Modernity and Tikanga Maori

Although the official committee system and its offshoots constituted a state-sanctioned mode of socio-racial control, it also became a site for efforts to reforge Maori politico-cultural solidarity in both traditional and urban environments. While welcoming the benefits that ‘the west’ and modernity offered, the committees represented a rejection of full assimilation (in the guise of ‘integration’) and an affirmation of autonomy. Just as western ideas and technologies added value to Maori lifestyles, moreover, so too could Maori, by retaining and developing indigenous attributes, add value to the pakeha world. ‘Official New Zealand’ gradually came to see this.

If very generously interpreted, official acceptance of a degree of tikanga Maori/Maori custom during the days of integrationist policy could be viewed as embodying support for a significant presence of rangatiratanga in New Zealand life; in such a view, the early evolution of the MWA system could evenpage 137 be seen as exemplifying integration in action. The committees affirmed that while there was a strong Maori desire to ‘succeed’ in a pakeha- and urban-dominated New Zealand, doing so required, as a matter of both practice and principle, culturally-based and collective forms of organisation and mutual assistance. In their adaptation to modernity, Maori did not want to become the same as pakeha: ‘Maori want [ed] to be Maori in a Pakeha world’, and for the pakeha world to take up Maori perceptions and ways of doing things.

However wanting the Hunn report’s motivations and some of its conclusions were for increasing numbers of Maori, it had renewed general discussion on ways in which the state could and should take a lead regarding the appropriate place of Maori in New Zealand society and governance. Its cautious endorsement of the need to retain some degree of Maoritanga, even within an integrated society, held out hope to many Maori leaders that progress could be made on preserving or even enhancing Maori language and culture. Among promising developments was the formation of the Maori Graduates’ Association, which became active on a number of fronts, both integrationist and autonomist.

The continued strength of tikanga Maori even in non-tribal milieus became increasingly apparent to officials and their advisers, and Maori values and customs gradually began to be taken into greater account in Crown policies. Some degree of tikanga Maori could be accommodated partly because of a widespread belief within state circles that other aspects of Maori culture inappropriate to modernity were being obliterated, and that Maori were gradually moving towards western hegemonic norms. Such accommodation does not mean, therefore, that ethnocentric policies had entirely disappeared, as a 1971 bureaucratic utterance indicates: ‘The Maori is not sufficiently removed from his past to be well adapted for commerce with its demand for strongly individualistic traits, which are in sharp contrast to his ancient mode of living.’ But an increasingly common view within officialdom was that the retention of some traditional Maori ways could help with adaptation to modern life. The Department of Maori Affairs believed that the ‘complex and perplexing’ transition from a rural to an urban people would be eased by the Maori ‘capacity to identify himself with one culture whilst striving to master another’. Thus, ‘Maori culture or “Maoritanga” in its modern form is … more than an end in itself, for it is also a stepping stone to adjustment to the new world’. While retaining aspects of indigeneity and collectivity, Maori would supposedly come to see, for example, that ‘free enterprise’ and an ‘individualistic spirit’ were both good and natural.²⁴

As a result of relentless state influences and pressures upon the committee system, a number of members of rural or small-town Maori committees believed that its social control functions were so tied to the state’s desires as to make it a threat to local, especially tribal, values. Some went so far aspage 138 to attempt to operate completely independently of the requirements of the legislation. There was much internal discussion or dissent within the NZMC system, with vigorous debates among candidates standing for election and complex configurations of beliefs and proposals. Sometimes hereditary rangatira would assert traditional tribal custom, in opposition to the values of younger, modernising tribal members who wanted to work with or alongside the Crown. At other times or in different places, older traditional leaders saw adaptation to the changing order and cooperation with the state as the key to survival for Maori customs and organisational forms. Some of these supported collective reorganising in the cities to try, in the words of John Rangihau, ‘to take into the urban situation aspects of tribal living … that would … stand the test of urban pressures’.

Some tribes had been making adjustments to modernity and urbanisation over a long period, including those conventionally seen as the most resistant to the Crown’s assimilation policies. Tuhoe, for example, had seen many of its people leave for Rotorua, and had moved to procure an urban base, Mataatua Marae, in that city. In the 1960s, its tribal leadership began to address the fact that large numbers of the people were now moving to Auckland. In 1971, Te Tira Hou Marae was established there, and on this urban marae the tribe acted ‘as tangata whenua, the host people. In a very real sense these marae are part of Tuhoe tribal organisation’, an observer noted.

Tuhoe continued to establish institutions, both formal and informal, outside of its traditional rohe. This did not mean any diminution in the iwi’s focus on its role as tangata whenua of its Urewera rohe, where its major political and cultural events were held. These events included an annual whare wananga, established at a hui at Ruatahuna in 1969–70, for teaching tribal customs to the young. The work of tribal institutions was complemented by a flourishing network which included the Crown-franchised institutions of trust board and official committee. By the mid-1980s, the region in which Tuhoe was located hosted six Maori executive committees and 33 Maori committees, most of them based at marae. All Tuhoe organisations, including those which were officially franchised, were said to be ‘based on the continuing concept of tribal identity and sense of belonging, turangawaewae, in Te Urewera’.²⁵

In urban settings, migrants from rural areas carried with them ‘[t] raditional knowledge, marae etiquette, songs and chants’, and many other varieties of tikanga Maori, all of which were fortified and replenished by trips ‘home’. Assisted by frequent interaction with those remaining in the tribal rohe, many rangatira and kaumatua continued to exercise leadership after they had moved to the cities. Such leaders often forged alliances with state and other organisations, and cooperated with non-traditional Maori leaders, some of whom had gained their power bases by being respected and selected by Maoripage 139 who had become ‘isolated’ from their tribes. Maori urban leaders of all types, but especially those representing mixed-iwi areas in the cities, sought to make use of official committees whether they liked the concept or not, because committees could help them in their many and difficult tasks. ‘The close scrutiny and supervision of the lives of Maori people by a Maori committee and its officers fills the vacuum in the lives of those who migrate from the face-to-face tribal community to urban society and anonymity’, an observer noted in the 1970s. ‘The work of a Maori committee is clearly a response to the problems of a minority adjusting to urban life.’

Anthropologists at the time, trained in participant-observation methodology, generally agreed that the committees represented a significant means of securing state support for organising along collective lines in the interests of both adjusting and ‘staying Maori’. Prominent among them was Joan Metge, who analysed the post-war situation of Maori as follows: ‘Maori have resisted cultural and political domination by developing management strategies of their own, putting up barriers behind which they organise their lives their own way, unknown to most Pakeha, adapting borrowed practices to Maori ends, editing and re-interpreting traditional tikanga (“right ways”) to meet contemporary needs.’ The Maori committees were but one domain in which indigenous culture displayed a dynamism which belied the simplistic belief among many pakeha that Maori society was generally one of a static traditionalism which would (and should) soon disappear.

In the process of reappropriating Crown appropriations, Maori both affirmed tikanga Maori and made adjustments to meet the times and circumstances. A number of social, organisational and cultural forms which had remained virtually intact in the pre-war period of ‘resistive acculturation’ were being reasserted through official bodies intended, ultimately, to usurp them. All the while, Maori themselves were subtly altering their perspectives and strategies as a result of the complex and developing mix of negotiations with, and adaptations to, pakeha society and its institutions. The ‘norms of good conduct’ in the Maori world, then, were adapting to post-war modernity, urbanisation and other circumstances. The degree of balance struck between the old and the new in any given situation was among the factors which both dictated which parties benefited most fundamentally and shaped the patterns of the fast evolving New Zealand society.²⁶