covid-19 demonstrates central aspects of Māori well-being that move beyond a government focus on statistics as the key measure of well-being and how tikanga Māori (Māori values) are being used to develop successful responses to the global pandemic.

Global disease trackers quantifying the size, spread, and distribution of COVID-19 illustrate the power of data during the pandemic. Data are required for decision-making, planning, mitigation, surveillance, and monitoring the equity of responses. There are dual concerns about the availability and suppression of COVID-19 data; due to historic and ongoing racism and exclusion, publicly available data can be both beneficial and harmful. Systemic policies related to genocide and racism, and historic and ongoing marginalization, have led to limitations in quality, quantity, access, and use of Indigenous Peoples' COVID-19 data. Governments, non-profits, researchers, and other institutions must collaborate with Indigenous Peoples on their own terms to improve access to and use of data for effective public health responses to COVID-19.

In First World colonised nations such as Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, population statistics form the evidentiary base for how Indigenous peoples are known and `managed' through state policy approaches. Yet, population statistics are not a neut