Ihumātao, like most Māori land, is a place haunted by specters. Sitting on the barricade that blocks road access from the south, the tarmac is fading away into a grey blur. The lights of factories pierce the gloom. People walk in front of them, casting bizarre shadows. A hundred meters away is the Ōtuataua stone field, a site with ancient significance to Māori. No fewer than six tribal groups trace their ancestry to this land, where the first Māori settled, and the stone fields are rich with human remains. Anthropologists who have only recently put down their cranial calipers will quibble over the exact length of time, but I am keeping watch next to almost a thousand years’ worth of graves. Tombs on tombs on tombs. The fog on Ihumātao, we only half-joke, is 90 percent ghosts.
The dead are not the only ones looming here. Out on Te Puketāpapatanga a Hape, the sacred hill, will-o’-wisps are burning. Police in headlamps, patrolling the chain-link fence they stretched around our occupation, are escorting land developers from Fletcher Building. Fletcher is one of the largest homegrown multinational corporations, a $6 billion USD cancerous outgrowth of New Zealand’s enthusiasm for neoliberalism. They move in silence, quiet rows surveying their property. Beating out their boundaries, walking through streets they have yet to carve from a sacred graveyard. This is the other specter that lingers—the specter of class struggle.
Land occupations have a long history in Aotearoa. Parihaka, a village of pacifists led by two Christian prophets, was a major moment in the anti-colonial struggle against land theft. The colonial police arrested its inhabitants, raided its people, and burned the village to the ground in 1881. In 1977, Māori in the urban core took back waterfront land earmarked for development, building a functioning village in the heart of Auckland. With the help of organised labour, the Bastion Point occupation held out for 506 days until it too was demolished by the police.
Depending on how you count it, the occupation here at Ihumātao has lasted far longer than all of these. The land was taken from the local people in 1863, at the height of the Land Wars. In an act of ethnic cleansing, all Māori in Auckland were required to either swear an oath of loyalty to the British queen or be declared enemy combatants. Loyal to the paramount chief of the Tainui confederation, the people of Ihumātao fled. The land was given to farmers, kickstarting the cycle of capitalist production in New Zealand. In 2016, the descendants of those farmers sold Ihumātao to Fletcher Building, who now plan to build a massive housing development. That was when Pania Newton, a recent law graduate and a descendant of Ihumātao, began the occupation of the land. Since then, in some form or other, local people and their supporters on the organized left have remained on Ihumātao.
The situation on the land was relatively tame as Newton and her supporters challenged the development on every possible legal ground, from the Māori Land Court to the Environment Court to the United Nations. As the state and capital pushed on through each of these, the occupation grew more determined, building a small village on the land. Members of my socialist group, Organise Aotearoa, were present at the village on 23rd July when a contingent of more than 100 police officers arrived without warning at dawn to evict the land protectors. In response, thousands of people have swarmed Ihumātao, re-establishing a permanent presence on the land to make its desecration by Fletcher impossible.
This was the spark which ignited the prairie fire Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is now facing. The occupation has been renewed and energized by this attempt at repression. Hundreds of us are camped out in the stone fields, blocking construction equipment and reinforcing the defenses. Quite simply, Ihumātao is ungovernable. Nonetheless, it remains the “lawful” property of Fletcher Building. The exercise of indigenous sovereignty on the land here challenges the very basis of bourgeois private property by making the hidden bloodshed necessary to capitalist production powerfully and plainly visible. If all land is stolen land, how can any claim to private ownership of the means of production be valid? Ardern is caught by an internal contradiction of capitalism, demanding that Māori abandon their lawfully stolen land so that the bulldozers of the rich can tear up their ancestors’ skeletons.
In its efforts to dispel this crisis, the state has relied on the notion that local Māori support the housing development. This replicates the Native Land Court, which granted individual title to sections of land only to those chiefs willing to sell it. One Māori group, Te Kawerau ā Maki, supports Fletcher Building, but it is only one of many who trace their ancestry to Ihumātao. It is a shallow farce to pretend this is a mandate from local Māori. The development of Ihumātao would catastrophically affect everyone who belongs to this land—by shutting the majority of those people out of the decision-making process, Ardern is behaving like a blood-drenched imperial general out of the Land Wars.
As I write, Ardern has vanished for an inspection of New Zealand’s empire in the Pacific, touring the atolls of Tokelau. Her staff have attempted to shut down questions from journalists about the occupation of Ihumātao, threatening to remove access to the Prime Minister. She has made vague promises that construction will halt and that new negotiations will be entered into with all affected groups. Police presence on the land has been reduced, but they remain. The occupation, meanwhile, is only growing. Tattooists have arrived, and freshly-carven spirals wind around new faces every day. A huge steel marquee, serving as a formal Māori meeting ground, has been raised. Campfires dot the stone field.
Ardern has managed to coast on her reputation, internationally and domestically, from her handling of the atrocity in Christchurch. If Ardern does not recall her police force, if she does not send Fletcher Building home, if she does not preserve Ihumātao for future generations, this reputation will be permanently mutilated. This is the intractable crisis facing politicians within the dictatorship of capital: they cannot but act in ways that uncover the naked brutality and horror on which their world is founded. For the enemies of capital, our situation is an easier one. The sacred soil of Ihumātao remains, and so will we.
Emilie Rākete is a Māori woman of the Ngāpuhi and Te Rarawa tribes. She lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand, as a graduate student and community organiser. Emilie is the Māori caucus coordinator for Organise Aotearoa, one of the newer and larger socialist groups in the country.