Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Maori and the State: Crown-Māori relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1950-2000

The Official Committees

The Official Committees

Along with many other indigenous people globally, Maori were becoming experienced at utilising for their own ends the laws, practices and modes of representation imposed upon them. By 1952 the number of committees had increased under the new government, up from 381 tribal committees to 440 and from 65 tribal executives to 75, a reflection partly of their expansion to towns and cities. The expansion had been encouraged by National, once it had seen early on in its administration that the MWO’s Maori institutions could offer (among other things) useful mechanisms for urban adjustment. Committees could become vehicles for social as well as economic ‘progress’, ‘fitting the Maori fully and usefully into the community’. This could contribute to an emerging ‘National Blend’ that would ‘weld all in one nation’. From the beginning, the system had been provided with model by-laws which reflected Crown ambitions. The committees faced sanctions if they deviated too far from these blueprints or from other administrative ‘suggestions’. Officials attended committee meetings ex officio ‘for the purpose of guiding and leading as far as possible the activities of the Executives and Tribal Committees’.

While the committees gradually became key vehicles for rangatiratanga, albeit stronger in some areas than others, the struggle was always uphill. In 1956, Maori Affairs reminded Maori bluntly that the committees came under departmental direction. In face of such attitudes and associated difficulties, resignations were many. A number of committees (especially those in depopulating areas) were scarcely functioning by mid-decade, although state assessments of inactivity sometimes reflected disinclination by committees to submit paperwork and/or inclination to do things other than those outlined in their official terms of reference.

Some committees proved ‘more successful in carrying out administration directives than in formulating the plans and activities and hopes of the people’. These and others tended to take heart from the concessionary tone of state pronouncements; the system was said to constitute ‘the true nature of Maori self-government’, supposedly giving Maori greater local government powers than those possessed by the general population. While this was hardly the case in reality, committees were able frequently to pressure local government agencies on behalf of their people, with considerable success. A tribal committee in Onehunga, for example, persuaded the borough council to provide Maoripage 52 with a community centre at very low rent, and established sporting, social and cultural subcommittees which themselves worked with local authorities. Committees sometimes dealt confidently with central authority too. To combat racism in its area, the Pukekohe tribal committee secured support for the establishment of a Maori-dominated school, an institution which in turn became ‘a rallying point’ for the retention and revival of local Maori power, culture and ‘philosophy’. Through such efforts, the committee gradually increased its ability to act locally, with the authority born of successful ventures. Such activities, as one observer put it in 1952, were at the forefront of a ‘social revolution on a small scale’.4

Insofar as Maori were successful in the MWO/Welfare Division at carving out their own autonomistic spaces, however, this generally needed to be in association with performing functions required by the Crown. The Onehunga committee, for all its autonomist impulses, carried out many a function or activity approved by state officials as fitting into their adjustment and assimilation agendas. In the rural areas, many concentrated on procuring state assistance to raise the living standards of those who remained in the rohe. They hoped that, in the process, a viable tribal core would stay on rather than migrate. In the early 1950s, Maharaia Winiata found in a semi-rural locality that both the tribal committee’s official franchise and its links with the Welfare Division gave mana and prestige to its leaders, providing a base from which to pursue development for the people. With success in obtaining subsidies and other funding, the committee gained greater influence. But, echoing leaders who feared ‘governmental invasion into Maori affairs’, the tribe was acutely aware that cooperation with the Crown came at a price that could, if they were not careful, undermine the development of rangatiratanga. In short, trade-offs had to be negotiated very carefully, with Maori in each local area having to assess how far they would accept state help, and in what fashion.

Broadly speaking, urban committees in the 1950s developed in different ways from their rural counterparts. Both Joan Metge and Winiata, observing the committee system in an Auckland urban context, noted that members were selected on a wide range of criteria that included modern as well as customary factors. While traditional leaders tended to dominate committee proceedings in rural environments, the ‘educated person [was] very much in evidence’ in the urban committee. It was in this context that a kind of division of labour arose, with better educated Maori brought ‘to the fore’ and traditional leaders (especially elders – kaumatua and kuia) called upon mostly for ceremonial and similar purposes. The search for leaders able to operate in a pakeha environment could be a slow one. Development of the necessary expertise was not helped by deliberate educational policies which stereotypedpage 53 Maori in ways which restricted their potential; in 1956, less than 3.5% of the Maori workforce lay within the ‘professional, technical, and related fields’.

Auckland city’s tribal executive, representing the combined weight of its half dozen committees, was (in contrast to many of the rural areas) the ‘most important body’ in the local official system. Its leadership frequently negotiated with and lobbied non-Maori organisations, both official and non-official. But the problems of representing a newly-arrived and hence relatively atomised population were manifold. Many young Maori did not know of the existence of the committee system, partly because of their mobility. Those who did know, were often not inclined to attend meetings or other activities sponsored by the committees: partly because of problems of transport, timing and the like, but also due to a much reported disrespect for authority among those ‘liberated’ from the constraints of the marae. All this was in contrast to many marae-based committees, where attendance was relatively easy to obtain from those in the surrounding pa, for reasons which included proximity, tribal social control mechanisms and lack of alternative activities.

In Auckland, as in other urban areas, there were tensions within the system between old and young, and many difficulties inherent in a situation in which leaders dealt with constituents from a multiplicity of tribes. Their limited access, in a non-tribal operating environment, to both coercive power and tribal sanctions was just one of many problems they identified. The urban leaders, in short, had to struggle hard to bring the community together, and at one point, only two of Auckland’s six committees were functioning well. Despite all the problems, however, the results of the work of these two committees – as well as that of the executive – indicated that the rewards could be great. Committees frequently came to focus their attention on specific tasks, reflecting a combination of what they were good at and what their communities most needed. Many of the urban ones sought mostly to alleviate difficulties surrounding drinking and other causes of social disruption, often using the services of their wardens extensively in doing so. Over and above holding such negative social control roles, successful committees were significant and proactive players in carving out viable Maori communities in pakeha cities and suburbs.5

Anthropological studies have provided good insights into the workings of the MWO/Welfare Division’s committees. Ranginui Walker’s Auckland-based study of a tribal committee found, like other studies, that its members focused their work on a community centre and its attendant activities. Such foci of committee attention often had a degree of pakeha involvement – sometimes, but by no means always, as a result of intermarriage. In the new suburbs, committees would often engage in infrastructural development that wouldpage 54 assist all people living in the community regardless of ethnicity. This reflected a reality that pakeha who did not come into any great contact with Maori did not fully appreciate (if at all): Maori aspirations were not separatist, but were geared to establishing Maori control and exercising rangatiratanga in its many forms within the dominant political economy.

Maori-run institutions opening the doors to pakeha might also be seen in some circumstances as a reflection of the overwhelmingly assimilationist paradigm in mainstream society. In urban settings, in particular, pressures to conform to pakeha ways were intense and sustained. The MWO’s institutions had been established by the Crown partly with such goals in mind, and even initially resistant Maori could be inexorably drawn into such an agenda – taking on western beliefs and behavioural patterns and helping impose them on other members of the Maori community. Official committees, in fact, often became agencies for ‘policing the mind’ as well as ‘policing the body’ – often with the help of their wardens for these two (interrelated) purposes. In a typical case, a welfare officer warned a tribal committee in 1950 that if it did not bring a family ‘up to scratch’ in its attitudes and activities, the family’s house would be placed under official observation until matters improved. In such circumstances, committees had little choice but to work with the family or risk even greater state intervention. In assisting their own people, committees often had to accept hegemonic ‘received wisdom’ as their guiding norm. At best, the committees constituted ‘separate but parallel strategies of adaptation … on terms that respect [ed] Maori cultural values’, but in which the forces of ‘socio-cultural separation and self-determination’ were necessarily in problematic ‘interplay [with] the forces of assimilation and adaptation’.

By the later 1950s, committees operating under the MSEA Act which did not engage in ‘approved’ activities were receiving little official support, or none at all if they were carrying out activities of which the Crown strongly disapproved. Many were struggling financially and in other ways. A number of those which did meet with official approval had become limited in their foci, and some of them had reportedly become compromised in their search for effective rangatiratanga by the nature (and sometimes sheer load) of Crown requirements. Nevertheless, many committees achieved some kind of equilibrium between the demands of the Crown and their own autonomist aspirations, and this was sufficient to ensure that the state did not abolish the institution. The flaxroots components of the Welfare Division could no longer be seen, even by the most conservative of bureaucrats and politicians, as a potential rival to state power. An American observer at the time concluded that the very best Maori could hope for was no more than ‘a certain measure’ of cultural, rather than political, ‘autonomy and separateness’.6

page 55

4 New Zealand Herald, 10 May 1952 (for ‘Blend’ and ‘weld’ quotes) and 2 August 1952 (for ‘social revolution’ and ‘rallying point’ quotes); for general coverage of relevant points, see Hill, ‘Social 303 Revolution’, especially p 3 (for ‘usefully’ quote), p 6 (for ‘philosophy’ quote); Ritchie, James E, The Making of a Maori: A Case Study of a Changing Community, Wellington, 1963, p 26 (for ‘more successful’ quote).

5 Lange, Maori Well-Being, pp 27–30; Winiata, The Changing Role, p 132 (for ‘governmental invasion’ quote); Winiata, ‘Leadership’, p 22 (for ‘most important’ quote), p 26 (for ‘educated person’ and ‘to the fore’ quotes); Metge, New Maori Migration, pp 215–20; Walker, ‘Maori People Since 1950’, p 500 (for ‘professional, technical’ quote); Hill, ‘Social Revolution’, pp 5–6.

6 Walker, Ranginui J, ‘The Politics of Voluntary Association: A Maori Welfare Committee in a City Suburb’, in Kawharu, I Hugh (ed), Conflict and Compromise: Essays on the Maori Since Colonisation, Wellington, 1975 (2003 ed); Labrum, ‘Bringing families up to scratch’, p 171 (for ‘up to scratch’ quote); Fleras, ‘Descriptive Analysis’, p 303 (for ‘separate but parallel’ and ‘socio-cultural separation’ quotes); Ausubel, Maori Youth, p 174 (for ‘certain measure’ quote).