33 Human Rights Commission Economics of colonisation The colonial state of Aotearoa that emerged continued dispossessing and alienating tangata whenua from their ancestral estates and ways of being for the prosperity and enrichment of settler society. By 1865 Pākehā society had alienated twothirds of the land area of Aotearoa from Māori (Taonui 2012), by 1939 they had taken 91 percent and by 2000 just four percent remained (Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2021). Land swiftly moved into Crown and settler ownership, kāinga Māori shrank to smaller parcels of increasingly marginal, non-arable land. Māori ownership and use of food and water resources were severely limited or disappeared. Malnutrition was widespread (Reid, J. et al, 2017:33). “Māori were impoverished on small parcels of land. Between the 1890s and World War II, many Māori in poor communities lived in a state of permanent epidemic” (Taonui, 2021). Rangatira and their hapū who were prospering through economic and trade development had their authority to collect taxes, lands, business tools and resources removed and taken over by the state and settlers. Self determination Undermining of self determination Article 3 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) enshrines the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination: Indigenous peoples have the right to selfdetermination. By virtue of that right, they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development (UNDRIP, 2007). “Self-determination is the inalienable right of peoples and cultures to self-determine their destiny. Self-determination is integral to being human” (Jackson, 2021a). Self-determination is the equivalent of rangatiratanga in Article Two of Te Tiriti. Self-determination captures a sense of Māori ownership and active control over the future at iwi and hapū levels, as well as to all Māori people collectively (Māori Congress (1995) cited in Hill, 2009, p. 7). The usurpation of Indigenous rangatiratanga selfdetermination was central to colonisation, and intergenerational, ongoing and continuous because this structured the benefits that accrued to colonial settler society and protected their privilege and wealth (Wolfe, 2006; Aikman, 2019). The structure is what matters because “all events that deprive Māori of opportunity, equality and self-determination are part of a wider colonial racist structure of privilege and protection” (Jackson, 2021a). The structures of white supremacy in Aotearoa “actively and implicitly limited the ability of Māori to realise their self-determination” (Jackson, 2021a). “Colonisation fractured the hope for interdependence and denied the possibility of continuing Māori independence” (Jackson, 2021b). By negating or constraining self-determination, colonisation dehumanised Māori: Colonisation and racism attacked the very being, the very humanness of people. It causes those people to lose faith in themselves and impacts our ability to govern ourselves, to be self-determining in a way that we self-determine for ourselves (Jackson, 2021a). The right to self-determination Because the suppression of Indigenous selfdetermination preserves white privilege, the former British colonies of Canada, Australia, Aotearoa and the United States opposed the endorsement of Article Three in the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (1993) for 15 years. To concede the right of Indigenous peoples to shape their destinies as they saw fit, was for them a surrender of control: When we were drafting UNDRIP, every year we knew that Article 3 would be the cause of the most contention, because every other right flows from that. But for Indigenous peoples, you cannot exercise any other right if you are unable to exercise the right of self-determination. Everything flows from that; it’s the fundamental right (Jackson, 2021a). Aotearoa voted against the UNDRIP in 2007. The government eventually endorsed the UNDRIP in 2010, but only on the basis that it would not be binding on New Zealand (Watkins, 2010).