Alan Duff’s first novel Once Were Warriors (1990) made a controversial intervention into debates on cultural politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand, seeming as it did to rewrite the discourse of indigenous rights that had been increasingly articulated over the past two decades in terms of indigenous responsibility. Rather than focusing on oppression and reparation or claiming the rights of the tangata whenua to access their ancestral land, native language and cultural practices, as other Maori writers had done, Duff presented a damning portrayal of the poverty, violence and alcoholism affecting urban Maori and advocated a ‘self-help’ ethics to redress these problems: “We work our way out. Same way as we lazed ourselves into this mess.”

This paper explores whether, alongside the accusatory narrative of self-disempowerment, a version of indigenous rights can be retrieved from Once Were Warriors and its sequels, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted (1996) and Jake’s Long Shadow (2002). It focuses particularly on the representation of children’s suffering as potentially complicating Duff’s valorisation of personal responsibility; from Beth’s determination to provide her children with their “rightful warrior inheritance” to Grace’s assertion of her “right . . . to realise [her] potential,” adult culpability is paired with a tentative acknowledgement of childhood cultural entitlement. I examine whether this ambiguity can go some way towards recuperating ‘rights’ within Duff’s contentious politics and if so, whether his rewriting of rights poses a productive challenge to idealised representations of indigenous communities or is ultimately disenabling to indigenist movements worldwide.