SPIRITUAL HALF-CASTES

When I read the headline, ‘Kaumatua driven from his home,’ I thought to myself, the only winner here is the Crown.  How could it not be when the settlement of Ngāti Kuri’s claims was achieved under Crown rules, processes, timeframes and terms? 

Could this all have been avoided?  To answer that I turn to a time in history when males ruled the world and race was worked out in fractions of blood.  At that time, my father and his siblings were raised as half-castes but were legally classed in all official records as Māori.  And yet their half-caste first cousins were classed as Pākehā.  The reason for this difference was that one family had a Māori father, while the other had a Pākehā one, and under Crown rules at that time, your father’s race determined yours.  Crazy I know, but that is the nature of racism.

Besides this classification of ‘half-caste’ Māori and ‘half-caste’ Pākehā, there were many other signs of racist craziness at that time.  These included the fact that the Native (later Māori) Land Court was still blatantly overseeing the unjust transfer of huge chunks of land from Māori into Pākehā hands, and banks were openly refusing to lend Māori the capital needed to develop our land.  Additionally pubs refused to serve us, landlords refused to rent to us, and schools punished us for speaking te reo.  And to this day, police stop and question Māori more readily than Pākehā for the same behaviours, while the criminal courts punish us more severely than Pākehā for the same crimes.

Today, it’s hard to imagine the impact all this had on our parents and their cousins.  After all, their two sets of parents got on well enough, and their descendants are all either proud to be Māori, or to have Māori whānau.  But it was a bad thing then, and it still is today.  At times our two cultures can seem to be at total odds with each other.  But under tikanga, regardless of our differences, we can be reconciled through tika, pono and aroha.

I turn back now to Ngāti Kuri where my whanaunga are the only losers in this latest tragedy.  How could they not be?  Regardless of whether they support or oppose it, they know the settlement was a Crown process without tikanga.  One only has to look at the faces of the negotiators to see that.

Yes, all this could have been avoided, but it wasn’t.  And now that it’s done, the choice is clearer than ever for all of us; either learn and live our tikanga and be wholly human, or become spiritual half-castes forever defined, divided and ruled by Crown processes. 

Aue! E koutou, e ngā mea ataahua, nā te aha i ahei i a koutou te kōtiti kē atu i ngā huarahi a te tikanga!