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

Responding to Challenge

Responding to Challenge

As mid-century approached, tribal organisation was coming under strain, with ‘drift’ to the large towns and cities starting to become a huge and rapid migration. From 1948, the Crown assisted rural Maori to gains skills necessary for urban life, and the government began to implement (in the words of the Secretary of Labour) ‘practical measures for ensuring the ultimate absorption of the Maori Race into full employment’, providing, for example, temporary accommodation in the cities. The disciplined and ethnically-situated modes of behaviour required in collectively-orientated rural communities began to yield to the atomised lifestyles of the urban spaces. The new challenges to tribally-based organisation and discipline would soon escalate as the Maori population increased: up from 134,097 in 1951 to nearly four times that number half a century later. The Crown considered the problems engendered by urbanisation were best addressed by securing jobs and better living conditions: Maori would benefit primarily from socio-economic improvement strategies posited on full assimilation to the ways and mores of the dominant culture. The Crown’s refusal at the time of the MSEA Act to countenance official regional and national Maori representation, because this had the potential to promote Maori autonomy, meant that (apart from unofficial movements such as Kingitanga and Ratana) there was no cross-tribal organisation to fight urban threats to ‘Maoritanga’. The DMA and its Maori Welfare Organisation handled matters at a central official level, and tribal committees and executives sometimes became involved in pursuing transitional measures through departmental channels, seeing these contributions to adjustment procedures as a case of Maori helping control Maori issues.10

However, such collectivity-based collaboration, while welcomed, did not form a major part of the strategy of the post-war government. In Labour’s social-democratic philosophy, Maori were individuals who tended to be disadvantaged by their class location and needed welfare or other state assistance to participate in socio-economic uplift. Past welfare efforts would be consolidated and extended as Maori moved to the towns, a migration that would encourage industrial expansion and diversification in the interests of allpage 22 New Zealanders. As Minister of Maori Affairs, Fraser emphasised in his 1949 annual report to Parliament that he believed socio-economic development to be the key to the Maori future. This would not only benefit the tangata whenua but also contribute to ‘national wealth’. A raised income and standard of living for Maori was thus of ‘great importance not only to the Maori people themselves, but also to the economy of the country’.

Such sentiments, which were expressed twice in the report, were typical of state pronouncements of the time, and they were always underpinned by an assumption that Maori should be helped to become as close as possible in all respects to Europeans. However, these goals of social and economic assimilation could meanwhile accommodate (again, in Fraser’s words) some form of ‘independent, self-reliant, and satisfied Maori race working side by side with the pakeha’. Such rhetoric may have damaged Labour in the eyes of the European electorate at the 1949 election, given a vigorous National attack upon Labour’s alleged pandering to Maori and the Prime Minister’s apparent concessions to Maori self-determination. But in reality, the Labour government had remained reluctant to offer Maori anything but a cautious and constrained degree of control over their own affairs.

In the election campaign, Labour essentially stood on its previous assimilationist and equality-focused policies, while the National Party ostentatiously offered Maori less than Labour. National won, reflecting a mood swing within sectors of pakeha New Zealand which, when combined with urbanisation and other trends, did not seem to bode well for the future of rangatiratanga and of Maoridom in general. Already there was a racial backlash against the growing and visible Maori presence in urban spaces. Race relations could be deemed to be ‘the best in the world’ when most pakeha knew Maori only at a distance, but such official discourse could come under challenge when individuals and, later, families moved into urban areas and brought with them customs unfamiliar to surrounding pakeha.

While pakeha attitudes reflected a general European ethnocentrism, racist incidents were on the rise, especially as a reaction to increased Maori involvement in urban-based disorder or crime. The National politicians had taken heed of popular pakeha sentiment in their campaign, and afterwards. Once in office, however, they did not attempt to turn the clock back on urban migration. And, despite some urban pakeha resistance to mingling with newly-arrived Maori, the National government continued the assimilationist policies of its predecessor – policies so deep-seated in both officialdom and civil society that they formed part of accepted wisdom, whatever the difficulties posed by Maori adjustment. Significant voices within Maoridom, too, saw assimilation as the most desirable goal. In 1949, the Maori Purposes Fund Board published Peter Buck’s The Coming of the Maori, which treated official policies as though rootedpage 23 in fact. The book argued that a blending of the two races was occurring, and that ‘in nationality’, the Maori were ‘as British as anything which ever came out of Britain’.11

Almost all Maori leaders, however, including the most conservative, aspired to some degree of autonomy for their people. Although the outlook may have seemed bleak in 1950, prospects for self-determination were not unpromising if long-term developments were taken into account. The first half of the century had seen considerable social, economic, demographic, cultural and political advances for Maoridom. Many marae-centred communities continued to thrive, or were reconstructing themselves within a vigorous tribal environment. Since the 1930s, Labour policies had led to significant increases in Maori health and material well-being. From this considerably improved socio-economic base, which would eventually find further enhancement as people found jobs in the cities, Maori leaders could work to pursue politico-cultural autonomy. To be sure, urban migration, essentially the province of the young, implied intermarriage, and the state welcomed this as an agent of assimilation. But increasing intermarriage, and general Maori adoption of city ways, did not necessarily (or even usually) mean complete abandonment of tribal affiliation.

Urban life, moreover, could actually help to promote identification with ‘Maoridom’, as newly arrived individuals naturally sought out ‘their own kind’, including through the official committees and their activities. The various types of Maori development in both urban and rural environments did not, of course, come to a halt under National. Just as pre-1950 gains were made in the absence of any great understanding by Labour of Maori desires for autonomy, or indeed of tikanga Maori (Maori custom), further accomplishments – socio-economic, cultural, political, even autonomist – were possible under the new government, however unsympathetic or uncomprehending it might be on Maori issues. Obviously, many achievements would need to come from the people themselves, but Crown intervention could assist Maori aspirations – especially if government officials and politicians could be persuaded that intervention was in ‘the national interest’. The process benefited from the emergence of new leaders within Maoridom, often people able to work within both pakeha and Maori worlds, and from the inputs of the small number of Maori associated with the National party – some of them of very high rank in tribal Maoridom.

Observers, even within some National circles, were soon noting a general feeling within society that a new era of Maori development was about to begin, one that would build upon the gains of the previous half century, the potentialities of urbanisation, and the post-war economic boom. Development, as Maori saw it, would draw much on Maori culture, and its maximisation would depend upon Maori being able run their own affairs unimpededly whilepage 24 engaging with urbanisation and modernity. Maori aspirations for recognition of rangatiratanga, then, did not sink beneath the weight of urbanisation, assimilation policies and growing wealth for individuals who had adjusted to work and life in the cities. In some ways, hopes were reinforced in the decades which followed. This was partly a result of pakeha and Maori New Zealanders becoming increasingly aware of national issues of ‘race relations’ and Maori aspirations. International developments – decolonisation, self-determinationist discourse and anti-racist movements – were also widely discussed. Debates and politico-cultural trends which would eventually lead to momentous changes throughout the world were already present, sometimes in more than incipient form, in mid-century New Zealand.12