Notes on Maori Education

1

Maori Education was at the head of the conference agenda at Palmerston. He tino pai. But what is meant by Maori Education? Does it mean an education designed to turn Maori children, as painlessly as possible, into brown pakehas. Or does it mean a possible social role to fulfil, on either side of the Maoripakeha fence? From the deep and considered address of Dr Ranginui Walker page 544 I took it that the Education Department, despite its well-bruised conscience, is still unconsciously thinking in terms of a long-term cultural assimilation.

The Government is still the pig that invades the Maori kumara patch, and what he does not eat he chews and tramples and spoils. God forbid that teachers should regard themselves simply as Government employees. They must be able to act independently, and be honest enough to risk finding themselves out of a job. In the past, teachers have belted kids for speaking the Maori language in the classroom or in the playground. Like Nazi gauleiters they carried out obediently and unthinkingly the Government’s deliberate policy of cultural genocide. The strength and skill of the Maori guerrilla fighters had prevented physical genocide during the Land Wars. But if you kill a man’s sacred culture, it may hurt him more than physical death. No shadow of the policy of forced assimilation must remain in our classrooms. It is the duty of all New Zealand teachers, as far as their hearts will allow them to soak themselves in Maoritanga and begin to learn the Maori language. It cannot be done simply by an intellectual process. Pakehas have to learn to look at the world through Maori eyes.

2

Let us remember that our education system is the great plague-pit of this country. Servility, fear, anxiety, boredom, the cynical self-interest of place-getters, dishonest thinking, sentimentality walking hand in hand with sadism, a mediocre social philosophy – it is not unnatural that a teacher well-conditioned to greet a bullying inspector with a show of window-dressing should ignore the Maoriness of the Maori children in his class, and add the attempt at cultural genocide to the list of his crimes. To participate in Maoritanga in a real way, in or out of the classroom, would require more than a reshaping of the syllabus. It will undoubtedly require for most teachers something like a deep personality change. They will have to acquire in some measure a Maori mind. They will have to modify their views on property, style of dress, style of speech, style of living and the relation between the sexes. They will have to begin to see the value and beauty of the culture of the poor.

3

‘Ka piko te nga’ – the rain is falling. ‘He roimata ua, he roimata tangata’ – the tears of the sky are falling along with the tears of man. You must imagine the people, elders and young people, men with brown-lined faces and women in black shawls, standing round an open grave. The rain is falling on the wet clods. This is the tangi, where the tribe takes the death journey out of love, with the one who has died and return to wash their hands outside the tribal page 545 hall and eat together in the land of the living. The tangi carries the weight of the death as a great net carries a boulder.

Do you understand me? The tears of God are falling when a man dies. Perhaps the tears on the faces of the tribe, rain mixed with tears, are their own tears and the tears of God. A desacralised culture cannot understand a culture whose folk sayings contain a sacred meaning. You may have to purify your sons to participate in Maoritanga. There are no observers, no photographs, at the tangi, only participants in a sacred event. You may have to reorder your scale of values. If your contact with Maoritanga is mere lip-service, because it’s the thing to do, or if you say – ‘Here’s another bloody subject to teach!’ You’ll get nowhere, neither you nor the children. You have a chance to transcend your narrow culture. Why throw away the orange and keep the skin?

4

My son Hoani had Maoritanga in his veins. In your schools you treated him as an empty cipher. At thirteen he made bold, vivid, abstract painting, using the Maori colours – black, white, red, brown – that he knew already by seeing his mother Te Kare making headbands. You put them on your walls. You gave his hungry mind no Maori food at all – no language, no mythology, no art. You didn’t even guess he was a devoutly religious Buddhist. You grabbed him by his hair and tried to shake his head off. ‘Boy, get a hair-cut!’ You were too arid to give a stuff about what went on in his heart and head. He told me you were idiots, and I had to agree with him.

At seventeen, your bureaucratic cousins the police took charge of him and stuck him in a solitary cell for three months, for the crime of being in a flat where another boy had some very ordinary sedative pills, the kind you can easily buy over a chemist’s counter. If you get them, you’ll get them legally and not be prosecuted. You don’t belong to the culture of the poor.

A few days before his release Hoani saw a greenish-white star shining on the wall of his cell – he called it ‘taku-whetu’ – you don’t know what the words mean. He wrote to me – ‘It shows itself when nga atua of my mother’s tribe are present to me. They told me I’d be released soon.’ The star was an omen sign belonging to the world of matewa, the Maori name for the night life of the soul.

I think Hoani had got the impression that you didn’t have souls. You lost the battle to get him to use his heart and mind creatively in your schools, because you cared for nothing but your work schedules, not for my son, a boy with a mind far deeper than my own, a boy with a Maori mind; you never even began to fight the battle.

If he dies in Mount Eden Gaol, fighting the screws, or in the bin with a hole in his head, I will not lament too much, because his courage is very great, and nobody can buy his friendship. The sacred greenstone can be given, not page 546 bought – at times he has given it to his foolish father. I do not know of any greater jewel. I won’t even come and shoot you for helping to bugger up his life. I understand the death coma you experience in our institutions. It is too late for you to meet my son. He was among you and you never saw him. But I want you to open your eyes and see the children of others.

The problem is radical. As the Maori child climbs the educational ladder, he progressively loses whatever Maoritanga he possesses. If he does not climb the educational ladder he remains imbedded in the culture of the poor.

I hold only that he should be given a real choice.

Some don’t get on badly. That’s true. People can be enormously resilient. Let’s not keep our compassion for the Maori child. The pakeha child has no communal nature to fall back on. He may be in a tougher situation: to be a slave-owner or to be a slave.

The Maori child climbs the ladder towards a mirage of equality, even monetary equality. The values of the hard core of the pakeha middle-class are far too ethnocentric and paranoid to allow a non-European an open and real equality. Equality is a bus that the Maori never quite catches on the road to total assimilation. If assimilated he is doomed to live in a neo-cultural void.

Do the schools actually have to be the digestive organ of the majority culture? If they have to be, the answer is to burn down the schools.

If a genuine participation in Maoritanga becomes part of the life of our schools, then we will actually be rebelling against the values of the majority culture. It could change our society. But it would take an honesty and courage we may find hard to find.

You have to eat bread to know what it tastes like.

1972 (700)