Mana Wāhine: Decolonising Feminism and Patriarchy in Aotearoa

Aotearoa/New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the right to vote in 1893, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was widely celebrated for her response to Covid-19 (Roy, 2020), and the country, despite having experienced a swing towards the right in the 2023 general election (Corlett 2023), is generally seen as one of the most progressive (McDonald, 2020). But does the situation of Māori women paint a different picture? It is important to look at numerous additional difficulties Māori women face compared to Pākehā women. Statistics show that Māori women are significantly overrepresented in prisons (Adair, 2023) and are much more likely to be unemployed than all other demographics (Reilly, 2019). According to Linda Tuhiwai Smith, a leading Māori scholar on Mana Wāhine theory (1992), Māori women face a double jeopardy of oppression for being both a woman and Māori. To understand their situation, it is essential to examine what role colonialism plays in this oppression. In this essay, I explore how colonialism has shaped the struggles Māori women face, and how they respond to it through Māori feminisms, – more specifically, through the concept of Mana Wāhine . I start by describing how colonialism is a gendered process that brought patriarchy to Aotearoa, and how this colonial encounter shaped interactions between white and Māori feminists, an encounter that is marked by misconstructions of distinct realities that are assumed to be the same. I move on to Indigenous feminism in Aotearoa by categorising Mana Wāhine as a decolonising Māori form of feminist theory and tying it into transnational efforts before finishing with a conclusion. I find that the colonial encounter lastingly shaped the situation of Māori women in Aotearoa by introducing Western binaries, gender norms and patriarchy. Furthermore, the lens of colonisation distorted Māori culture to present it as sexist. The only way out of thisdouble bind for Māori women is therefore an approach that takes their oppression as both women and Māori into account.