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181 The advent in 2004 of the free-to-air Maori Television Service (MTS) channel in New Zealand marked an important development in Maori cultural politics and in the bicultural nation’s televisual democracy. While Maori constitute around 15 percent (and growing) of the population, more compelling than the statistical argument for greater representation in broadcast media has been the notion of “partnership” of Maori and Pakeha (white New Zealanders) under the auspices of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840, referred to hereafter as “the Treaty”) and its revival as a basis for appeals against historical and continuing (post)colonial injustice in the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act and 1985 Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act. Invoked with the institutionalization of statutory biculturalism in the mid-1980s, the notion of Treaty “partnership ” implies an ideal of equality, so that the “fifteen hours per week (including repeats!)” of Maori content on mainstream broadcast channels was justly decried by Tainui Stephens, shortly before the arrival of MTS, as “a disgracefully small amount of media time for the television needs of a people who are ostensibly equal partners in Aotearoa Te Wai Pounamu [New Zealand, constituted as Aotearoa, the North Island and Te Waipounamu, the South Island].”1 Stephens’s comment bears witness to the complexities and contradictions of struggle within ostensible biculturalism: continued de facto Maori disadvantage within statutory (Treaty) equality reveals the Treaty’s “promise of power sharing between Treaty partners” as “an incomplete project.”2 MTS therefore offers an opportunity for examining what Rey Chow refers to as “the vicissitudes of cross-ethnic representational politics.”3 First mooted in 1973, the channel was conceived as an initiative in promoting and revitalizing te reo Maori (the Maori language) and tikanga Maori (Maori customary lore) or culture more generally. By 1973, New Zealand was acknowledging and beginning to address its colonial past, the impact of its early-to-mid-twentieth-century policy of assimilation of Maori into the hegemonic British-descended settler culture, and the implications of its Pacific location and relations. Britain—to which New Zealand had been tied politically, economically, culturally, and affectively since its nineteenthcentury colonial settlement—joined the European Economic Community, in practical 10. The Maori Television Service and Questions of Culture C H R I S P R E N T I C E 182 C H R I S P R E N T I C E terms forcing New Zealand to find new export markets, but also to come to terms with the wider implications of a loosening of (post)colonial ties. Locally, the Maori political and cultural renaissance was emerging, and this was the year that Nga Tamatoa, a group of young Maori activists, presented a petition to Parliament calling for the introduction of Maori language into the nation’s primary and secondary schools,4 putting the revitalization of te reo Maori squarely on the agenda.The country was also attending to the increasing centrality of broadcasting, and in particular television, as sites of cultural negotiation and exchange. While there was still only one television channel available (color television was introduced that year; a second channel arrived in 1975), by the 1970s the vast majority of New Zealand households had television,5 reinforcing its ability to function as a “national” forum,6 and thus also reinforcing the stakes of Maori representation, as a means of intervention into a settler-culture hegemony. The decades that followed saw further efforts to secure Maori televisual representation .7 RanginuiWalker discusses the 1985 bid by the Aotearoa Broadcasting Trust for the country’s third television channel. Such a channel was proposed as furthering the fulfillment of section 3 of the 1976 Broadcasting Act concerning the broadcasting system ’s obligation to reflect and develop New Zealand’s culture and identity, as it largely neglected Maori culture.The bid failed for lack of funding support, a failure“likened to the original betrayal of the Treaty,” as such a channel “would have provided employment and an economic base, as well as an outlet for the expression of Maori culture.”8 In 1986, a claim was brought before theWaitangi Tribunal (see the Introduction) arguing that the Maori language was a taonga (treasure, prized possession or article) that warranted Crown protection through, among other things, presence in national broadcasting. However, in 1989, in the context of the country’s neoliberal economic reforms and widespread deregulation, Radio New Zealand Ltd. and Television New Zealand Ltd. were established as “state-owned enterprises.” The New Zealand...

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