Paper short abstract:

The recent expansion of the aquaculture industry in New Zealand signifies a new form of private property rights in the seascape and thus has implications for productive relations and moral claims of ownership. This paper will address how concrete ways of owning among two Maori coastal communities have been reconfigured in the process.

Paper long abstract:

The recent expansion of the aquaculture industry in New Zealand signifies a new form of private property rights in the seascape and thus has implications for productive relations and moral claims of ownership. This technological revolution prompted Maori to claim ownership of the foreshore and seabed in a discourse which emphasised primordial relations of use, customary marine tenure and the sea as constitutive of identity. These claims were countered by legislation which legally repositioned the state as an elite holder of "public property" rights and created a new synthesis of the land-fisheries dichotomy.

Nevertheless, a simple conception of the state as an immoral appropriator of Maori tenure and by extension identity is an essentialised reading of the multileveled and shifting way resources are owned and valued by indigenous groups in contemporary post-colonial states. Local resistance to the extension of private property is a common theme in the colonial milieu. However, in the context of contemporary indigenous claims such resistance need not necessarily emphasise a return to pre-existing systems of communal owning, a romanticised gemeinschaft; resistance may stem from multiple motivations including perceived exclusion from emergent markets, themselves the rasion d'etre of newly created private property regimes.

Whilst Maori claims can be read as a call for a recognition of indigenity, these claims were simultaneously a call for inclusion in a newly important commercial enterprise. This paper will address how concrete relations of owning have been reconfigured in the process by drawing on recent fieldwork with two coastal Maori communities.