Ranginui Walker in the context of Metro (magazine)

The New Zealand land confiscations took place during the 1860s to punish the Kīngitanga movement for attempting to set up an alternative Māori form of government that forbade the selling of land to European settlers. The confiscation law targeted Kīngitanga Māori against whom the government had waged war to restore the rule of British law. More than 1,200,000 hectares (3,000,000 acres) or 4.4 percent of land were confiscated, mainly in Waikato, Taranaki and the Bay of Plenty, but also in South Auckland, Hauraki, Te Urewera, Hawke's Bay and the East Coast.

Legislation for the confiscations was contained in the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863, which provided for the seizing of land from Māori tribes who had been in rebellion against the government after 1 January 1863. Its stated purpose was to achieve the "permanent protection and security" of the country's inhabitants and establish law, order and peace by using areas within the confiscated land to establish settlements for colonisation, populated initially by military settlers enlisted from among gold miners at Otago and the Colony of Victoria (Australia). Land not used by for military settlers would be surveyed and laid out as towns and rural allotments and then sold, with the money raised to be used to repay the expenses of fighting Māori. According to academic Dr Ranginui Walker, this provided the ultimate irony for Māori who were fighting to defend their own land from European encroachment: "They were to pay for the settlement and development of their lands by its expropriation in a war for the extension of the Crown's sovereignty into their territory."

In Māori culture, rangatira (Māori pronunciation: [ɾaŋatiɾa]) are tribal chiefs, the leaders (often hereditary)of a hapū (subtribe or clan). Ideally, rangatira were people of great practical wisdom who held authority (mana) on behalf of the tribe and maintained boundaries between a tribe's land (Māori: rohe) and that of other tribes. Changes to land-ownership laws in the 19th century, particularly the individualisation of land title, undermined the power of rangatira, as did the widespread loss of land under the Euro-settler-oriented government of the Colony of New Zealand from 1841 onwards. The concepts of rangatira and rangatiratanga (chieftainship), however, remain strong, and a return to rangatiratanga and the uplifting of Māori by the rangatiratanga system has been widely advocated for since the Māori renaissance began c. 1970. Moana Jackson, Ranginui Walker and Tipene O'Regan figure among the most notable of these advocates.

The concept of a rangatira is central to rangatiratanga—a Māori system of governance, self-determination and sovereignty.