The taonga of radio spectrum: articulating Maori knowledge of wireless interconnectivity

I would like to propose a conference paper and a research project for the SCANZ conference and writing week. These would use my research into the Waitangi claims to radio spectrum as a base for exploring the broader dimensions of Maori and other forms of indigenous knowledge in relation to wireless interconnectivity. I would like to use the writers week part of SCANZ as an opportunity to extend my research beyond the Waitangi Tribunal process itself into broader issues around indigenous knowledge and technology with a focus on wirelessness. I would particularly like to discuss these issues with local Iwi and with other SCANZ participants, and to explore concepts such as Te Iarere and raranga tangata in relation to wirelessness and the radio spectrum, and I believe that the thematic framework of SCANZ provides a productive conceptual scope for this research.  The conference paper would be based on a discussion of the Waitangi claims and the process of knowledge-articulation they represent, and I would ideally be able to expand on and support that discussion with material developed during the previous week.

About the Waitangi claims:  In the Radiocommunications Act 1989 the New Zealand government adopted a market-based approach to allocating frequencies in the radio spectrum for broadcasting and communication. This fundamentally reframed state power over radio spectrum as a property right, in order that further rights may be created and then tendered to private interests. However this framing has twice been challenged through the Waitangi Tribunal, in a process that positions radio spectrum as a resource appropriated from Maori by the Crown so that Maori can assert tino rangatiratanga over it. Claims made to the Tribunal in 1990 and 1999 argue that the Crown had no prior property right in New Zealand’s radio spectrum and accordingly no right to sell property rights in spectrum to private interests without at least consulting with Maori. The claims were supported by two central concepts: that radio spectrum is a natural resource, which means that the principles of consultation according to the Treaty apply to radio spectrum as to other resources; and that the spectrum is a taonga, a treasure to which Maori rights are protected by the Treaty. The claims were not successful in their explicit intentions to gain greater access to radio spectrum and consultation over the allocation process, however they have produced alternative discourses about, articulated new forms of knowledge of, radio spectrum and wireless interconnectivity. The Waitangi claims frame radio spectrum as a fluid space of extensive interconnection and knowledge transfer between people, and between humans, ancestors and gods. These new, old, ways of conceptualising the radio spectrum employ metaphors that re-conceive it as a natural resource that is not purely defined by technology or by economics, and to which property rights cannot apply. The claims also use this traditional understanding of radio spectrum to assert an imperative for Maori to gain a conceptual and legal stake in resources that may be mobilized in the service of a ‘knowledge economy’. The Waitangi claims to radio spectrum provide a lense through which to examine the (re)articulation of Maori knowledge about new technologies, and the relationship between traditional knowledge and economy.

Geography: As a side note to this discussion, I would also like to expand my longterm research interest in the relationship between wireless transmission and geography. In relation to Waitangi claims and Taranaki this particularly includes the issue of the use of mountains as sites for transmission towers. An evidential document in the 1989 Waitangi claim to radio spectrum contrasts this new use of the mountains with their ancestral meaning to Maori, for whom the transmission peaks are Taonga of the local Iwi, not just instrumental locations for broadcasting (New Zealand Maori Council and Nga Kaiwhakapumau I Te Reo, 1999: 10). This document goes on to express concern that the increase in broadcasting activity through the 1980s caused overcrowding on the mountain transmission sites as well as within the spectrum itself. Local Iwi were finding that their ancestral mountains were not necessarily available to them for broadcasting, because of interference concerns with other broadcasters, and the monopoly of transmission sites by the (then) SOEs and Telecom (New Zealand Maori Council and Nga Kaiwhakapumau I Te Reo, 1999: 10). Helen Wilson highlights a specific instance of this issue in relation to Mt Taranaki, which was presented as a Koha from Taranaki Iwi to the nation in 1979. Despite gifting the mountain to the nation, the Iwi were charged $350,000 to transmit from it (1994, 100-1). I would like to carry out some more research on the relationship of ancestral mountains and transmission technology, with an initial focus on Mt Taranaki.

Zita Joyce is a lecturer in the department of Media and Communications at the University of Canterbury. Her research explores the radio spectrum, with a special interest in artistic uses of radio technologies, both in traditional and new media. Zita was Programme Director of Christchurch radio station rdu for nearly three years, and developed several radio shows focused on experimental music, the arts, and New Zealand music. Zita has written and edited for print and web, and has organised a wide range of gigs and events. Living in Amsterdam from 2000-2003, Zita worked in telecommunications, and participated in several projects with the RIXC media lab in Latvia.

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