Urban Adjustment

Whatever the prejudices within officialdom, there were no thoughts of attempting to discourage Maori urban migration. Urbanisation was seen as a way by which all citizens could benefit from the flourishing economy, with Maori contributing mostly to the unskilled and semi-skilled industries. It was a better investment, the Crown believed, than bringing in assisted immigrants from overseas. The welfarist policies which the National government had taken over from Labour remained available to assist. While ‘social problems’ among Maori were better able to be contained in a rural, marae-based environment, the short-term social costs of adjustment to urban life would be considerably outweighed by the public good benefits. Not only would Maori join the growing work sites of an industrialising New Zealand, they would internalise the rhythms of industrial and social discipline as a result of living and working in the city environment. A number of Maori themselves saw a need for ‘adaptation’ to the western values of ‘order and regularity’ in the interests of urban adjustment. An article in the New Zealand Listener in 1950 presented the views of a ‘Maori Housewife’: ‘A young girl who goes to work in town has to adapt or her way will be much harder. She must conform within narrow limits of dress, neither beyond nor beneath pakeha fashion, she must learn the industrial meaning of time, learn to do a job she probably isn’t trained for, and conform with the custom of saving money so that it lasts from pay day to pay day.’

From the late 1940s, officials began to manage urban migration in ways designed to ease the pain of adjustment – for the sake not only of the individuals concerned but also for that of the wider society itself. Many urban migrants were temporarily housed in workers’ camps in the two main North Island cities and their suburbs. Blocks of flats were built, schemes to build houses for rental or purchase were put in place, and loans were offered to migrant Maori to purchase or renovate houses. Officials had earlier developed anpage 39 apprenticeship training scheme for migrants with appropriate aptitudes, and in 1949 Cabinet approved the construction of hostels for this purpose. In 1951, the Maori Affairs and Labour Departments established hostels in Wellington and Auckland, and Rotorua and Christchurch followed in mid-decade.

The hostels were to provide ‘equal opportunities’ for Maori to become tradespeople. They aimed to create an ‘atmosphere that makes for that social stability and security’ especially needed by newly-arrived Maori youths. The government often subsidised church and welfare organisations in large towns like Hamilton and Gisborne to assist migrating youth. But there was a growing concentration of migration to a handful of urban destinations from the mid-1950s, especially Auckland and Wellington. By the end of the decade, the Crown had systematised its assistance to Maori urban migrants into a coordinated adjustment policy involving temporary or permanent accommodation, employment and general ‘guidance’. By 1961, well over half of the DMA’s houses were being built in urban areas, and by the middle of the 1960s, three-quarters of state dwellings built for Maori were in urban spaces.¹⁶

Migrants did not stop ‘being tribal’ in the new environment, whatever the pressures and temptations to fully assimilate. However far they were living from their home marae, whanau, hapu or iwi, most kept up contact with friends and relatives back in their tribal homelands. Urban households would act as the anchor points for those from rural marae who visited or migrated to the city, and the hospitality would be reciprocated. Urban families would ‘return home’ for marriages, christenings, twenty-firsts and funerals/tangi, sometimes establishing whanau funds to be able to afford such contingencies. As the chair of the Waitangi Tribunal would later put it, speaking of his people, keeping up such connections reaffirmed ‘our meaning for life’. The concept of ‘home’, then, was not constrained by geography, and many at first were not necessarily wedded to staying in town once assets had been accumulated. Many newly-arrived Maori were too preoccupied with coping with difficult adjustments to their daily lives to do very much, at least initially, by way of reorganising collectively. But even if they seldom or never returned to the rural pa, few completely abandoned all vestiges of Maori culture or identification, despite the myth peddled by many pakeha (including officials and scholars) that ‘detribalisation’ was rampant. More broadly, Maori did not cease to ‘be Maori’. They sought out fellow Maori in social and other circumstances, such as at playcentres, in church congregations and sports clubs, and outside school gates. Established households became centres of Maori life, whether or not people were of the same tribe. Such environments were microcosms of Maoridom in a pakeha landscape to a degree that most non-Maori never realised.

Lifestyles and interactions in such microcosms often segued into participationpage 40 in the larger, voluntarist organisations covered in Chapter Four. Suffice to say here, in the immediate post-war years and early 1950s, Maori-run institutions strengthened or emerged to cater for the needs of urban-dwelling Maori, assisted by urban-based tribal groupings and marae. The most significant of the new associations were Wellington’s Ngati Poneke complex (which arose in 1937 out of earlier religious and welfarist formations) and Auckland’s Akarana Maori Association (which included liberal pakeha). These reflected an appreciation that one way of establishing ethno-cultural collectivity among the individuals from various tribes who had come to the urban spaces was to establish independent Maori structures with pan-tribal membership. They would be run along non-tribal lines, while typically exhibiting a whanau-like atmosphere. Such initiatives gradually came about in larger towns as well as cities. They would eventually culminate in the establishment of pan-tribal urban marae and service institutions. Various cooperative efforts in West Auckland, for example, would lead first to the founding of Hoani Waititi Marae and then to an urban authority, Te Whanau o Waipareira Trust, in 1984.

Such developments did tend to redirect Maori attention away from the homeland marae and their tikanga, especially for those generations brought up or born in the cities. Other factors contributed to this process. The most obvious was intermarriage, which generally led to the pakeha culture predominating in the urban household. Some factors were more subtle. Although Maori tended to have the lowest paid jobs, constituting a ‘race-based’ sub-sector of a proletarianising workforce, there were ‘trickle down’ benefits from a 1950s economy whose health had been boosted by the effects of the Korean War. It was a time of boundless socio-economic optimism in most sectors of society, with continuing economic expansion and very low unemployment rates. In public perception at least, there was nothing to stop individuals or families (Maori or pakeha) thriving. Economic opportunities for Maori workers, even though the urban jobs available to them were among the least appealing, did help many gain confidence in their capacities as individuals. This, in turn, fed into the individualistic ideology so pronounced within the ruling National Party and the dominant interests it overtly represented. It might be said that whereas Maoridom attempted to transfer collective autonomy to the cities, the pakeha ethos was to proclaim the sanctity of individual autonomy. Insofar as the pressures of assimilation worked, many Maori lost some (but very seldom all) of their tribal or even Maori identity. As elders increasingly noted, the harsh facts of being a displaced minority within dominant cultural and socio-political structures meant that assimilationist pressures were intense and, to a degree, successful.¹⁷

Many urbanising Maori, better off materially than ever before, pinned future hopes not on their iwi, hapu or whanau, but on the employment, cultural andpage 41 educational opportunities of the city. The DMA journal endorsed such views, and argued that European attributes assisted all Maori. ‘Education and the possession of European skills are the highest qualifications for leadership in Auckland’, it stated. Their acquisition was ‘necessary because of the close association of Maori and European’. Possessing pakeha skills and knowledge did not mean leaving Maoridom behind: ‘While the educated leader is given prestige by virtue of his education, he maintains his position through concretely expressed interests in the welfare of the Maori community.’ At a time when government and white society were increasingly unsympathetic to any aspirations that would lead to the constitution of ‘a race apart’, however, the integrationist pressures of the pakeha lifestyle and education were intense: ‘Maori welfare’ could mean any one of a number of things. Many new urban dwellers, while uneasy at some of the consequences of migration, saw their welfare improved through enhancements to their previously restricted lifestyles. Rural marae-based leaderships instead often saw a decline in traditional morality and sense of tribal pride amongst their people who had gone to the towns and cities.¹⁸

State and pakeha opposition to Maori socio-political autonomy, and the realities of life in a pepper-potted urban landscape, meant that large numbers of migrants mostly just got on quietly with adjusting to the urban environment on a day-to-day level. It was observing this phenomenon on the surface which made many pakeha conclude that urban-based Maori were drifting away from a collective quest for control over their destiny, substituting instead the ethos of individualised endeavour; officials and scholars saw their evolutionist-based preconceptions vindicated. Some pakeha who were invited (sometimes due to intermarriage) to take up leadership roles within the Maori population in the cities, however, saw that Maori perspectives remained, and sought to combine these with pakeha worldviews in new ways. In such endeavours, they worked alongside very many Maori, including Maori scholars.

While encouraging education as a ‘training ground for effective future Maori leadership’ and a prerequisite for doing well in the ‘pakeha economy’, observers noted that the emerging Maori leaders who were at home in the pakeha world still had cause to frequently interact with ‘the kaumatua, the kuia and the rangatahi leader’. These more traditional leaders were required within urban Maoridom for ‘specific occasions’, especially when ‘Maori deals with Maori’. An occasional return (if that) to the rural marae for a tangi was not, whatever most pakeha or officials might think, going to represent the future of urbanised Maoridom. Few believed it possible to turn back the clock, but many felt that aspects of Maori community could and should be reconstructed or reconfigured in the cities. Urban Maori leaders (supported by some pakeha) took many steps to ensure that ‘while western education was highly valued, the Maori community still prospered, as a separate culturalpage 42 and social entity’. It would develop in its own ways, defying the official rules if necessary. One urban ‘tribal committee’ had five more members than the statutory limit, seeing itself as an elected, pan-tribal community group rather than as an official body, and causing the DMA to sigh that ‘reducing the number was almost impossible’. The author Bill Pearson put matters thus: Maori were seeking ‘to be Maoris among Maoris when they want to be’, doing it their own way wherever this was possible.