Wardens, Communities and State

With the very existence of wardens under intensifying critical scrutiny, Maori communities generally responded protectively. As with the Maori schools, in effect Maori had appropriated a Crown-initiated and accredited institution as ‘their own’. Maori committees affirmed that wardens were their much needed ‘eyes and ears’ as well as their strong arm. Responding to considerable pressure from the Maori associations and elsewhere within Maoridom, elements in both the DMA and other government institutions endorsed Maori communities’ calls for continuance of the warden system. Faced with the potential disappearance of wardens, the New Zealand Police also came out strongly in their support, despite their misgivings about how aspects of the system had developed. When the NZMC’s subcommittee on wardens met in Wellington in 1970, it endorsed continuance of the wardens: while they were established by legislative and ministerial fiat, they constituted a Maori ‘cultural right’. They gave much needed organisational strong-arm assistance to communities which were ‘helping themselves’, and could assist mediation between their leaders and those members who were actually or potentially in difficulty of various kinds. In 1971, after much internal deliberation, the Crown agreed that, for the time being, wardens were integral to the work of the NZMC system.

Nevertheless, debate over their role and function continued, and changes in approach occurred as a consequence. There was, in particular, a deliberate lowering of the official profile of the warden system. Relatedly, both DMA and NZMC publicity now tended to de-emphasise the policing role of wardens and instead to highlight their community work, almost a reversal of previouspage 129 stances. By the mid-1970s, in any case, controversy over the wisdom of separate institutions for Maori was dying. A significant degree of positive pakeha response to the recent ‘renaissance’ within Maoridom had helped legitimate the possibility of things being done in different ways in Maori communities if these were genuine reflections of Maori desires. Difficulties with regard to the warden system now centred on a lack of systematisation of wardens’ activities, as communities developed ‘their own’ ways of managing social control. The wardens’ association, accordingly, became moribund, causing the DMA, the Maori Council and elements within the wardens movement to work on ways of reconstructing a national body.

Eventually, a government-financed meeting at Ngaruawahia in November 1979 made such progress that a new association was established in 1980. This technically constituted a subcommittee of the NZMC, and so although the wardens system became more streamlined and regularised, it also became more fully officialised. There were now to be tighter controls on appointments, for example: after nomination by Maori committees, names of candidates needed to be approved first by district Maori councils and then at the highest level. Recruits, furthermore, would now be professionally trained, and they would have a warrant to act anywhere in the country rather than just in their localities. These professionalising tendencies mirrored trends in both state and society.

On one plane, such developments were welcomed by most Maori committees. But there remained some concern that an officially supported, centralised body to superintend the wardens system could jeopardise flaxroots control. There was also a worry that certain of the new developments seemed to be moving back towards emphasising the auxiliary policing role of wardens rather than stressing service to the community, and that in any case their community work was becoming too heavily state-prescribed. Certainly, wardens were increasingly expected to conform to standardised rules and procedures, and act as exemplars and enforcers of ‘western standards’. It seemed to some observers that, inexorably, those volunteering to be wardens were being drawn into the state’s plans for management of its Maori citizenry. It was a familiar problem: while wardens were ‘in the vanguard of a drive to achieve Maori goals’, as Maori communities saw it, the Crown had a different underlying motivation. This was, in the words of a ‘participant observer’ among the wardens, writing in 1980, to ‘provide assistance to the Maori public but for the ultimate benefit and within the framework of pakeha power structures’.

By the end of the 1970s, however, government policies had moved far from the rampant assimilationism of the immediate post-Hunn years, and so the convergence of benefits for both Crown and Maori ensured that the wardens system would survive. For the state, wardens were valuable agents of order imposition, order maintenance and social control. Despite the tightening ofpage 130 state controls on wardens, community-based Maori, both in city and rural spaces, still tended to see them as agents of localised autonomy. Certainly, wardens generally operated in accord with the wishes of those who worked in or with the Maori committees. In turn, the committees often had allies within kinship-based networks, other local or marae committees and official agencies, as well as liaising with local police personnel and welfare officials among others – and so the wardens system penetrated and interacted with a great many social and bureaucratic arenas.

While wardens were agents of the state, then, they were also – and, in some areas, increasingly – operatives on behalf of community aspirations, especially insofar as such goals were channelled through officially sanctioned leadership structures. Through their work with emerging new leadership strata in the urban areas in particular, wardens were important in the reconstruction of Maori communities in pan-or non-tribal environments. Some of the wardens carved out semi-autonomous spaces in those communities, and the most successful were often those who interacted well with Maori and pakeha alike. Generally, the evidence suggests that the Maori wardens’ endeavours were appreciated by Maori from most walks of life, their authority often respected even by the alienated young people of the cities. Whatever their objective location in the corpus of the state disciplinary apparatus, therefore, they could also be seen as embodiments of Maori agency – of rangatiratanga. Although in one way ‘symbolic of a paternalistic and indirect strategy of State control’, then, wardens also worked for ‘the benefit of the entire Maori community’. ‘Their objective’, as outlined in the constitution of the original Maori Wardens’ Association in 1968, was ‘Maori self-determination’.¹⁶