The Māori experience of colonization is reflected in the experience of Indigenous peoples in other settler states who have also been systematically dispossessed and alienated by state policies and practices, and where they continue to be over-represented in every negative social indicator, including high rates of incarceration (McIntosh & Coster, 2017). The settler states have sought both to control Indigenous lives and to dispossess them of material and cultural resources in
what Cunneen and Porter have called a process of ‘immiseration’ (2017, p. 669). Immiseration, in this instance, is the process of economic impoverishment through an organized system of racialized, state-controlled labour (Cunneen, 2013) and the related processes of cultural impoverishment. Redress and response to harm
must capture the entirety of the context in which something harmful occurs. In reflecting on physical, sexual, psychological, emotional, and family violence,
we must ensure that we address and seek to redress state, colonial/neo-colonial, legislative, structural, political, economic, cultural, religious, institutional, and collective violence (McIntosh & Curcic, 2020, p. 226). The latter are forms of
systemic violence that often provide the context for the former. Legislative violence, for example, has both historical and contemporary cases where the impact of legislation on Indigenous peoples is marked. In many cases, legislative vio-
lence produces and reproduces economic impoverishment. The colonial state used legislative powers to alienate land and to punish (often by incarceration and other forms of detention) those original owners that sought to defend their lands and
resources. Neo-colonial legislation has allowed the ‘legal’ removal of children from their families and too often has also attempted to remove their culture and identity. (Opening paragraph of chapter). Record #8439