Settlers against colonialism? Education, organising and the Tiriti workers' movement
Behind every hypervisible collective action organised by a social movement is an enormous amount of labour cultivating everyday people’s ability and willingness to mobilise—a political education which takes place both inside and outside the classroom. Despite the close relationship this implies between organising and education, however, distinct bodies of research have emerged around them which struggle to engage with each other. Social movement theory concerns itself more with the phenomenon of social movements themselves, with less consideration for the labours which enable them to emerge; critical pedagogy, meanwhile, focuses on developing individuals’ capacity for transformative social action, but often without forging meaningful links to those actions taken by social movements.
My research seeks to address this fissure by exploring how it informs decolonial struggle in the case study of the Tiriti workers’ movement in Aotearoa New Zealand. Since the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) in 1840, Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa, have struggled against European colonisation. These efforts went largely unsupported in any organised capacity by the settler population until the gradual emergence of the Tiriti workers’ movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Following Māori calls for non-Māori to conscientise our own people about the realities of colonisation and the need to support Māori aspirations for self-determination, this movement within the settler population is now known for its educational interventions in settler communities and institutions across the country.
Drawing on a scholar-activist praxis which involved working within and through my existing relationships as a participant in the Tiriti workers’ movement, I conducted and analysed a series of interviews with 25 of my Tiriti worker peers for this research. Together, we sought to better understand how and why our knowledge-practices were established; how and why they have changed over time; and how those changes open and/or foreclose new opportunities to advance the movement’s (and by extension Māori) interests. Through analysis of these discussions, I argue that this case study demonstrates the key tensions and overlaps between educating and organising practices that emerge when pursuing transformative social change in settler-colonial contexts. This claim is supported by the data in three ways. First, many participants found that the movement’s primarily educational strategies are now experiencing diminishing returns, as more of the population becomes “Tiriti-educated” but remains unsure as to what happens next. Second, constraints on Pākehā (white European New Zealander) Tiriti education in particular have pushed out a critical analysis of the centrality of race in local settler-colonial structures and systems. This has prevented meaningful Tiriti-based coalition-building from taking place between Pākehā and other settlers, highlighting a continued need for education even amongst the otherwise “Tiriti-educated”. Third, the movement has an unusual positioning within the dominant settler group as part of the object of transformation. This position requires both a careful reconstruction of self-interest and a structural analysis of state and capital, tasks for which critical pedagogy and social movement theoretical traditions, respectively, are better equipped.
These findings show that rather than being a linear process within which education results in action, in practice education is deeply intertwined with other forms of collective action, contradicting the divisions evident in the literature. This thesis therefore makes important contributions to the bridging of social movement theory and critical pedagogy by showing how the social change processes they emphasise are in fact mutually dependent in their efforts to establish and sustain effective challenges to the colonial-capitalist status quo.
