Maori Blood

Don Brash's comments on Maori bloodlines have stirred debate about the nature of Maoridom and National's policies. Sunday Star-Times columnist Frank Haden and Dr Rawiri Taonui, head of the school of Maori and indigenous studies at Canterbury University debate this divisive issue.

Dr Rawiri Taonui

Don Brash's claim that Maori are no longer indigenous because there are few, if any, full-blooded Maori left is nothing but old-fashioned colonial racism in new-age disguise.

While whakapapa or descent is a prerequisite for identity, the exclusive application of the stockman's blood quantum in this way is deeply offensive. In colonial times the quantum doctrine, skin colour, and weird things such as head shape, the size of the penis and female buttocks were used to position dark skinned peoples along an evolutionary continuum between animals and Europeans. Black, brown and yellow were inferior and evolving toward whiteness.

The assumptions underwrote policy from 1840 to recent times. Governor George Grey, Henry Williams, Richard Taylor, Elsdon Best and Percy Smith -administrators, missionaries and teachers alike - believed Maori were children in the lower stages of human culture. The infamous 1960 Hunn Report classified three kinds of Maori: half-castes, who were more European-like, lived in cities, spoke no Maori and were advanced; those who were still Maori but lived in the cities and were making progress; and those who spoke Maori, lived in rural areas, and remained "backward and retarded".

Colonial governments and racist regimes used the doctrine to deny basic human rights. Dark Aborigines were deemed non-human so Britain could possess an uninhabited Australia. North American colonies classified Indians, African slaves and mixed offspring. The United States graded Hawaiians. Nazi Germany applied the same principles as racial science. In pre-1974 New Zealand, Maori who were less than half-Maori did not always officially qualify as Maori.

Among its several assumptions, the doctrine presumed intermarriage accelerated evolutionary progress. Adherents welcomed intermarriage as a way of obliterating difference. Dilute dark blood, lighten the skin, create a more intelligent and evolved person. Hence, post-Korean War Australia granted the franchise to Aborigines who reached the half-caste threshold, although, as a check against residual pollution, they still had to prove they were "civilised".

These views drove the view that Maori would and should die out or assimilate. But the opposite happened. The Maori population recovered from 35,000 at the turn of the 20th century to over 600,000 today.

Brash's belief that the arrival of his forebears in 1848 somehow negates the indigeneity of Maori is an affront to the 6000 indigenous peoples who number 500 million in the world. Indigenous is more than hanging around for a generation or five.

Indigenous peoples are the descendants of the original first occupants. They are First Nations, First Peoples, tangatawhenua. Later arrivals have nothing to lose and everything to gain by respecting that. In a weak attempt to regain the post-Orewa popularity of 2004, Brash threatens the reverse by appealing to the innate fears of those who have difficulty accepting brown people as co-equals.

Indigenous peoples also descend from pre-State societies marginalised politically, economically, socially, culturally and ideologically through Western colonisation. Brash tramples the tragedy of this reality when he blames Maori for the disproportionately negative social indices - it's their own fault.

This rhetoric ignores the cumulative intergenerational impact of colonisation. The present is shaped by the past. When the land was taken, Maori lost their economic base. Maori were excluded from political power. Economic and political disempowerment impeded providing the basic needs of tribes and families. It undermined development, causing under-performance in education, the main avenue of upward mobility. Education was also prejudiced. The barriers were insurmountable. One generation could not provide for the next. Most of the next generation repeat the cycle. The dominant culture expected the subordinate culture to fail and condemned them for it, while garnishing its own table with the spoils from the land.

Brash says poor Maori choices cause poor Maori health and a failure of Maori to study law, despite having places reserved for them. However, the poor practice poor health the world over. Poverty and despair level choice. Affirmative action and equity initiatives in education fail because they assume deficits on the part of Maori rather than institutions.

Race versus need is a rhetorical smoke screen. Maori have the greatest need and that is to be treated without prejudice. Brash's cry of one law for all ignores the cumulative impact of a history of racist legislation, court decisions, government policy and continuing institutional barriers.

Indigenous is also about preserving and transmitting to future generations cultural identities, social institutions, customary practices and spiritual values about ancestors, land and the natural world. Brash diminishes and dismisses the identity of the descendants of a people who have lived here for 1000 years.

He mistakenly thinks New Zealand is whitening. It is browning. The Maori population is growing faster than the European one. Children of Maori descent will comprise 40% of all school children by 2050. More than that, any person of Maori descent can call themselves Maori. There is new pride in doing so, less fear. Gone are the days when people hid their Maoriness because of the stigma and discrimination of mono-cultural white New Zealand.

It is disturbing that a deliberately divisive person might be the next leader of a multicultural Maori, Pakeha, Pasifika and Asian country. Archaic, antiquated, anachronistic, backward and inferior views have no place in a civilised society. I prescribe evolution.