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Introduction
This paper examines how recognition of indigenous cultural values can form the basis for social innovations that seek underlying and transformative societal change. At an overarching level, it contends that cultural considerations matter and open up possibilities for social innovations. Using empirical examples of social innovations that acknowledge the unique historic and cultural setting of Māori, the indigenous minority population of Aotearoa/New Zealand (A/NZ), it reinforces the opinion that social innovation “cannot be separated from either its socio-cultural, or from its social political context” and demonstrates that historic and cultural contextual factors afford opportunities for innovation (Overall et al., 2010; Moulaert et al., 2013, p. 17).
Comprising 15 per cent of the total population, Māori are marked by a history of colonization, primarily by settlers from Britain in the later nineteenth century, although more recently from diverse sources, contributing to an increasingly multicultural society (Statistics New Zealand, 2013). Settler culture retained allegiance to European (Pākeha) culture rather than seeking to integrate and accommodate with the culture of the host nation (Bell, 2006). Numerical dominance of the settler population and ideations of a superior cultural legacy contributed to the devaluing of indigenous culture. When accompanied by the social devastation imposed on Māori tribal entities, the retention of indigenous knowledge and its associated cultural traditions became not only lost to settler populations but also increasingly hard for Māori to sustain. The consequence was that Māori found themselves marginalised within their own lands, suffering not only redistributive injustices but also the injustices of misrecognition that underpin racism. The consequences for Māori, as for similarly affected indigenous populations in other lands, can be described in a host of negative outcomes that have persisted into the present. Māori are often framed in deficit discourses of poor health, educational underachievement, high levels of imprisonment and poverty (Henry, 2007). They are over-represented in a range of negative statistics including disparities in education, unemployment, underemployment, low wage and precarious employment and housing ownership (Perry, 2017). These statistics are embedded in descriptions of poverty and represent the ethnic contouring of class-based society.
Relationships between Māori and settlers are mediated by A/NZ’s foundational document, the Treaty of Waitangi, first signed in 1840, and breached over successive settler generations. More recently, Crown (Government)...