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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