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Voluntary Associations

Through the 1950s, many Maori were vocal in stating their belief that their mana and organisational capacities were being demeaned or undermined by Crown attitudes and actions. Maori leaders argued, for example, that various pieces of legislation, such as the Maori Affairs and Town and Country Planning Acts of 1953, opposed or ignored Maori interests. The latter legislation, for example, had the capacity to displace entire Maori communities on grounds of ‘public good’. If communities were deemed to be in ‘economically retarded areas’, their inhabitants could be denied departmental loans for repairing houses or building new ones. People would, instead, be encouraged to move to the large towns and cities which needed their labour. Other formal rules of state similarly reinforced a general social and bureaucratic climate of hostility to manifestations of autonomy. Many of those who saw decreasing prospects of official assistance for ways of meeting their aspirations for rangatiratanga looked to alternative means of organisational expression.

Maori in the cities and large towns adjusted to the loss of everyday tribal-based kinship bonds in various informal ways. New communities of interest were constructed from ties based not just on kinship but also on friendship and the sharing of new experiences; networks and activities based on ‘affiliatory ties’ and ‘belonging by association’ developed. At first, churches played an important role. In 1950s Auckland, the Ratana Church, followed by Catholic and Anglican communities, featured most prominently. Associational linkages around these and other institutions – schools, playcentres, childcare facilities, sports clubs, community centres and the like – would assist urbanised parents to bring up their children surrounded by ‘new’ whanau as well as, or in place of, kin-based whanau. Local associations might help to establish or revive yet other institutions – a branch of the Maori Women’s Welfare League, a tribal committee’s community hall or, eventually, an urban marae.

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Even in the most adverse of urban circumstances, a ‘strong residuum of traditional values’ continued to inform Maori life. This was partly as a result of the very abruptness of the ‘resumption of contact’ between the two peoples after the war. Urbanising Maori could clearly see that their collective ethos was under threat from the dominating social and other forces of the cities. In response, many continued to organise their daily lives along associational principles. Large numbers participated in developing broader Maori-based associations to complement their interactions with pakeha and western institutions. Such collectivist adaptations suited both the Crown (in terms of its short-and medium-term policies) and Maori. By allowing individuals to adjust to their new way of life without losing all aspects of the old, associations helped minimise or contain the social turmoil inevitable in the context of mass urban migration, benefiting both parties. Ultimately, a collective approach helped ‘Maoridom’ survive and (in some aspects) thrive in apparently unpromising times. It also progressed aspects of the Crown’s assimilationist agenda. In 1964, the Department of Maori Affairs noted the apparent paradox of both individualist and collectivist agendas working in tandem: ‘religious, family, and tribal ties are still strong, and these have given [Maori] a moral and spiritual stability’, assisting their ‘transfer to a highly individualistic urban life’.

New and renewed ties of associational adjustment, extending into many non-official (as well as official) institutions, happened outside of the cities and towns as well. Some Maori who stayed on in the rural areas sought to adapt to the challenges of modernity (as well as to local or regional depopulation) by forming new organisations and linkages which supplemented traditional tribal institutions. Such community reorganisation formed part of Maoridom’s ‘resistive acculturation’ to the post-war world. There were many ways in which this occurred, ranging from a new ‘racial nationalism’ (as it was once perceived) based on Maoritanga, to whanau retaining a few of the old ways in the midst of countervailing pulls in the city. In the spaces between, many Maori groups and individuals founded or joined ‘voluntary associations’, which tended to transcend tribal divisions. Some observers have seen these as ‘the key to the successful adjustment of the Māori to urban life’. Top bureaucrats in the DMA approved: ‘Many [Maori] will want to continue mixing mostly with their own kind and it has often been found that in such associations they learn about their new community from people like themselves far more readily than they would if cut off completely from their familiar Maori world.’¹

Cultural clubs had been established during the first manifestations of urbanisation and these now flourished, particularly Wellington’s Ngati Poneke and Auckland’s Ngati Akarana organisations. That these two major clubs had transliterated and non-traditional names symbolised both the reconstitution of Maoridom in the urban spaces and an emerging ‘consciousness of pan-tribalism’.page 67 They, and before long others in cities and towns, not only kept alive traditional songs, dances, customs and crafts, but also assisted with adjustment to the cities. Such cultural organisations generally focused upon youth displaced from the countryside, and broader cultural groups often established youth sectors. The Crown soon recognised that many voluntary associations were doing useful work in urban adjustment and was willing to help.

In 1956, the DMA, noting the importance of clubs in the cities, described the ‘formation of Maori youth clubs or organisations [as] a stated function of [officially-assisted] welfare’. Such clubs ‘cushion the effect of migration from one way of life to another’. Officials would later note that Ngati Poneke ‘gathers into its fold the young Maori boys and girls who come to the city in search of work [and] is also a social and cultural centre that has a unifying influence’. By the early 1960s, in ‘every town where there are any number of Maoris there are youth clubs [providing the migrant with] a moral support that helps him to find his feet in the course of adapting himself’. The clubs’ role in both adjustment and retaining Maoritanga was therefore important for Maori per se, while also helping to foster the ‘new relationship that is growing between Maori and pakeha’. It was not surprising that the state was increasingly interested in appropriating, or at least ‘guiding’, such Maori-inspired initiatives. In addition to involvement by the DMA, many clubs were supported by tribal committees or executives, or the Maori Women’s Welfare League.

Such state and quasi-state interest did not guarantee that things would proceed as the Crown or Maori elders working with or within the state wished. Some youth clubs were ‘mainly run by young people themselves’ and were not necessarily amenable to intervention. Sometimes young people ‘adjusted’ to city life in ways that did not please their elders. Although youth clubs often provided entertainment based on Maori cultural forms, by the late 1950s the ‘age of “Rock-n-Roll” ha [d] infiltrated’. In 1958, Auckland’s senior Maori welfare officer spoke of ‘Maori songs being sung to rock’n’roll tempo, tight pants, gaudy clothes – these are some of the signs of the new breed of Maori race growing up in Auckland … The young Maoris in the city have lost their respect for their elders and their pride in their race … Somehow the influence of the marae has to be replaced’. Many elders, and some of the new leaders in the city, agreed.²

The community centres and halls which served the needs of youth and cultural clubs were clearly ‘incomplete substitute [s] for … marae’ and unable to host many customary activities. They were, for example, inappropriate for holding tangi, ‘one of the bastions of cultural conservatism in the alien environment of the city’. Soon, urban-based whanau, tribal, pan-tribal and religious groups formed associations to plan for ‘urban marae’ (as opposed to the marae of tribes whose rohe had been urbanised). This could be done inpage 68 conjunction with the official committee system. The work of the committees of South Auckland, operating under the Waitemata Tribal Executive, was instrumental in establishing the city’s first urban marae, Te Puea, at Mangere in 1965. This was run in traditional kin-based mode: in some built-up areas where large numbers of people from specific tribes (usually from nearby rohe) concentrated, urban associations could take on a quasi-tribal hue. Other urban marae (church-based or secular) were pan-or multi-tribal, linking migrants ‘who had nothing in common except residence in the same suburb’. This clustering together was partly made possible by the State Advances Corporation’s lending policies, which dealt with Maori applicants as individuals and did not take into account other departments’ policies of ‘pepper-potting’ Maori within pakeha communities. Through a natural desire to resettle near people of similar cultural background, Maori using corporation assistance came to concentrate in ‘their own’ suburban areas. This made it easier to form the cultural, political and social organisations (both voluntary and officially franchised) that were the prerequisites for the development of the urban marae.

In rural areas, where kaumatua and kuia continued to predominate in decision-making, adaptation to the post-war world often took different routes. All the same, many adjustments did occur. These included improving community living standards through collectivised methods that took advantage of a booming economy. ‘Community development’ was supported, at least in principle, by sectors of the state. Following a state-franchised experiment at Panguru from 1954, for example, investment groups providing credit facilities in isolated districts began to spread through Northland and into parts of the Bay of Plenty. Participants pooled their savings, and loans were made out of the common fund to members who had, as the DMA put it, ‘worthwhile use for the money’. Such ‘investment society’ resources were to be used either for individual purposes or, more importantly, to ‘revitalise Maori communities … and encourage members to turn their energies towards building a better future’.

It once used to be argued from the evidence then available that the rapid development of voluntary associations and community development schemes was not necessarily a significant factor in, or even a reflection of, the pursuit of autonomy or the preservation of Maoridom. Instead these were seen as adjustment mechanisms to urbanisation and modernity which had little to do with tikanga Maori. This was a stance taken both by observers who were approving and disapproving of assimilative trends. Such a perspective was situated within a discourse which saw rangatiratanga only in traditional terms, and therefore interpreted urban initiatives and modernity as disconnected from, or alien to, its exercise. In the 1960s, anthropologist James Ritchie argued that the new Maori ‘protocommunities’ in the cities needed to strengthen, butpage 69 in order to further the process of ‘integration’. In the mid-1970s, Ranginui Walker saw the ‘integrative function of voluntary associations in the multitribal situation’ as primarily assisting the mass adaptation of Maori to the foreign urban environment of the pakeha, a New Zealand version of an international phenomenon.

But, as Walker later noted, voluntary associations were essential in ‘transplanting [Maori] culture into the urban milieu’. Most succeeded at this by dint of operating in Maori ways and engaging in Maori cultural activities: in keeping alive an aura of Maoriness, in giving individuals and families who were far from their tribal headquarters a sense of ‘being Maori’. Even when voluntary Maori associations emerged from, or were assisted by, the state or its approved agencies, they quite often separated themselves from it and went in their own directions. There seems little doubt that, as a result of voluntary associations, rangatiratanga was assisted not only to re-establish but also to flourish in the large towns and cities.³