Addressing Rangatiratanga

All Maori leaders, however, had to confront various and varied dilemmas and frustrations. Pakeha officials were averse to publicly recognising the existence of racism or discrimination, for example, making the task of fighting them harder. More significantly, for the long run, promoting socio-economic advance entailed encouragement of many essentially assimilationist policies. Urban Maori leaders, even those working within the Welfare Division, sometimes had to operate in the face of official disinclination to utilise their services fully – a corollary to Tirikatene being denied the Maori Affairs portfolio.

That the Crown was very slow to appoint Maori to positions of authority stemmed partly from concerns which paralleled those it held about regional and national Maori bodies: too much influence and status for (especially urban) leaders might increase the power of pan-tribal and other ‘new’ movements. This was seen as having the potential to do harm to unitary state sovereignty.page 83 In the 1950s, Maori matters were therefore often addressed as if the rural tribal past, sanctioned in the nomenclature of the tribal committee/executive structure, was the Maori reality. This resonated with a general assessment that tribal units were easier to deal with (and perhaps to ‘deal to’) than urban, pan-tribal groupings. It also possibly played to a subliminal image, whatever the official policy on assimilation, of Maori as a pre-modern tribal people finding it difficult to adjust to modernity.

Official attempts to address problems arising from socio-racial displacement in the big towns and cities were thus more intermittent and half-hearted in the 1950s than some sectors of the state wished. Some advisers, moreover, believed that special assistance to Maori through the Crown encouraged an undesirable degree of recollectivisation, and this led to some ultra-cautious policies. But increasing numbers considered that interventions brought clear advantages for the state and the citizenry as well as for Maori – such as a decrease in social distress and disorder. The solution to the dilemma of reconciling assistance with self-reliance was seen to lay in a deliberate speeding up of assimilation, bypassing or downplaying both formal and informal Maori channels which emphasised rangatiratanga and related aspirations.

One arena of official activity which eventually picked up momentum involved moving Maori away from urban areas of high indigenous population density – addressing the problem first prominently highlighted by the MWWL survey in Auckland. At first there was widespread approbation from Maori that the state was making efforts to eliminate ‘slum’ conditions. However, officials increasingly developed assimilative solutions to housing problems, such as escalating pepper-potting of Maori families among pakeha in the suburbs, and in many Maori quarters this was not appreciated. The promotion of ‘racial mixing’ in such coercive (if well meaning) ways made the creation of new organisations which were Maori in nature even more of a necessity – and a challenge – to Maori urban leaders, official and unofficial.

As Maori were becoming an established presence in the suburbs, a future generation of their young people, including significant numbers of those who would become ‘new leaders’, was growing up in the urban spaces. While there were many assimilationist pressures, family links with home marae and the existence of Maori religious cultural, sporting and other organisations meant that most did not lose their core sense of tribal and/or Maori identity. They grew up in environments in which, however bleak the future for Maoridom might seem on the surface, discussions of ways of containing or resisting assimilation were continuous – if not always (or often) couched in such terms. Their tactics and strategies included, in a reversal of dominant processes, a partial ‘colonising’ by Maori and their pakeha sympathisers of structures provided by the state. The journal Te Ao Hou, for example, established by the DMA in 1952 and edited bypage 84 Erik Schwimmer, was touted as ‘a marae on paper, where all questions of Maori can be discussed’. In its initial hosting of debates ‘on the issue of assimilation versus the retention of Maoritanga’, it promoted assimilative ‘social progress’. But it eventually became a means for increasing numbers of Maori to share ideas on methods and goals of self-determination. It became, in effect, a site of resistance to the assimilative processes which it had been set up to promote.¹¹

Maori political and intellectual leaders, then, continued to further the claims and demands of rangatiratanga in many ways and by various means. In the mid-1950s, Winiata gained great publicity (and in some quarters, notoriety) when he joined pakeha scholars such as Piddington in reminding the ‘one nation’ of New Zealand that it contained ‘two peoples’ whose relationships had yet to be worked through satisfactorily. Rather than bridging the gap between the two groups, he argued, state agencies had more often sought ‘to retain power in the hands of the dominant European’. It is ‘an illusion’, he continued, that Maori ‘rights are being preserved’ and their culture ‘held intact’. A sign that the many debates on these kinds of issues might lead to concrete developments came in 1959 with the second Young Maori Leaders’ Conference. While spearheaded by University of Auckland staff who had attended the first conference twenty years earlier, the discussions emphasised how very far the problems and potentialities had moved in the intervening years. Kaumatua and young delegates alike agreed that education was the key to Maoridom’s development in the modernising and urbanising world. They were also of one mind in their caveat to this: it was crucial that ‘education for Maori’, formal and informal, should also preserve what was best and most appropriate in Maori culture. As a result of the conference, yet another Maori pan-tribal organisation was born.

A number of the ‘young leaders’ at the 1959 conference, moreover, moved on to pioneer some of the radical forms of activism which were to take root from the late 1960s. The political and career trajectories of this new generation were based on the increased educational and vocational opportunities which had opened up to Maori youth following urbanisation and the general prosperity of the 1950s. These leaders, ironically the products of assimilationist strategies in the official education system, caused chagrin for the authorities, especially when their struggles for rangatiratanga took new and sometimes alarming forms. The radicalism of many of them – which increasingly amounted to promoting the fully-fledged implementation of Maori autonomy – was partly based on new, ‘liberationist’ ideas in the pakeha world. But it was also rooted in the struggle of, and took heart from the momentum built up by, the Maori post-war leadership and the continuous assertions of rangatiratanga by the Maori people – who refused to countenance that adaptation to urban New Zealand meant subsuming their Maori identity.¹²