Abstract
"Resurgent indigeneity" has been witnessed in Indigenous peoples' struggles for their rights across the globe, as well as in scholarship on their struggles, binds, and achievements. It is not only an objective phenomenon "out there" in the social and political world but also a meta-discourse that urges critical and reflexive methods in research and writing. This chapter examines some debates among scholars of Māori history in Aotearoa New Zealand about the nature and purpose of historical knowledge-making in a particular context of resurgent indigeneity. It demonstrates the heterogeneity of such debates and varied stances of their authors while also highlighting the formation of ideas in particular contexts of rights recognition, ethnographic refusals, a reckoning with the colonial past, and anticolonial mobilization. To what extent do these debates move beyond settler-colonial framings? By refusing the demands of recognition, Indigenous scholars seek to expose the epistemological assumptions or myths of many disciplines, including history. They do so by drawing attention to how certain research protocols violate Indigenous norms. However, this essay also asks whether deeper continuities in colonial thought continue to shape the re-making (and re-coding) of knowledge in a postcolonial era.