Sixteen leading legal scholars ask who guards and protects Indigenous knowledge now, and in the future.

From mānuka honey to haka, and across patents, trade marks, copyright and geographical indications, the protection of traditional knowledge, cultural expressions and genetic resources is one of the most complex legal and political challenges of our time.

On the fifteenth anniversary of Ko Aotearoa Tēnei, the Waitangi Tribunal’s landmark report on the Wai 262 claim, sixteen leading legal scholars offer new perspectives on how authority over and guardianship of traditional knowledge, cultural expressions and genetic resources might be recognised and protected in contemporary legal systems.

Ko Aotearoa Ināianei takes up the wero laid down by the original Wai 262 claimants and extends their kaupapa into the present. The chapters confront pressing and unresolved questions. How should offensive or derogatory uses of taonga be remedied? Could legal personhood be applied to intangible Māori taonga such as waiata, and what would that recognition require? What might knowledge governance grounded in tikanga Māori involve, and how might it challenge or reshape Western intellectual property frameworks?

Through wide-ranging essays engaging with law, policy, theory, science and culture, the authors advance aspirational visions of cultural ownership, control, inheritance and identity, grounded in the shared whakapapa of people, land and knowledge. Ko Aotearoa Ināianei contributes to global debates on Indigenous authority and knowledge protection.

Editors

Jayden Houghton (Rereahu Maniapoto) is a senior lecturer and assistant dean at the Faculty of Law, University of Auckland | Te Wāhanga Ture o Waipapa Taumata Rau. He is an author of the books Tikanga Māori and State Law (Thomson Reuters, 2025) and Aotearoa New Zealand Law: Foundations and Method (3rd ed., Thomson Reuters, 2025). His research, which primarily focuses on the protection of knowledge and culture, is published in international journals including the International Journal of Human Rights, the Torts Law Journal and Legalities, and the leading domestic law journals the New Zealand Law Review and New Zealand Universities Law Review.

David V Williams FRSNZ is a professor emeritus at the Faculty of Law, University of Auckland | Te Wāhanga Ture o Waipapa Taumata Rau. He currently sits on the Waitangi Tribunal and the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira Trust Board. David has authored or co-authored multiple books, including ‘Te Kooti Tango Whenua’: The Native Land Court 1864–1909 (Huia, 1999), A Simple Nullity? The Wi Parata Case in New Zealand Law & History (Auckland University Press, 2011) and The Shapeshifting Crown: Locating the State in Postcolonial New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Endorsements

‘A decade and a half on, Ko Aotearoa Ināianei brings together contemporary reflections from leading scholars on the findings and recommendations of Ko Aotearoa Tēnei. Contributors variously support, extend, challenge or outright disagree with the views we expressed. This is excellent. It that the issues are as important in 2026 as they were in 2011 and reflects the ongoing work of thinking seriously about what it means to perfect the Tiriti partnership in practice – an endeavour that, by its nature, will remain unfinished, generation upon generation.’

— from the Foreword by Justice Joe Williams, Supreme Court of New Zealand