Local government engagement practices and Indigenous interventions: Learning to listen to Indigenous voices

Abstract

This article examines the Māori consultation and engagement processes in a development project framed as climate adaptation and carried out by a local council that sought to expel Māori from ancestral land. Drawing on a dialogue between Kaupapa Māori (KM) theory and the culture-centered approach (CCA), land is centered as the basis for everyday meanings of health. We depict the processes of culture-centered organizing in co-creating voice infrastructures at the “margins of the margins” of the community, which serve as the spaces for voicing Indigenous knowledge to resist the modern-day confiscation of ancestral Māori land. The dialogue between KM theory and the CCA foregrounds communicative inequalities within community spaces, working with the concept “margins of the margins” to center Māori voices that have historically been silenced.