Abstract
In recent decades, the consideration of Māori law in Aotearoa New Zealand state law has taken on a new momentum. Law schools are improving their teaching of tikanga and Māori law in compulsory and specialist law papers. The judiciary more often cites Māori law as relevant to legal decisions. The Māori Land Court has normalised the use of tikanga and Māori law in its deliberations, and the District Court has new expectations for the use of tikanga Māori in its processes. This is not to say that the way Māori law is incorporated in or recognised by these institutions of the state, and state law itself, is a settled matter, however. A conversation on this is taking place in Aotearoa New Zealand, and this thesis is intended to contribute to that conversation.
This thesis explores the questions of what Māori law is and what some of the objects of Māori law are. It reviews what the non-written visual means of documenting Māori law might be and how these means help to communicate Māori law. This thesis draws on legal theory and education and art theories of visual literacy and encoded objects to investigate whether Māori law is documented in whakairo Māori – specifically in the Māori art forms of tā moko, pou whenua, and raranga. Tā moko is the art of tattooing marks into the body, particularly the face but also the legs, body and arms. Pou whenua are tall upright wooden carvings placed in or on the ground and used to identify whakapapa to and mana whenua over lands and waters. Raranga is the art of weaving, which is extensively used in the making of garments and domestic tools.
Māori law is documented in objects and visual markings just as objects (such as law books) and visual markings (such as writing) document state law in Aotearoa New Zealand. This thesis considers the evidence for that documentation of Māori law. Seven core principles of Māori law are explored and applied to three chosen forms of whakairo Māori.
This thesis acknowledges how Indigenous jurists have critiqued Western attitudes about Indigenous laws, confirming the resilience of both Māori law in Aotearoa New Zealand and contemporary Indigenous jurisprudence. The thesis demonstrates that Indigenous peoples, including Māori, can be said to have documented their law in creative art forms. There are examples of whakairo Māori that can be read as encoded with the principles of Māori law. As such, this thesis establishes that Māori were a literate culture pre-colonisation. It suggests that any failure to understand whakairo Māori as documenting legal information is a failure of literacy by the reader – not a failure of literacy of te ao Māori itself.