Māori Status in New Zealand Law · Part 09 · Synthesis
Rangatira, hapū, Māori and citizen are not interchangeable legal concepts.
The record becomes much clearer once four categories are kept separate: office/authority, political community, statutory descent classification and nationality.
The largest source of confusion in this subject is using one word to answer four different legal questions.
Rangatira
Describes chiefly status and authority grounded in whakapapa and relationships with people, hapū, whenua and other communities. In He Wakaputanga, tino rangatira are the persons in whose collective gathering Kīngitanga and mana are described.
Hapū
A kin-based political and social community. He Wakaputanga names the collective as Te Wakaminenga o ngā Hapū. A hapū is not simply a statutory ethnicity category.
Māori
A people and identity that colonial and later statutes also use as a legal classification. Statutory definitions attach specific consequences within particular Acts; they do not create whakapapa or erase hapū.
Citizen / subject
A legal relationship between an individual and a state or Crown under nationality and allegiance law. Historically this included British subjecthood; modern New Zealand law centres New Zealand citizenship.
This also clarifies a proposition that can otherwise be overstated: colonial law's treatment of Māori as individual subjects of the Crown did not logically prove that every pre-existing collective authority held by rangatira and hapū had been transferred to the Crown. That requires its own constitutional analysis.
A legal status imposed on an individual and a constitutional transfer of collective political authority are different juridical events. The central research task is to locate the instrument or doctrine said to connect them.
1835 sourceHe Wakaputanga transcript.
1840 sourceTe Tiriti Māori text.
1865 sourceNative Rights Act 1865.
Current sourceCitizenship Act 1977; Te Ture Whenua Māori Act 1993.