Chapter 4: Embracing the Tension: Treaty Responsiveness and Decolonizing Pedagogies in Aotearoa New Zealand to Inform Education in the United States and Similar Countries

This chapter revisits themes in multicultural politics and education in the local context of a treaty-based bicultural Aotearoa New Zealand in relation to the United States and similarly colonized nations. As North American Indian descent (Choctaw Nation, Oklahoma) and Māori (Ngāpuhi) women, scholars, and educators, we discuss political connections and divergences that underpin the statuses of Indigenous peoples (primarily Māori in our example) and peoples of color. We draw attention to the differing orders of rights claims of these groups within nation-states, but also to their connections as minoritized groups who continue to be underserved by education systems that privilege dominant groups. In foregrounding the political threads in multicultural education, we grapple with the relationship between multiculturalism and biculturalism (multiethnic peoples and indigenous groups) often regarded as contested or competitive to argue for a relational approach which though not ignoring tensions, suggests both paradigms are required. We work these themes through in the Aotearoa New Zealand context, where biculturalism is an official state policy and responses to multiculturalism appear nascent at best. It is our intention that this chapter introduces opportunities for creating critical spaces for educators from preservice- to veteran- to tertiary-level academics to engage in exploratory, uncomfortable, and potentially healing conversations that signal educators’ embrace of familiar tensions to move local, regional, national, and global teaching and learning communities beyond paralysis and status quo in educational contexts toward curricular reform and critical action.