Dr Moana Jackson, the pioneering Māori lawyer and a global authority on Indigenous people’s rights, has died.
Jackson’s scholarship and activism has been influential in shaping public debate around colonisation and Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi, Aotearoa New Zealand’s founding document.
He died in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty, following a lengthy illness with cancer.
Māori development minister Willie Jackson – a nephew of Jackson – has paid tribute, telling the New Zealand Herald that he was “proud to have an uncle held in such high esteem and had such a brilliant mind.”
“Uncle Moana was a man who always waited to be called on and was never one to jump in front of the limelight,” Jackson said.
Born in 1948, Jackson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Rongomaiwahine, Ngāti Porou) was the son of an All Black, Everard Jackson, and brother of prominent Māori activist and trade unionist Syd Jackson.
“When I was growing up I didn’t hear the word ‘colonisation’ very much but I was always aware, I think, of its cold and unrelenting hurt,” Jackson said in an interview with the Counterfutures journal in 2017.
“So I guess colonisation politicised me, and with it a sense of the need to settle all that it has done and continues to do”.
Those experiences shaped Jackson’s work championing indigenous rights in law and working in academia over the last five decades.
After training as a lawyer and working as a Māori language teacher, Jackson studied in the US, where he also worked for the Navaho Legal Service.
After returning to New Zealand in the 1980s he co-founded Ngā Kaiwhakamarama i Ngā Ture – the Māori Legal Service – and later the Te Hau Tikanga, the Māori law commission.
In 1988, Jackson authored a groundbreaking report into Māori experiences of New Zealand’s criminal justice system, which highlighted widespread institutional racism and called for greater recognition of the impacts of colonialism on Māori.
Among other things, that report recommended the establishment of a parallel Māori justice system, a recommendation which was not implemented.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2015, Jackson said that “not a great deal has changed in 25 years”, and that it was impossible to separate the place of Māori in the prison system from the impact of colonisation, and the disputes around the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi.
In 2007, he resigned as a patron for the police after raids targeting Māori activists using contentious anti-terrorism powers. “Every act of resistance by Māori since 1840 has been met with opposition … Those who take power unjustly defend it with injustice,” he said at the time.
In recent years, Jackson led work around constitutional transformation, helping to produce a report calling for an overhaul of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements to better address Māori interests.
