korero

debating the maori bloodlines issue

dr rawiri taonui
this is interesting. i have printed the whole article, it's a bit of a read, but it gives a flavour with regard to how things are here in nz. in my opinion, as long as we have bigoted idiots (brash, haden) refusing to accept how we (maori) define ourselves, we will just have to keep up our fight for our own sense of who we are. as for their "one law for all" cry, i want it too. i am sick of reading about maori who are punished differently from pakeha in their [not ours] court system. one punishement for us [jail], various lesser degree punishments for them is not "one law for all." the donsta and frankee do not get to tell me who i am. i for one, am tired of their superior attitude. they were not born to rule.

08 october 2006
don brash's comments on maori bloodlines have stirred debate about the nature of maoridom and national's policies. sunday star-times columnist frank haden and dr rawiri taonui, head of the school of maori and indigenous studies at canterbury university, debate this divisive issue.

dr rawiri taonui
don brash's claim that maori are no longer indigenous because there are few, if any, full-blooded maori left is nothing but old-fashioned colonial racism in new-age disguise.
while whakapapa or descent is a prerequisite for identity, the exclusive application of the stockman's blood quantum in this way is deeply offensive. in colonial times the quantum doctrine, skin colour, and weird things such as head shape, the size of the penis and female buttocks were used to position dark skinned peoples along an evolutionary continuum between animals and europeans. black, brown and yellow were inferior and evolving toward whiteness.
the assumptions underwrote policy from 1840 to recent times. governor george grey, henry williams, richard taylor, elsdon best and percy smith -administrators, missionaries and teachers alike - believed maori were children in the lower stages of human culture. the infamous 1960 hunn report classified three kinds of maori: half-castes, who were more european-like, lived in cities, spoke no maori and were advanced; those who were still maori but lived in the cities and were making progress; and those who spoke maori, lived in rural areas, and remained "backward and retarded".
colonial governments and racist regimes used the doctrine to deny basic human rights. dark aborigines were deemed non-human so britain could possess an uninhabited australia. north american colonies classified indians, african slaves and mixed offspring. the united states graded hawaiians. nazi germany applied the same principles as racial science. in pre-1974 new zealand, maori who were less than half-maori did not always officially qualify as maori.
among its several assumptions, the doctrine presumed intermarriage accelerated evolutionary progress. adherents welcomed intermarriage as a way of obliterating difference. dilute dark blood, lighten the skin, create a more intelligent and evolved person. hence, post-korean war australia granted the franchise to aborigines who reached the half-caste threshold, although, as a check against residual pollution, they still had to prove they were "civilised".
these views drove the view that maori would and should die out or assimilate. but the opposite happened. the maori population recovered from 35,000 at the turn of the 20th century to over 600,000 today.
brash's belief that the arrival of his forebears in 1848 somehow negates the indigeneity of maori is an affront to the 6000 indigenous peoples who number 500 million in the world. indigenous is more than hanging around for a generation or five.
indigenous peoples are the descendants of the original first occupants. they are first nations, first peoples, tangatawhenua. later arrivals have nothing to lose and everything to gain by respecting that. in a weak attempt to regain the post-orewa popularity of 2004, brash threatens the reverse by appealing to the innate fears of those who have difficulty accepting brown people as co-equals.

indigenous peoples also descend from pre-state societies marginalised politically, economically, socially, culturally and ideologically through western colonisation. brash tramples the tragedy of this reality when he blames maori for the disproportionately negative social indices - it's their own fault.

this rhetoric ignores the cumulative intergenerational impact of colonisation. the present is shaped by the past. when the land was taken, maori lost their economic base. maori were excluded from political power. economic and political disempowerment impeded providing the basic needs of tribes and families. it undermined development, causing under-performance in education, the main avenue of upward mobility. education was also prejudiced. the barriers were insurmountable. one generation could not provide for the next. most of the next generation repeat the cycle. the dominant culture expected the subordinate culture to fail and condemned them for it, while garnishing its own table with the spoils from the land.

brash says poor maori choices cause poor maori health and a failure of maori to study law, despite having places reserved for them. however, the poor practice poor health the world over. poverty and despair level choice. affirmative action and equity initiatives in education fail because they assume deficits on the part of maori rather than institutions.

race versus need is a rhetorical smoke screen. maori have the greatest need and that is to be treated without prejudice. brash's cry of one law for all ignores the cumulative impact of a history of racist legislation, court decisions, government policy and continuing institutional barriers.

indigenous is also about preserving and transmitting to future generations cultural identities, social institutions, customary practices and spiritual values about ancestors, land and the natural world. brash diminishes and dismisses the identity of the descendants of a people who have lived here for 1000 years.

he mistakenly thinks new zealand is whitening. it is browning. the maori population is growing faster than the european one. children of maori descent will comprise 40 per cent of all school children by 2050. more than that, any person of maori descent can call themselves maori. there is new pride in doing so, less fear. gone are the days when people hid their maoriness because of the stigma and discrimination of mono-cultural white new zealand.

it is disturbing that a deliberately divisive person might be the next leader of a multicultural maori, pakeha, pasifika and asian country. archaic, antiquated, anachronistic, backward and inferior views have no place in a civilised society. i prescribe evolution.

frank haden
don brash's attack on demands for indigenous status for everyone who feels like a maori is one of the most effective barrages he has mounted in his campaign to lead the next government. by insisting maori people can't claim to be a distinct indigenous group because, after a couple of centuries of racial dilution by interbreeding, few if any full-blooded ones remain, he has struck gold.

if he follows up this success, summoning his best advisers to help join battle with adroit political stair-dancers winston peters and pita sharples, he will rekindle the fires lit by his memorable orewa speech of 2004, when he promised to dump laws that give maori people preferment based on the colour of their skins.

this time he has put his finger on the most vulnerable point of maori activists' claim for special treatment -that anyone can become a maori by choice as well as by birth.

we can work this out from the shrill reaction to his eminently sound assessment.

"there goes brash again, kicking us when we are down," cry the politically correct of all skin shades from pink to brown.

these people are left cruelly exposed as they flounder about trying to justify their proposition that because some maori settlers got here before the first white ones, all their descendants are entitled to regard themselves as special, as part of a separate racial group that automatically goes to the front of the handout queue.

they have no answer to people like brash who point out that many who claim they are maori have far more pinkish people than brown among their ancestors.

these off-pink people should logically be classified as non-maori when the goodies are being distributed, or when concessions are made to maori criminals whining that their race entitles them to special privileges.

brash also struck a nerve with the rest of us out here, already alarmed to hear the extraordinary statement by high court justice david baragwanath that maori people might need separate legal treatment.

we agree with brash that there must be one set of laws for everyone, regardless of skin colour.

the ill-advised crew attacking brash included senior national mp georgina te heuheu, leaving herself open to ridicule when she said that whether or not you were maori was a matter of practices, customs and language, not the proportions of your maori and non-maori blood.

it was not surprising she was joined by auckland university academic dr lynette carter in this desperate attempt to show that being a maori is a matter of how you behave, not who your parents are. carter, regarded as an expert in "blood quantum", said that what made people maori or non-maori was their degree of participation in and belonging to the maori community.

the bizarre conclusion both these women had come to, in effect, was that a person's race was not involuntary, as we had all naively believed, but a matter of choice. they would have been better off listening to highly-respected academic dr elizabeth rata as she told the annual conference of the skeptics in auckland last weekend that politicised ethnicity subverts democracy when it takes precedence over citizenship as a person's primary political status.

a former fulbright scholar with her own unchallengeable whakapapa, rata works in postgraduate studies at auckland university and knows her stuff. she pointed out that since the 1970s we have ignored our national identity by prioritising ethnicity disguised as biculturalism.

maori party co-leader sharples was intellectually dishonest when he said brash's argument would lead to the extinction of the indigenous maori nation once a certain blood threshold was reached.

brash has never called for the racially defined maori segment to disappear.

all he wants, and all we want, is for the privileges that now attach to the group to disappear.

sharples continued with a mysticism-shrouded claim that maori ancestry is indivisible, that no matter how many of your grandparents were non-maori, you are still mokopuna. this means if you are part-maori you are maori, never mind how many non-maori people lurk in the family tree. we out here are never going to accept such a proposition.

peters, the perennial jester, has made a mistake in conveniently forgetting his own history of objecting to special treatment for maori people, and deciding by his own tortuous thinking that brash's questioning of indigenous status is now somehow "evil". he showed he has lost touch with us out here when he attacked the brash view of maori blood proportions as a prescription for denying the minority race any legal status as maori.

too right that's what it would mean, and that's exactly what we want. if i go into a court with a maori, i don't want to have to allow for the fact that i will be fighting with one hand behind my back because my opponent has legal status as a maori.

Labels: bloodlines, don brash, donsta, frank haden, maori, rawiri taonui

posted by mystified @ 3:07 pm