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

The Meaning of ‘Integration’

The Meaning of ‘Integration’

The Hunn report’s assimilative parameters were obfuscated by definitional issues. In line with official nomenclature, Hunn differentiated between ‘assimilation’ and ‘integration’, declaring the latter to be already ‘a fact of life’: ‘Evolution is clearly integrating Maori and pakeha. Consequently “integration” is said to be the official policy whenever the question is asked.’ Building upon the pre-existing processes of integration provided the best prospects for the immediate and medium-term future. Assimilation was taken to mean that Maori would ‘become absorbed, blended, amalgamated, with complete loss of Maori culture’. Integration was seen to be a more realistic option, defined as a policy that aimed to ‘combine (not fuse) the Maori and pakeha elements to form one nation wherein Maori culture remains distinct’. Integrating processes would inevitably build in momentum, but could speed up greatly with Crown assistance. The reality of integration, brought about by developments such as urbanisation and modernisation, needed to be fully embraced and enhanced by the state. Urbanisation should be especially ‘welcomed as the quickest and surest way of integrating the two species of New Zealander’. ‘Full integration of the Maori people into the main stream of New Zealand life is coming to be recognised as just about the most important objective ahead of the country today.’ The report, Hunn later said, merely codified the policy of integration which was already in place but which had ‘never been articulated by any Government’ – at least not in so dramatic or explicit a way.9

Although Hunn distinguished integration from assimilation, the goal of official policy remained assimilative in all but name. Both integration and assimilation were seen to be part of the ‘successive stages of evolution, whereinpage 94 different races in the same environment pass from their original segregation to integration and ultimately to assimilation’. The report was thus informed by Social-Darwinist assumptions. With ‘only the fittest elements’ of Maori culture able to survive the ‘onset of civilisation’, the ‘object of policy’ was to ‘raise’ Maori who were still ‘complacently living a backward life in primitive conditions’ to the level where they became ‘integrated’, retaining marginal elements of their culture while feeling totally ‘at home’ in pakeha society – or, if they so chose, completely ‘assimilated’. Any prospect of ‘two dissimilar peoples living together but as separate entities’, called ‘symbiosis’ by Hunn, was roundly rejected. Liberal minded officials, politicians and advisers were confident that in two generations, Maori would be ‘well nigh fully integrated’, an outcome supposedly different from that entailed by nineteenth-century ‘amalgamationist’ or ‘absorptionist’ programmes of assimilation. For those Maori resentful of the ‘pressure brought to bear on them to conform to what they regard as the pakeha way of life’, the report offered the advice that they could adapt not to ‘a pakeha but [to] a modern way of life, common to advanced people … Full realisation of this fact might induce the hesitant or reluctant Maoris to fall into line more readily’.10

The spelling-out of integration as a policy can be (and was) seen as a way of minimally taking into account Maori aspirations for self-determination. For Hunn and others the term did imply ‘some continuation of the separate cultures’, although this seemed to mean little more than survival of ‘the [Maori] language, arts and crafts and the institutions of the marae’. Only ‘the Maoris themselves could keep alive these features of their ancient way of life’, something that was ‘entirely a matter of individual choice’. There was, therefore, a realm of permitted (though inexorably declining) Maori culture, but the possibility of a ‘distant future’ in which a full assimilation of minorities might occur was held out – as was believed to have happened in England.

A balance was needed, officials and liberals argued, if New Zealand were to continue to be ‘in the vanguard of [nations] that are building multi-racial societies’. This involved a way forward that would ‘give equal opportunities … without imposing unnecessary uniformity’ upon Maori: in ‘closing the gap’ between the two ‘cultural groups’ of New Zealand, state and pakeha needed to be ever mindful of being ‘tolerant of diversity’. The result would be a country in which ‘no citizen differs from any other citizen, because of his ethnic origin, in his economic and social rights, opportunities and responsibilities’. Thus, integration had, in the liberal pakeha political milieu, been developing as a policy option which made a virtue of temporary or limited accommodations to Maori culture and organisation. It claimed that even the ‘whole new culture’ which would emerge from intermarriage and other assimilative tendencies would not involve ‘a submergence’ of Maoridom.

page 95

Hunn insisted, then, that while integration meant bringing two distinct cultures together in order ‘to form one nation’, it allowed both to remain distinct. But the reality was, as he and others knew, that the intermix of cultures in post-colonial New Zealand was very much a one-sided affair. At best the dominant political economy and culture would tolerate selective aspects of the Maori organisational ethos and worldview. Hunn, Hanan and many others believed that ultimately Maori would be assimilated within a ‘blended new species’ in which, essentially, they would be brown-skinned pakeha. The ‘fundamental tenets’ of ‘communal’ Maori culture and of ‘individualistic and self-centred’ European culture were, Hunn eventually concluded, ‘incompatible’, and it was for Maori to adapt to the European world. Such views lay towards the progressive, left-liberal end of the political spectrum. In the final analysis, the report, embodying the worldview of white liberals and state alike (whatever their varying motivations), had no place for the exercise of rangatiratanga – and nor should anyone be particularly surprised at this, in view of the dominant discourses of the times.11

The concessions the National government was prepared to make to Maori aspirations for an ongoing separate presence in state and society, then, were severely limited and temporary. They could be nothing else in view of the Crown’s aims for, and prevailing social attitudes to, Maoridom at that time. The future for rural Maori, for example, was said to be best served by continued urban migration, which would remove the problems of ‘backwardness’ which were said to flow from the collectivist outlook and activities of the home marae. The many urban migrants who had ‘adopted the 1960 pattern of living in every way’ were seen to need assistance into socio-economic parity with pakeha to strengthen that new pattern. This was believed to be the best that could be done for Maori, given a prevalent view that (in the words of an anthropological assessment) ‘the economics and social consequences of their history of acculturation have made many of the elements of maoritanga functionless’.

In the early 1960s, the state’s plans to incorporate Maori fully into mainstream pakeha life became more fully articulated. While Hunn’s report eschewed the concept of full assimilation except for those (relatively few) Maori who were willing, its implementers were not so squeamish in enunciating the processes they were engaged in as ending in ‘social, economic and cultural fusion’. Politicians were guided by many other official statements and reports as well as Hunn’s. In 1959, Nash, noting that ‘[g] overnment policy is to integrate Maoris with the European community’, declared that the most important way of doing so was ‘by arranging for Maori and European children to attend school together’. The ‘school is the nursery of integration’, Hunn agreed, sharing the widespread frustration within officialdom that Maori schools were slowpage 96 in transferring to the mainstream system: over a quarter of Maori children remained in Maori schools. On the question of culture and language, the 1962 report of the Royal Commission on Education (appointed in 1960, with no Maori members) was resonant of the Hunn report: essentially, any responsibility for preserving Maori culture lay with Maori themselves (although assistance could be given to schools with significant numbers of Maori pupils).12

To continue its predecessors’ policies of integration on western terms was a safe policy for the new Holyoake government, one unlikely to meet with much organised opposition in the pakeha world except from relatively small numbers on the right. Even the far left generally supported the assimilationist policies which had been a key feature of ‘progressive thought’ in New Zealand. Ron Meek’s left-wing wartime publication Maori Problems Today had argued that both the Maori and the pakeha working classes shared the same struggles and goals. Even such posing of the issue as involving two sets of class interests, rather than a single working class in and for itself, was queried in some quarters. A diary entry by youthful Dick Scott, who would later champion Maori causes, saw a dual-class analysis as ‘only a good liberal effort’ that was not reflective of historical laws of inevitability. One of his comrades in the communist milieu argued that it was ‘nonsense to worry about [Maori] tribal survival, to restore their arts and crafts etc.’, particularly given the inexorability of urban migration: the thing to do was to provide sufficient resources to eradicate the ‘gross maladjustments of [Maori] existence’. Under socialism, he argued, the ‘Maori problem [would] “wither away” and so [would] probably the Maoris themselves’.

While a few members of the far left applied Marxist-Leninist analyses which accommodated self-determination as the means of removing a ‘roadblock’ to socialism, Scott summed up the views of most ‘progressive’ thinkers in the first post-war decades: there was ‘no value in artificially attempting to preserve a race which is being assimilated’. The mainstream centre-and far-left vision among pakeha essentially reflected the views of most non-Maori sectors of society, especially those concerned about the much publicised difficulties of urban adjustment: if the state needed to do anything for people of Maori descent, it should help hasten the inevitable disappearance of ‘Maoridom’, for their own good and that of everyone else. Enabling their full participation in all that the ‘highest civilisation in history’ had to offer would also help alleviate socio-racial difficulties and assist the growth of a unified nation working together for the class or common good. There was little appreciation that the tangata whenua had any special Treaty-based or other place in New Zealand society, only that Maori ‘cannot be expected to give up their entire Maoritanga in the process of adopting the ways of the pakeha’. Within the ‘one nation’ Hunn and Booth allowed, ‘Maoris will make a considerable contribution to thepage 97 common culture in areas where their numerical proportion is high’.13

The Hunn report led to general public awareness of the adverse socio-economic situation of both urban and rural Maori, and also generated a great deal of debate over proposed efforts to overcome their problems (and problems of society at large). Many pakeha still opposed spending state resources on Maori. In the publicity surrounding the report’s release, and in the extended discussions which followed, the government sought to persuade the pakeha constituency that ‘special measures’ to assist Maori as individuals were legitimate so long as they were geared to assimilative, ‘public good’ ends. Many were seemingly won over to the view that significant socio-economic improvements should and could be achieved within Maoridom, building upon (in Hunn’s assessment) the ‘quite remarkable strides’ taken by Maori in recent decades. There had undoubtedly been many positive developments in matters such as housing, social security, state-assisted relocation and employment in the cities, and insofar as the Crown had been involved in these, precedents had been created for state intervention to narrow the socio-economic gulf between Maori and pakeha. The Crown, and seemingly most pakeha, thought that goal was sufficient. Implementation of a number of Hunn’s recommendations was fast tracked, aiding those Maori aspirations which lay within the parameters defined by officially sanctioned discourses.14

9 Hunn, Report on Department of Maori Affairs, p 14 (for ‘welcomed as the quickest’ quote), p 15, (for ‘Evolution is clearly’ quote), p 78 (for ‘Full integration’ quote); Hunn, Affairs of State, p 144 (for ‘a fact of life’ and ‘never been articulated’ quotes); Harris, Hīkoi, pp 21, 23.

10 Hunn, Affairs of State, p 144 (for ‘successive stages’ quote); Hunn, Report on Department of Maori Affairs, p 14 (for ‘well nigh’ quote), p 15 (for ‘only the fittest’, ‘onset of civilisation’ and ‘two dissimilar peoples’ quote), p 16 (for ‘object of policy’, ‘complacently living’, ‘pressure brought to bear’ and ‘a pakeha but’ quotes); Harris, ‘Dancing with the State’, pp 116, 120–121, 129–30; Herzog, Christine, ‘Toward a Sustainable Relationship: Pakeha and Tangata Whenua in Adult and Community Education’, in Benseman, John, Findsen, Brian and Scott, Miriama (eds), The Fourth Sector: Adult and Community Education in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Palmerston North, 1996, pp 129, 131; Allen, Chadwick, ‘Postcolonial Theory and the Discourse of Treaties’, American Quarterly, 52(1), March 2000, pp 61–2. 307 The hybridisation of the colonial encounter, which leads to a whole new, negotiated culture, as argued by Homi Bhabha, is not the operative process in New Zealand; see Bhabha, Homi K, The Location of Culture, London, 1994.

11 Hunn, Affairs of State, p 144 (for ‘blended new species’ quote), p 145 (for ‘some continuation’, ‘the [Maori] language’, ‘the Maoris themselves’ and ‘entirely a matter’ quotes), p 150 (for ‘fundamental tenets’ quote); Hunn, Report on Department of Maori Affairs, p 15 (for ‘to form one nation’ quote); Butterworth, ‘The Health of the Body’, p 112; Ballara, Proud to Be White? p 134; Booth and Hunn, Integration, pp 1–4, (p 1 for ‘vanguard’ quote, p 2 for ‘uniformity’, ‘closing the gap’, ‘whole new culture’ and ‘tolerant of diversity’ quotes, and p 3 for ‘submergence’ quote); McEwen, ‘Urbanisation’, p 84 (for ‘no citizen’ quote); Kawharu, ‘Introduction’, in Brookes and Kawharu (eds), Administration, p 9 (for ‘distant future’ quote); see too Ritchie, ‘Planning’, p 112, and for a gendered perspective, Woods, Megan C, ‘Integrating the Nation: Gendering Maori Urbanisation and Integration, 1942–1969’, PhD thesis, Christchurch, 2002.

12 Hunn, Report on Department of Maori Affairs, p 15 (for ‘adopted the 1960 pattern’ quote); Ritchie, The Making of a Maori, p 38 (for ‘the economics and social consequences’ quote); McEwen, ‘Urbanisation’, p 84 (for ‘fusion’ quote); Barrington, John, Separate but Equal? Māori Schools and the Crown 1867–1969, Wellington, 2008, pp 268–9; Booth and Hunn, Integration, p 8.

13 Meek, R L, Maori Problems Today: A Short Survey, Wellington, 1944; Scott, A Radical Writer’s Life, p 89 (for ‘only a good liberal effort’ and ‘no value in artificially’ quotes), p 90 (for ‘nonsense to worry’ and ‘gross maladjustments’ quotes), p 108 (for ‘wither away’ quote); Booth and Hunn, Integration, p 9 (for ‘ways of the pakeha’ and ‘numerical proportion’ quotes).

14 Hunn, Report on Department of Maori Affairs, p 14 (for ‘remarkable strides’ quote).