(Download) "Quiet Revolution in Aotearoa New Zealand (Aboriginal Sovereignty)" by Arena Journal * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Quiet Revolution in Aotearoa New Zealand (Aboriginal Sovereignty)
- Author : Arena Journal
- Release Date : January 01, 2002
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 201 KB
Description
The first 'revolution' followed the coming of the British to a Maori land, and the presumption (through treaty) of the rule of British law. What constitutes for some an actual invasion or conquest has been considered by others a legal revolution for the purposes of the institution of the rule of law. (1) The second revolution involved the devolution of the authority of the British Crown to the New Zealand Crown-in-Parliament, sealed by the belated adoption in 1947 of the 1931 Statute of Westminster giving British dominions control of their own affairs. The third and would-be quiet revolution is the outstanding settlement of affairs of the New Zealand Crown with Maori--a legacy of this colonial history. It involves the troublesome matter of sovereignty, what I will call the constitutional matter. The notion of revolution is something that many settlers of European descent in New Zealand might think alien to the history of their nation; it will be disturbing news to them that anything like a revolution has happened before in this country, much less that one is happening now. Other, more informed non-Maori hope that the revolution now taking place will be merely legal, involving, if anything, limited constitutional reconstruction. They would also be wrong. The idea of a revolution of state is only the spit of a greater social sea-change that presages the end of a settler-dominated idea of place. Understanding the extent of this change, and its historical logic, requires greater knowledge of things Maori (maoritanga) than settlers ordinarily possess. But the more they learn, the more the resisted change will come about, which is to say that the stakes of sovereignty are stakes of knowledge.