The US can learn a lot from New Zealand on how to embrace indigenous cultures

It begins in breakbeat – thud, thud, thud – the captain then growls his battle rhymes – hiss, hiss, roar – and the New Zealand basketball team unleash – BOOM. They creep forward with each staccato scream. The NBA players facing them stand puzzled. Something is happening, but Team USA are not quite sure what.

What happened was a haka, a traditional Māori challenge, and footage of its performance at the Basketball World Cup last month went viral. Not because of the act itself (the haka has long been a pre-match ritual among New Zealand sport teams) but because of the slack-jawed reaction from the American players, including Derrick Rose and James Harden. ABC News described the reaction as “amused and intrigued”, People Magazine chose “baffled” and USA Today went with “unimpressed” (of course).

“We knew that was a really neat thing to do and it’s part of their tradition”, coach Mike Krzyzewski explained, “and we admire that.” But while news organisations scrambled to upload the video along with pithy copy, an important angle was missed.

Here are two teams from English-speaking democracies with frontier legacies, histories of mass immigration, common law legal systems and living indigenous cultures. Yet while one team is proudly celebrating its heritage, the other responds with confusion. It is a situation that is scarcely imaginable in reverse. Can you imagine NBA players performing a Native American grass dance in an act of team solidarity and national unity?

In New Zealand, no one bats an eye at the haka. The Chiefs, whose haka went viral when they won the Super Rugby competition, credit Māori culture as the secret to their success. The team’s name itself is a celebratory play on their Māori heritage. Meanwhile, in the US’s most popular sport, owner Daniel Snyder clings to the wreckage that is the Washington Redskins, going so far as to argue the name actually “honours” Native Americans. Go figure. South Park’s season premiere had the best response to that absurdity.

But the differences extend beyond cultural kitsch. The political comparisons between Indigenous cultures in the two countries are startling too. New Zealand enjoys a state-funded Indigenous broadcaster, Māori Television, the US does not. New Zealand enjoys dedicated indigenous representation in its national legislature, the US does not. The Māori party holds ministerial positions in the New Zealand government. At the federal level, there is no Native American equivalent.

“[It is] another compliment to the Māoris that the government allows native representation,” wrote Mark Twain in Following the Equator, “and in doing these things the government also compliments itself; it has not been the custom of the world for conquerors to act in this large spirit toward the conquered.” Twain, who was no great friend of Native Americans, was smitten with Māori. “And it is another compliment to [Māori] that the British did not take the whole of their choicest lands, but left them a considerable part, and then went further and protected them from the rapacities of landsharks”.

The protection Twain alludes to is the Treaty of Waitangi, a treaty signed between the British Crown and some Māori chiefs. While Twain was too generous to the government of the day – early British authorities recognised Māori sovereignty, but colonial governments wasted little time trying to extinguish it – the contrast between the Treaty of Waitangi and the treaties signed in Twain’s American west are profound.

In New Zealand, the constitutional narrative is built on the Treaty of Waitangi, writes Fulbright scholar and legal academic Claire Charters, which means that Māori and state relations are central to New Zealand’s understanding of itself. On the other hand, there is “less of a sense that [the United States is] constitutionally built on the encounter between indigenous peoples and colonial power”.

While indigenous peoples in the US and New Zealand suffered similar catastrophes during and after the “opening” of the American west and the pacification of Māori resistance, one country’s treaty emerged as central to public and legal life while the other country’s treaties remained marginal. While New Zealand commemorates Waitangi Day, much of the US observes Columbus Day – a day of tragedy for the Americas’ indigenous peoples.

Jason Momoa, the Hawaiian actor whose ferocious haka secured his role as Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones, told New Zealand’s Dominion Post that “there are few indigenous cultures that have done as well as the Māori”. It seems that while one country powers ahead, the other dawdles. What, then, can the US learn from New Zealand about recognising indigenous peoples and their culture?

“The intractability of the Washington Redskins over their appropriation and racism would be unimaginable in New Zealand,” Graham Cameron told me, “because of a sensitivity to Māori image and story that Māori Television and [tribal] radio have been part of creating”. Cameron, a Māori political commentator and guest at the Hopi and Navajo reservations last summer, found “no indigenous media outside of the reservation. I feel there is a struggle to have their stories included in the national discourse. Here in New Zealand, the Māori discourse is central to the national discourse.”

That much was clear during Prince William, Kate and baby George’s tour of New Zealand. When the royal family was welcomed to Wellington with a pōwhiri – a Māori welcoming ceremony – the New York-based CNN reporter Jeanne Moos filed a story asking whether a pōwhiri is “any way to welcome a future king and queen”. Moos exhumed archival footage of a pōwhiri for Laura Bush and recited an earlier description of the ceremony as a cross between “a Chippendales lap dance and the mating dance of an emu”.

New Zealanders were outraged by the journalist’s crass ignorance. Moos’s report was criticised in both New Zealand’s indigenous and mainstream media. Eighteen year-old Jayden Evett started a Change.org petition calling for Moos to publicly apologise, gathering 25,000 signatures. Although “the Māori mediasphere” – as Folker Hanusch puts it – has not been a cure-all, it grants indigenous communities the power to offer a counter-narrative. The same cannot be said about the US, where indigenous media have too little sway in the public discourse.

Without a nationwide indigenous broadcaster, Native American communities can struggle to normalise their own counter narratives. This absence was particularly felt during the recent Cliven Bundy standoff. While the white Nevada-based cattle rancher preached his “ancestral rights” to evade federal police power and as journalists rushed to cover the event, a similar standoff had occurred in the same state two decades earlier without media coverage (or the armed mobs the Bundy standoff drew).

In 1992, federal agents executed a raid on the Dann ranch, home to Western Shoshoni tribal members Carrie and Mary Dann. Since the 1970s, the Danns had refused to pay grazing fees in protest at the loss of Western Shoshone land. The Danns believed the Western Shoshone never ceded their ancestral rights. The raid led to a six-day standoff between the Danns and the federal government.

The similarities between the Bundy standoff and the Danns’s protest are remarkable, yet the similarities end at the media and public response. For a short time Bundy became a folk hero, a lightning rod for discontent with the federal government, yet the Danns were never lionised in the same way. The indigenous narrative – one of dispossession and oppression – did not capture public awareness like Bundy’s stance did.

But there is a lesson to be taken from New Zealand that is more fundamental than the efficacy of indigenous media and the power it has to offer a alternative narrative.

I asked Alice Te Punga Sommervile, an Ivy League graduate and lecturer in Pacific literature at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, about the major difference between the US and New Zealand. She tells me it is the difference between race and indigeneity. “Within the cultural logic of the US, race is the number one way to understand human difference – and race is tied to numbers. Native Americans aren’t at the race table (or aren’t often at the race table) because they only make up 2% of the country, and so are seen as a less important minority group. The thing that’s missing is an analysis of indigeneity which would recognise a special position of Native Americans”.

What the US could learn from New Zealand, then, is more fundamental than a potent indigenous mediasphere. Sommervile adds: “Sometimes I think New Zealand and the US talk past each other because of this completely different positioning. We think we’re talking about the same thing, but while New Zealand is thinking about Māori as indigenous, [the United States] is thinking about Native Americans as a racial group.”

And that is exactly how the US supreme court regarded the kānaka maoli in Rice v Cayetano. Harold Rice, a Big Island rancher, took a case against the state of Hawaii arguing that elections to the board of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs could not be restricted to people of kānaka maoli descent. The court agreed and ruled that the kānaka maoli were a racial group without tribal status. On the other hand, Māori – who, like the kānaka maoli, are Polynesian – are categorically considered indigenous in New Zealand – race is sometimes a proxy, but it is secondary.

Yet while recognising the distinction between race and indigeneity is a lesson to take from New Zealand, it also reveals the difficulties with a comparative exercise. If New Zealand privileges indigeneity and the US privileges race, then any comparison becomes an apples and oranges moment.

Jo Smith, a senior lecturer in media studies at Victoria University of Wellington, warns that we should be wary of providing judgments based on comparisons when the geopolitics of place, the histories of settlement, and the contemporary cultural politics of each place is highly specific. “Scale does matter,” she told me – Maori make up 15% of the New Zealand population, Native Americans make up only 2% – “but so too do the various linguistic differences of indigenous communities in America. Māori language is shared across a range of [tribes] with only regional differences in dialect. Also, indigenous Americans were involved with a range of treaties while New Zealand only had the Declaration of Independence in 1835, and then the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.”

Rather than searching for lessons from overseas, an exercise that risks robbing Native Americans of their agency in indigenous development, perhaps the key is to privilege indigenous perspectives.

I talked to Julie Anne Genter – who was born in Minnesota, raised in California and is now a New Zealand parliamentarian – who told me that “each country has done some valuable things … rather than rank each other what’s more useful is to share stories about decolonisation attempts. Indigenous people do it all the time – it’s usually their initiative. It would be wrong to set New Zealand aside as the ‘winner’ on some kind of sliding scale.”

In this context, the more appropriate question to ask is: what can the US learn from Native Americans about recognising indigenous culture?

In From a Native Daughter, kānaka maoli leader Haunani-Kay Trask writes that as “Indigenous peoples, our nationalism is born … of a genealogical connection to our place.” The challenge, then, is not to ask what we can learn from some other place, but what we can learn from “our place”. But how to do this?

Professor James Anaya, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, calls for more education, starting from the very early stages of education. “The textbooks need to more accurately reflect the place of Native Americans in the country, there needs to be more understanding at all levels of decision making and there needs to be more appreciation of both the negative and the positive aspects of the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. So when we talk about indigenous peoples it’s a matter of respecting their rights to self-determination, as stated in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

And the tools to recognise indigenous self-determination already exist. Treaties. “The indigenous standpoint generally views [treaties] as sacred texts,” says Anaya, “that established relationships in perpetuity and that have mutual obligations in the spirit of friendship and peaceful coexistence.”

The US was founded on the idea of freedom and liberty. But freedom and liberty, which might be called the “sacred” values of American society, were exclusive ideas. In the colonial period there was, writes Dee Brown in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, “an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it.” Treaties are the mechanism to extend that freedom and liberty – that is, the right to self determination – to indigenous peoples who were promised it, but do not have full exercise of it.

Treaties, and that includes treaties with Native Nations, are part of the constitution. That means freedom, liberty and self-determination for Native Americans is more than an ancient promise, it is the supreme law of the land.