ABSTRACT
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) provided a new route in 1995 centred upon truth-telling, amnesty, and forgiveness. The chapter deals with the assessments of Indigenous authors and allies within settler-colonial societies, most of whom reside in states that have lately undergone processes inspired by the TRC model, or that bear witness to ongoing legal processes that prefigure the TRC. Te Urewera Act of 2014 has transformed environment law in Aotearoa New Zealand by granting legal personhood to Te Urewera, an entity that was formerly considered a national park. Mutu cites work of legal scholars that grounds a proposal for ‘constitutional transformation’ yielding distributed governance between Maori and Crown authorities. The hugely influential ‘Kaupapa Maori’ movement has served to regenerate Maori language revitalisation, and more broadly to decolonise the research methodologies that have come to dominate and underpin research in Aotearoa New Zealand and elsewhere.
