Statelessness in a Legal System Without States: A Tikanga Māori Perspective

May 2025

In this blog, Sophie Coomber (Ngāti Maniapoto, Waikato-Tainui), Lecturer at Auckland University of Technology Law School, argues that Indigenous bodies of law like tikanga Māori contain rich resources for re-examining how we approach statelessness and belonging.

Tikanga Māori, the body of norms that guides behaviour within te ao Māori (the Māori worldview), offers a distinct foundation for understanding belonging, displacement, and authority outside of a state-centric framework. It is recognised as part of New Zealand’s common law, is incorporated in a number of statutes, and is the second body of law affirmed within New Zealand through the Treaty of Waitangi an agreement between the British Crown and Māori chiefs that founded the modern New Zealand state. Although New Zealand state law retains a legal and political hegemony in New Zealand, tikanga Māori is both a body of law in its own right and part of the law that can guide the New Zealand state on the international level.

The centrality of land in Indigenous law - including in New Zealand, the wider Pacific and Australia - suggests that statelessness, as defined by Western legal frameworks, may not adequately capture how authority and belonging are constituted elsewhere. There are no concepts directly equivalent to the state in tikanga Māori. Everything in te ao Māori is linked by whakapapa, the layers of genealogy between all things. Whakapapa dictates that relationships are of paramount importance – the relationships between past, present and future generations, including those between humans and atua (ancestral gods), and therefore, between humans and all living things. It extends to the land itself, who is Papatūānuku, and to features of the land, like Taranaki Maunga, a mountain in the rohe (territory) of ngā iwi o Taranaki (the tribes of Taranaki) who has recently been recognised as part of a holistic, living legal entity. A familial, reciprocal relationship exists between all people and all land, meaning that the rights and obligations in relationship to land are familial, and often layered.

The centrality of land in the epistemics of being from and of them is common to a number of indigenous systems. Whakapapa links Māori to Hawaiki, the physical and spiritual ancestral homeland in the Pacific, and to the environment around them. Katerina Martina Teaiwa explains that in I-Kiribati, aba means both land and people (related by blood); there is no possessive form of the word – abau means me/land, not my land. Land and blood are metonymies for the person and the group. This linking of the people and land is found in several Pacific languages – vanua in Fijian, aina in Hawaiian and whenua in the Māori language. People retain links to lands and landscapes that endure over time and space. In a Māori perspective, this is expressed as taura here, the rope that binds, which refers to those who live away, but are still connected through an umbilical cord to the ahi kā, the ‘burning fire’ of continued occupation in the homeland. The strength of ties does depend on the maintenance of ahi kā but even if land was alienated, the connection remains. The link between a person and their land by virtue of history cannot be erased: ngā tapuwae o ngā tūpuna (the footsteps of our ancestors) remain on the land forever.

An example can be drawn from the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera, which destroyed the Pink and White Terraces on the shores of Lake Rotomahana and displaced a number of Māori hapū (tribal groups), rendering them landless. Akuhata et al. explain that following the eruption, a displaced hapū, Tūhourangi, were given a tuku (gift) of land to re-establish themselves by another group, Ngāti Maru, with whom they had kinship ties with through a shared ancestor. A tuku whenua is a defeasible gift of land, in this case offered because of the enormous trauma and need of Tūhourangi. Tūhourangi returned the land in 1986, on the 100-year anniversary of the tuku. This management of a people rendered landless as a result of disaster occurred within the New Zealand state jurisdiction but entirely in accordance with tikanga.

Within tikanga Māori, decision-making around the exercise of public power is traditionally held at the hapū level. Hapū like Tūhourangi are autonomous within themselves despite whakapapa connections with other groups; it is notable that Tūhourangi did not lose its own identity in the process of tuku, even though they would have come under the cloak of another group’s mana (authority). The mechanisms used to manage this displacement differ entirely from the mechanisms used within a state-to-state system; tuku whenua incorporate the receiving group into the giving group on a community level and are given freely in light of need.

In that example, the mechanism of whakapapa through shared relational ties works to legitimise a displacement and rehoming. Arama Rata and Tahu Kukutai have explained how the concept of manaakitanga (hospitality), which is most commonly encountered as the concept that underlies the hosting responsibilities of mana whenua (those with ancestral authority over the land) could underscore a system for migration that could emphasise mutual care and respect, honouring and power-sharing, and the protection of the environment. Tikanga is not restricted in its application to those who are Māori; it is a living legal system with continued authority.

Kayla Cohen interviewed eight Māori experts and environmental activists on Pacific climate displacement and found, amongst other things, that Māori placed an emphasis on the ability for displacees to make the decisions that impact their lives. Whanaungatanga, which requires the reciprocal maintenance of relationships in accordance with tikanga, can extend to non-kin who become kin through shared experiences. A 2015 study by Catherine Lane West-Newman on Māori opinions on people seeking asylum found a sense of kinship with those seeking asylum due to a shared history of deprivation and suffering.

In tikanga, rights of belonging operate on different epistemic foundations than in international law. Land boundaries between different tribes are not distinctive nor precise, often overlapping and determined according to whakapapa. Authority is denoted by mana, a complex concept that captures political, legal and personal autonomy, authority and power. The connections between communities move along whakapapa and whanaungatanga lines, alongside a number of other kawa (protocol or procedure) that inform the expression of tikanga. There are things akin to statehood in terms of the exercise of public power, and there are cases of displacement or exile from homelands, but the foundational framework for understanding the status of displaced persons, the consequences of that status, and the pathways out of that status are entirely different. Tools like tuku whenua, which incorporate people into communities and forge reciprocal relationships, both honour te ao Māori (the Māori worldview) and provide new mechanisms in the case of statelessness and displacement.

If understanding authority or autonomy for a group doesn’t turn on the legalistic existence of a state at an international level, but on the complex relationships between community and communities, communities and land, and land and ancestors, the tools and methods we might use to discuss belonging change entirely. At a minimum, we might anticipate that no indigenous Australian’s citizenship would ever be questioned, and that the statehood of Pacific nations, sea level rise aside, is unquestionable. The central importance of relationality within the structure of tikanga means that relationships to people or land are obligations that cannot be unilaterally renounced like state citizenship, nor can others be arbitrarily deprived of them. Authority and autonomy turn on those relationships, not abstract legal definitions or borders.

Research in this area is minimal, but what emerges clearly from foregrounding tikanga is that statelessness is not an inevitable legal outcome. It emerges from a legal system centred on the primacy of states; tikanga, and other non-hegemonic bodies of law, can offer an alternative foundation for understanding belonging and legal identities. A pluralistic approach to the law allows a recentering of non-hegemonic legal models on the domestic and international levels, offering new pathways for the law.

The Māori relationship with migration is complex. The first example of migration into a Māori nation resulted in a far-reaching colonisation that left Māori authority, land, language, and people disempowered and fractured. The sovereignty claimed by the New Zealand state has prevented the expression of tikanga Māori on both domestic and international levels, but work being done in the space is a strong indication that consideration of indigenous laws like tikanga, alongside other non-hegemonic legal orders, is a necessary step for global movement systems that accurately reflect the laws of all the people who are part of them.

_{Image by Li Zhang on Unsplash}