Bones, Breath, Body: The Life of an Indigenously Owned New Zealand Corporation

Abstract

Different orientations and values coalesce around different notions of ownership, debt, responsibility, the regulation of spaces, and the proper relationship between the corporation and the land. My dissertation focuses on the meanings of interactions between Wakatu and its shareholders, Wakatu and the State, and Wakatu and the wider public. In my work I give particular attention to parsing the social relationships and legal orientations that give rise to frictions such as those evident in the WAI 56 dispute. In addition to my observations of legal proceedings, I use peoples' day-to-day negotiations of legal processes, regulatory regimes, and historical accounts to trace the way that history and memory are (sometimes literally) written onto the land - how shifting ideas and accounts of the past are deployed, and how narratives of ownership, largess, sovereignty, and freedom are configured and reconfigured in these spaces - how the land itself is used to `fix' notions of rights. My approach suggests challenges to conventional narratives of corporate power, social responsibility, and the supposed incongruities between indigenous cultures and indigenous commercial activity.