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

Leadership and Kinship

Leadership and Kinship

The reforms dating from the 1930s which resulted from Labour’s ‘equalising’ policies had led to an increase in the quality of life among Maori. The years following World War II saw the emergence of a new generation of Maori leaders who benefited from these and other factors, such as wartime experiences (including service in the Maori Battalion), post-war urbanisation and rising educational standards. Many new leaders were not of traditional chiefly/rangatira status, and sizeable numbers rose through the ranks of the institutions of the Maori War Effort Organisation or the 1945 MSEA legislation. Others came to prominence working either directly for the Crown, especially at DMA head or district offices. A number of non-rangatira gained leadership experience through using their education or workplace experience to advance their tribes’ interests during the adaptation to modernity. Others attained positions of influence or authority through quasi-official organisations such as the MWWL, or through voluntary associations with no links at all to the state. In the early 1960s, the Department of Maori Affairs declared that since the Second World War, the various Maori leaders – in the Welfare Division, tribal committees, the Maori Women’s Welfare League and elsewhere – had experienced ‘striking success’: ‘there is as never before an abundance of leaders on a local level throughout the country’. Maori numbers also began rising in professional, craft and trade employment. There were benefits in terms of race relations from such developments: the increasing power and profile of the post-war leadership strata demonstrated to pakeha New Zealand that a commitment to Maoriness did not preclude willingness and ability to take responsible, ‘respectable’ and leading positions in the broader society.

The new Maori urban and tribal leaders were often ‘impatient with anything less than full equality’. Those emerging from the labour movement, in particular, focused their attention on working towards achieving social and economic parity with pakeha in all quarters of Maori life. At the same time, most sought to preserve those aspects of Maoridom which had survived colonisation and were seen to be capable and worthy of preservation, revival or adaptation. In this sense, they had taken on board the ideas of ‘Ngataism’, that strand of Maoridom which had emerged from the Young Maori Party of half a century before. Adherents of this school of thought, in Ngata’s words, hadpage 81 long been developing a vision of ‘a truly united Maori people … conscious in all its parts of a distinct and separate existence, but nonetheless subject to law and government [and] loyal to the flag that protects it’. Such views had become mainstream within Maoridom, accommodating rangatiratanga within Crown sovereignty but insisting on maintaining a distinctive identity, whatever the assimilative wishes of the government. Various aspects of traditional culture, and the Maori language in particular, needed proactive protection and state assistance in the process. Above all, arrangements needed to be worked out between Maori and Crown in terms of the appropriate modes of interaction between their respective authorities, including those of the tribes which underpinned the evolving concept of ‘the Maori race’.9

Despite their brief to work in – and sometimes their belief in – the tribal committee system, a number of its leading members came to form Ngataist views on making progress through the unified actions of Maoridom. This was consonant with the perspectives of many who had gained practical experience in the MWWL and other voluntary and pan-tribal organisations: there was a need to lobby as Maori rather than, or as well as, tribal representatives. In the modern urbanising world, Maori everywhere were seen to share a common interest. Pressures from Crown and private institutions, and from c in general, to fully integrate into the political economy and adopt its behavioural norms were great, and effective resistance required united action. Such a front to the Crown was urgent, with traditional values, practices and knowledge coming under enormous strain in the urban spaces, far from the customs and controls of the marae.

Anthropologists were already finding that even whanau were evolving into groups whose ‘members cooperated not on a daily basis but from time to time and on special occasions … Members had to work individually for money incomes, had limited opportunities for cooperative activity, and often had to leave their home communities in search of work’. But these changing circumstances saw ‘new variations [of the whanau] arise as migrants settle [d] and put down roots outside their ancestral communities’. Joan Metge identified a new category of whanau that was not descent/whakapapa-based, but ‘kaupapa-based’. Primarily an outcome of urbanisation, this involved Maori from different iwi, hapu and whanau coming together for a common purpose (kaupapa). The new kaupapa-based whanau complemented other pan-and non-tribal formations in the cities and big towns.

Urbanisation was also having an effect on marae throughout New Zealand, and in the rural areas in general. In 1950s Northland, Maori anthropologist Pat Hohepa noted that while ‘[t]raditional cultural ways and cultural values’ had continued, this was in ‘modified form’. Those who had left to experience urban life made periodic returns, but they had primarily become permanentpage 82 city dwellers with developing attitudes to match. These attitudes, brought back on visits, made big impacts on (especially) younger people. The combined processes of ‘abandonment and change’ had such significant local consequences that coined the word ‘whaamere’ (family) to describe what was now, in his observations, the ‘most effective socio-economic group’. Unlike the whanau of the past, whaamere kin did not cooperate on a daily basis in securing their livelihoods. Single households within the kinship grouping were now the units of day-to-day existence. Even here, households were so integrated into the broader money economy that their members often left for work in nearby towns or more distant cities. Members of the whaamere did, however, offer mutual assistance to individuals and households in times of need, and they came together on special occasions and for community events. In both city and country, modernity led not to full but to selective adoption of non-Maori ways, and often also to adaptation of tikanga and custom – eventually, too, to processes of ‘retraditionalisation’.10

Kinship, then, continued to provide an important source of identity within Maoridom, but the role of iwi, hapu and whanau in the lives of many Maori was slowly being transformed. With Maori from different tribal backgrounds increasingly coming to share experiences in the urban spaces, and given the high degree of social interaction between town and marae, many ‘new leaders’ believed that activity focused on the common interests of all Maoridom was all the more necessary. One important area of concern was combating the ongoing problem of discrimination and racism; another was the need for socio-economic improvement. Overarching everything was the question of affirming rangatiratanga.

9 Department of Maori Affairs, The Maori Today, 1964, ‘The Future’ section (for ‘striking success’ and ‘never before’ quotes); King, ‘Between Two Worlds’, p 296 (for ‘impatient with anything less’ quote); Butterworth, G V, ‘The Health of the Body, the Health of Land: A Comparative Study of the Political Objectives and Careers of Wiremu Ratana and the Ratana Movement, and Sir Apirana Ngata’, Wellington, Treaty of Waitangi Research Unit, Feb 2000, p 48 (for ‘a truly united Maori people’ quote, taken from Ngata’s ‘A Plea for the Unity of the Maori People’, Papers and Addresses of the Second Conference of the Te Aute College Students Association, Napier, 1898, p 23); Sissons, ‘The post-assimilationist thought’, pp 49–52; Hazlehurst, ‘Maori Self-Government’, p 72; Winiata, The Changing Role; Winiata, ‘Leadership’.

10 Metge, Joan, New Growth from Old: The Whanau in the Modern World, Wellington, 1995, pp 39–40, 50, 305 (for ‘centralised market economy’ and following quotes); Morris, Paul, ‘Community Beyond Tradition’, in Heelas, Paul, Lash, Scott and Morris, Paul (eds), Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, Oxford, 1996; Hohepa, Patrick, A Maori Community in Northland, Wellington, 1970, pp 93–103, 129–30 (p 93 for ‘most effective’ quote, p 129 for ‘[t]raditional cultural ways’ and ‘abandonment and change’ quotes).