The Native Lands Act 1865 was an Act of Parliament in New Zealand that was designed to remove land from Māori ownership for purchase by European settlers as part of settler colonisation.
[2] The full title of the act is: "An Act to Amend and Consolidate the: Laws relating to Lands in the Colony in which· the Maori Proprietary Customs still exist and to provide for the ascertainment of the Titles to such Lands and for Regulating the Descent, thereof and for other purposes.
"[2] The 1865 act further individualised Māori land title with no more than ten owners, meaning the many others in the hapū or whānau that had ownership and usage rights to the land essentially had those right extinguished.
In 1865 the justice minister at the time Henry Sewell said the aim of the act was "the detribalisation of the Māori – to destroy, if it were possible, the principle of communism upon which their social system is based and which stands as a barrier in the way of all attempts to amalgamate the Māori race into our social and political system.
[6] Between 1870 and 1892, two million hectares of Māori land was transferred to Pākehā ownership.