Crown Policies and Social Attitudes

Increasingly, as bureaucrats and politicians realised that Maoridom was not about to disappear entirely into the ‘urban jungle’, Maori leaders were consulted on public issues. In such transactions, they managed to an extent to have Maori culture and aspirations taken seriously. In the early 1950s, for example, they resisted pressure to abolish Maori schools which was exerted under the rubric of removing ‘race discrimination’. In 1955, the Minister of Education established a committee with strong Maori representation to consider such issues. This was the first time Maori had taken part in national-level policy formulation on education. The committee appreciated that Maori schools, while they had begun as assimilationist devices, had become assets to many Maori communities. It concluded that such schools should eventually become absorbed into mainstream education run by the Education Boards, but that this should only be done under persuasion. Meanwhile, all schools requiring it should get special assistance for ‘more recognition for Maori culture, including the Maori language’, building on what Labour had introduced in the 1930s. And all New Zealand’s schools should pay greater attention to matters such as Maori history and Maori arts and crafts. Such approaches were integrated into government policy, and the committee – eventually called the National Committee on Maori Education – was reconvened on an annual basis.¹⁹

There was also some assistance from government departments to aid communal adaptation to the cities in Maori-friendly ways, with Maori Affairs pronouncing that it did ‘not seek to impose standards from without’. It interpreted ‘Maori welfare’ in such a way that it ‘concern[ed] itself with almost every phase of life’, and its policies did often accommodate a collectivist ethos. There was, for example, some effort at building ‘group housing … where Maori communal spirit is strong’ on gifted or purchased land in towns such as Opotiki or Rotorua. Some Crown support went to the informal initiatives of Maori in the cities, including those developed within the official committee structure. The formation of youth clubs and other social groups to ‘cushion the effect of migration from one way of life to another’ gained Welfare Division backing, and financial and other assistance was made available.²⁰

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But the fact remained that, in general, Crown policies remained posited upon an expected disappearance of Maoridom beneath western values and lifestyles and through intermarriage. The state’s overarching policies continued to promote the hastening of what were seen to be natural evolutionary processes – accelerating what urban migration and the arrival of modernity among Maori were believed to be already effecting. In this environment, the reconstruction of Maori organisational values and communal ways would always be difficult. Conformist pressures were led by a strong and paternalist state, which played a key role in such matters as economic management, wealth creation, the direction of labour and the construction of housing. At the same time as assisting Maori initiatives, officials and ministers believed that once Maori had cast off their ‘tribal shackles’, they should preferably join (if anything) groups that were non-racially based, such as school committees.

Even pakeha sympathetic to the idea of retaining some aspects of Maoritanga tended to be hard-line on the need for thorough westernisation, as expressed in a 1952 article in the New Zealand Herald: ‘The aim should be, in education or whatever else, to weld into one nation … The Maori can with equal pride preserve the best of his culture and recall traditions and history, as do the English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh. But it will be well if, like them, he becomes first and fundamentally a New Zealander, whose culture is and will remain basically European.’ Another newspaper article expressed an even more typical stance: the ‘Maori is now becoming a useful worker … More and more he casts off the old tribal shackles. He can best be helped and encouraged by treating him simply as a New Zealander’. Even conservative pakeha could foresee, approvingly, a society of legal and social equals, some of whom happened to be brown-skinned – although skin colour would preferably lighten through continuing intermarriage.

The theoretical vision of rapid assimilation, however, was complicated by the practical ethnocentric and racist barriers that became apparent when pakeha and Maori began living and mixing together in an urban setting. It was because of such difficulties, as well as the evolutionist assumptions embedded deeply into pakeha culture, that liberal and left-wing pakeha generally failed to support the Maori quest for rangatiratanga (although usually being more sympathetic than most to retention of some aspects of Maoritanga). In other words, it was partly as a result of the discrimination, indignities and socio-economic inequalities encountered by Maori in the towns and cities that ‘progressive thought’ tended to stress removal of legal and other distinctions between Maori and pakeha. When Labour opposition leader Walter Nash mounted a campaign to make discrimination against Maori illegal, there were many public calls to overturn all official recognition of differences betweenpage 44 ethnicities, even where these operated in ways which helped overcome social inequalities. Broader principles reflecting humanist, class-conflict, social-democratic, Christian-socialist and other philosophies also had a role to play in promoting such ‘egalitarian’ ideals.

Thus, while official New Zealand tolerated differences between Maori and pakeha, including some legalised differentiation generally supported by Maori (such as tribal committees and wardens), most left-of-centre people continued to stress that which the pre-war Labour Party had stood for: sameness of treatment; ‘equality’. One commentator, in arguing that assimilation was ‘inevitable’, suggested that it was ‘a logical result of the “equality” for which the Maori so persistently strives’. Indeed, some writers of the time equated assimilation with equality and contrasted it to the ‘distinction’ or ‘segregation’ which in other parts of the world kept the races apart. More broadly, for those concerned with social and economic equality (including a number of Maori), assimilation was an unquestionable good. ‘Assimilation of the two races’, in the words of a Maori adult education tutor, was ‘an ideal’. Even the Ngati Poneke association reportedly considered assimilation a goal worth striving for, while Maori university and training college students were similarly recorded as agreeing that a form of ‘integration’ with Europeans was necessary.²¹

Of course, notions such as difference, sameness, equality, integration and assimilation, to which Maori and pakeha commentators, decision-makers and others appealed, could mean different things to different people, and their meaning could change in different circumstances. There was a particular lack of clarity in the 1950s over what such concepts ultimately meant, and where Maori urbanisation might or should take both Maori and the nation. Sympathetic officials and others tried to differentiate between integration and full, or near-full, assimilation. An anthropologist employed by the DMA, John Booth, argued that Maori could be ‘integrated with not assimilated by Europeans’. His department declared its intention to help ‘perpetuate Maori culture’, while simultaneously facilitating ‘full integration into the social and economic structure of the country’. But a very strong current of public and official opinion clearly favoured Maori adopting European ways and abandoning their culture almost entirely. This was seen to be the price of progress in a Social-Darwinist world. Maori should behave, in the ironic words of Auckland anthropology professor Ralph Piddington, like ‘good little Pakehas’.

But for most Maori, living in the urban, modern and ‘pakeha’ world implied nothing of the sort, and they had some allies within that world. Anthropologists, for example, often publicly defended the Maori right to difference within a westernised New Zealand. Raymond Firth suggested that Maori sought ‘full participation and they want, at the same time, to retain … elements of Maoripage 45 culture’. Piddington, in particular, strongly rebuked pakeha New Zealand for its ‘cultural arrogance’. He was accused by some of leaning towards the defence of ‘racial separatists’, but continued openly to condemn the idea of ‘racial and cultural absorption’ – the scenario in which Maori were to ‘solve their social problems by rapidly becoming like pakehas’ – as a ‘demographic pipe-dream and a very dangerous one’. He warned that there was a need to avoid Maori in the cities becoming little more than a ‘brown proletariat’ in a white world. In the struggle to ensure that urban Maori did not form a permanent ‘underprivileged and despised community’, he argued, the preservation of Maori culture was essential – as was a move away from ‘absorption or assimilation towards encouraging Maori to solve their own problems in their own way’.²²

In 1957, however, the Minister of Maori Affairs was having none of this kind of approach. ‘The policy of the government is that Maori and European form one people. Everything that is done in legislation … stems from that basic assumption’, he wrote. ‘With Maoris and Europeans living together, side by side in towns and villages, the idea of Maori political autonomy would be quite impracticable. The … only type of autonomy that exists is in the form of … Tribal Committees which … have the task of promoting social and economic progress.’ In view of all the obstacles, from racist popular sentiment to official policy, it is scarcely surprising that the decade was not one where rangatiratanga aspirations could be significantly progressed. One historian has even suggested that the 1950s ‘saw basically a hiatus in Maori political life’.

Nevertheless, politico-cultural aspirations among Maori could be and were progressed when they were placed firmly within ‘official’ structures and hegemonic discourses. That way they had chances of state and/or pakeha support – if ‘Maoriness’ were redefined to fit modern life and the urban setting, it could be tolerated until intermarriage and supposed western superiority led to its long expected demise. Such official and mainstream cultural recognition (however reluctant) of ‘the Maori Other’ became, in fact, a significant weapon in the arsenal available to promote Maori self-identification from the 1950s. It assisted a countervailing tendency to those powerful forces in politics and society which viewed the urbanisation process as little more than a medium for rapid assimilation. The vague post-war concept of ‘Maori’ held by the state and many pakeha varied enormously from its expression by various movements within Maoridom, but at least it existed and remained a force to be reckoned with.²³

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