Dispossession as Destination

The systematic dispossession of Māori land in the 19th and 20th centuries formed the basis of Aotearoa New Zealand’s capitalist economy and contributed to persistent patterns of inequality between Pākehā and Māori. Māori were, and largely remain, excluded from the land-based economy of Aotearoa New Zealand. This chapter draws on an emergent body of Indigenous critical theory that seeks to reformulate or “indiginize” Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation to better account for Indigenous experiences of colonization. It describes the settler-colonial process in Aotearoa New Zealand, including the myriad attempts of settlers and the Crown to eliminate Māori and separate us from our ancestral lands. Ultimately, however, this chapter argues that the settler colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand is, in part at least, a failed project. Māori have not been eliminated and the umbilical connection to the lands of our ancestors has not been severed.

Land, land banks and land back: Accounting, social reproduction and Indigenous resurgence

This paper situates Indigenous social reproduction as a duality; as both a site of primitive accumulation and as a critical, resurgent, land-based practice. Drawing on three distinct cases from British Columbia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and Bua, Fiji, we illustrate how accounting techniques can be a key mechanism with which Indigenous modes of life are brought to the market and are often foundational to the establishment of markets. We argue that accounting practices operate at the vanguard of primitive accumulation by extracting once invaluable outsides (e.g. Indigenous land and bodies) and rendering these either valuable or valueless for the social reproduction of settler society. The commodification of Indigenous social reproduction sustains the conditions that enable capitalism to flourish through primitive accumulation. However, we privilege Indigenous agency, resistance and resurgence in our analysis to illustrate that these techniques of commodification through accounting are not inevitable. They are resisted or wielded towards Indigenous alternatives at every point.