ABSTRACT
The facticity of Indigenous existence is that colonization wrought and continues to wreak havoc on Indigenous people’s lives and epistemologies. The cultural juncture between the familiarization of Maori with the international civil-rights movement, misconceived notions of ‘Indigenous rights’, and the alignment with popularist sports discourses restresses Gayatri Spivak’s scathing definition of postcoloniality as ‘the failure of decolonization’. The Indigenous objects of colonization that emerged in conjunction with the biopolitical management of Maori were dependent on producing colonial apparatuses designed to dialogue with Maori via physical statements, and to produce Indigenous bodies recognizable through their natural physicality. The Maori soldier was heralded for his domesticated savagery in the service of the Commonwealth. The education system as a crucial component of the ‘technology of power’ supplied the State mandated physical curricula, which invariably forced Maori into physical vocations.
