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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

In my View [6]

page 13

In my View [6]

The difference between the Maori and pakeha cultures is the difference between a community of neighbours and a society of strangers. The tragic meaning and consequences of this cleavage have been poorly understood. Tragic not only for the Maoris who are steadily being absorbed by the majority culture; tragic also for the pakehas who have lived alongside a psychologically rich and varied minority culture for a hundred years, and taken nothing from it but a few place-names and a great deal of plunder.

John Waititi, that indefatigable labourer in the single-handed making of Maori reading-books for use in our schools, who died young perhaps as much from over-work as from the disease that killed him, told me once a small anecdote. When he was a little boy in the cowshed of his father’s farm, a visiting herd-tester approached him to ask him for some information. Innocently the boy replied to him in Maori. The herd-tester booted him savagely on the backside and then headed on to get the information from somebody else. I suspect that the herd-tester played a definite part in the subconscious motivation that drove John Waititi forward like a locomotive to accomplish his mission and to die.

If, as seems possible, in fifty years’ time no Maori is spoken in New Zealand except by university language students, no Maori elder is respected by his descendants, no Maori land remains in the hands of more than one person, no haka or action song is performed except as a picturesque extra laid on for visiting Americans by the hugely swollen organisation of the Tourist and Publicity Department, no graveyard is remembered, no marae is used as a meeting place – what will be the losses and the gain? The Government will smile to itself, because the Maori Wars will have ended at least in the psychological annihilation of the minority culture for which the Government has (probably not consciously) striven for a hundred years; our labour bureaus will be aware that no one is absent from the army of the depressed and dispossessed who pour in and out their doors; our advertisers will sharpen their axes for the crania of a few more passive and stupefied victims. The firm of New Zealand Ltd, which I refer to in private as the Giant Squid, will have swallowed the last canoe. But it is our own loss for which we should then be weeping; for we had a chance to become in some measure white Polynesians, and enter in some degree the community of neighbours, but we will have thrown it away through apathy and ignorance and greed.

‘Ko te Maori te tuakana. Ko te pakeha te teina . . .’. I said that, because it is true, in the Anglican Cathedral in Christchurch, when somebody had unwisely asked me to speak there. The Maori is indeed the elder brother and the pakeha the younger brother. But the teina has refused to learn from the tuakana. He has sat sullenly among his machines and studied his account books, and wondered why his soul was full of bitter dust; or else he has got page 14 up and hacked the body of his Mother – the earth we tread on – to pieces for the sake of money. If I write angrily, it is because of grief; because the kumara garden is invaded and trampled by wild pigs; because the tears of the albatross in the great tukutuku panels fall not only for the dead but for ourselves; because the Maori race (thank God) is alive, but the Maori heart may yet be killed by a wad of money and a little pinch of suburban garden earth. If Maoris truly desire to be pakehas, I have no quarrel with them; that is their freedom. But what of the pakehas who will never now be Maoris? I think we may already have destroyed what should have been our future.

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