Saturday, September 17, 2016

Tupuna Awa : People & Politics of the Waikato River

Tupuna Awa: 
People and Politics of the Waikato River
Marama Muru-Lanning
 
Auckland University Press
ISBN: 978 1 86940 850 3
Release Date: 19 September 2016, rrp $49.00 PB
 
An examination of how changing discourse around the Waikato River affects the relationships between the Crown, commercial operators like Mighty River Power, and the people of the region for whom it is a ‘Tupuna Awa’, a river ancestor.
 
‘We have always owned the water . . . we have never ceded our mana over the river to anyone’, King Tuheitia asserted in 2012. Prime Minister John Key disagreed: ‘King Tuheitia’s claim that Māori have always owned New Zealand’s water is just plain wrong’. So who does own the water in New Zealand – if anyone – and why does it matter?
 
Offering some human context around that fraught question, Tupuna Awa looks at the people and politics of the Waikato River. Marama Muru-Lanning introduces us to the way Māori of the region, the Crown and Mighty River Power have talked about water, ownership, stakeholders, guardianship and the river. Those conversations culminated in 2009 with a Deed of Settlement signed by Waikato-Tainui and the Crown that established a new co-governance structure for the Waikato River. By examining debates over water, Muru-Lanning provides a powerful lens into modern iwi politics and contests for power between Māori and the State.
 
About the author:
Marama Muru-Lanning is of Waikato and Ngāti Maniapoto descent and holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Auckland. She is now a Senior Research Fellow at the James Henare Research Centre.
 
Muru-Lanning’s work is primarily concerned with issues and debates in Environmental and Indigenous Anthropology; her current research focuses on the commodification and privatisation of freshwater and other natural resources in New Zealand and around the globe.
 
She is experienced in working with iwi and the crown and is a frequent spokesperson on related issues. This is her first book

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