Emergent identities: the changing contours of Indigenous identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand

This chapter explores the changing contours of contemporary indigenous identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It challenges essentialist notions that Māori have ‘‘…singular, integral, altogether harmonious and unproblematic identities’’(Calhoun 1994, 13). It will be argued that rather than conceptualising Māori identities as the continual transmission of fixed cultural essences through time, ‘‘being Māori’’ should be approached as part of a more discontinuous process in which culture and tradition are continually made and remade.