CONFRONTING CULTURES

One of the most confronting cultural shibboleths that surfaces now and then amongst some Pākehā is that Māori people and our culture are going to die out. This belief builds on earlier ideas of ‘fatal impact theory’, whereby ‘inferior’ races were supposed to have melted away as a result of European contact.

As early as the 1830s, Englishman Edward Markham wrote:  “In New Zealand the same as in Canada or North America, and in Southern Africa the Hottentots are a decreasing people … my belief is the Almighty intended it should be so or it would not have been allowed. Out of Evil comes Good.”

He was famously echoed in 1856 by physician and politician Dr Isaac Featherston who said it was the duty of Europeans to “smooth down … [the] dying pillow” of the Māori race. 

Then in 1868 a Wellington newspaper editor wrote in tones of surprised outrage: “They are determined to fight, and we, in self-protection, must treat them as a species of savage beasts which must be exterminated to render the colonisation of New Zealand possible.” 

The usefulness of racial theories like fatal impact, monogenism, polygenism and social Darwinism was that they upheld the European self-image as the most advanced of all races and eased any doubts about the morality of their attempt to take over the world. 

In that regard, usefulness was always more important than accuracy. For example, polygenists once claimed that different races could not interbreed, or at least that mixed-race people would be infertile.  Wrong.

And in 1863 the geologist Ferdinand Von Hochstetter managed the logically impossible feat of being monogenist, polygenist and social Darwinist in a single chapter when he wrote, “Richly endowed by nature … the Māori is fully aware of his progress in moral improvement and culture; yet he is not capable of attaining the full height of a Christian civilized life; and it is from this very incompleteness, that his race is doomed to gradual extinction …” Wrong again.

Although the belief that Māori and our culture ought to die out lost popularity from about 1914, many continued to believe that we would survive only as a ‘golden tinge’ on the skins of the Pākehā; and the belief itself did not die out.  Instead it went underground from whence it re-emerges occasionally in various racist guises.

In 2012, a rich ACT Party donor confidently and publicly claimed that all white New Zealanders "don't like the Māoris."  And just last week, a commenter on a Radio New Zealand story titled PM defends ‘racist’ TVNZ survey wrote, “Whatever, the future is clear Māori culture will die away...”

Confronted with the incurably racist culture of such people, Whina Cooper’s advice to Māori was that we ought to marry them until they died out, while McCully Matiu’s advice was that we ought to give them every chance to do the right thing.

My own thought is that while we combat their racism using their laws and ours, we also ought to work with non-racist Pākehā, like those from Network Waitangi, who are very able and willing to confront the culture from which racism came.

PLUTOCRATS, PROPHETS AND PITCHFORKS

American, Nick Hanauer, is a proud and unapologetic capitalist who has founded, co-founded or funded more than 30 companies, including aQuantive which he onsold in 2007 to Microsoft for $6.4 billion. 

With numerous homes, his own plane, a super-yacht and a bank, Hanauer is by definition also a plutocrat; i.e. he derives his power from his wealth. 

He describes himself as “not the smarted person” nor the hardest working, and credits his success to a combination of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance, and of timing. 

But Hanauer is demonstrably very good at a couple of things.  First, he has an unusually high tolerance for risk.  Second, he has a good intuition about what will happen in the future. 

In June 2014 he wrote a prophetic piece for Politico magazine in which he foresaw pitchforks coming for him and his "fellow 1%ers” because of the increasing wealth inequality between themselves and the rest of us.

To demonstrate, in 1980 the top 1% of Americans shared about 8% of national wealth while the bottom 50% shared 18%.  Today the top 1% share over 20%, and the bottom 50% share less than 13%. 

Are wealth and income inequality rising to the same extent in New Zealand? Last year, Treasury reported that while there are inequalities here, they haven’t increased in twenty years.  Of course that is cold comfort to those with whom the Salvation Army work.  

The fact is that we don’t have access to the kind of data that Hanauer uses. The only in-depth report ever done on wealth distribution in New Zealand was completed in 2004, and the annual Household Economic Survey doesn't capture wealth and income inequalities at all.  So we must rely on informal indicators and our own intuition.

For example, the Salaries Interactive app shows the top annual salary earned in New Zealand by an individual last year was almost $5million.  But we know the average income for individual full-time workers was only $45,000.  We also know that during the same period, the average income of beneficiaries was a mere $13,000 per annum, including allowances.  

Although they are informal, those are all very powerful indicators of inequality.  But how can they be resolved?

Because middle class consumers are far greater job creators than wealthy entrepreneurs like himself, Hanauer argues that he and his fellow plutocrats need to give higher median incomes to the workers rather than lower tax rates to the wealthy.

Although it sounds simplistic, a living wage is the pivot to addressing the poverty and inequality cycles which Hanauer knows must be broken.  However, if the plutocrats do not address the growing inequality at all, he predicts the inevitable destruction of the middle class and an uprising against the wealthy class that will match the French Revolution in ferocity.

He is right.  No free and open society can long sustain rising economic inequality.  It has never happened.  There are no examples.  You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising.  

While the inequalities here are not as bad as those in America, they are similar, and so too will be the results if the plutocrats do not heed the prophets.  Pitchforks.  

CULTURAL SETTINGS

Because we have always lived with and amongst all the different cultural traditions in our rohe, Tangata Whenua are multi-cultural.  No matter how closely those traditions run together, or how often they intersect with others, they each retain their own uniqueness within our jurisdiction.  And that is the defining essence of multi-culturalism.

However there is another definition of multi-culturalism which a few Tangata Tiriti have tried to foist on us.  At its most benign, it is something that over-rides our culture.  But at its most malign they use it to try to control and constitutionally disempower us. 

Nowadays we see it in action from the way racism against us is tolerated and trivialised in the mainstream media, through to legislative theft by Parliament of our resources.

Possibly as a result of this twisted version of it, some of us have rejected multi-culturalism as a concept, preferring bi-culturalism instead.  But just because a few haters twisted and used it against us, does not require us to abandon our multi-culturalism, or any other culturalism for that matter. 

To understand how and why that is, we need only check our cultural settings.  Culture is socially defined, not biologically fixed.  When we are at least bi-lingual we are not limited to being mono-cultural.  However, when we are in a mono-cultural setting we could describe ourselves as mono-cultural.  So too can we describe ourselves as bi-cultural when we are in bi-cultural settings. 

To illustrate, in 2011 Miria Simpson, known as a Taniwha of the reo, was asked by a reporter what it had meant to her to be fluent in te reo all her life.  The then 79 year old answered, “When I compare myself with people who do not have the language, then the only explanation I can give is that I am whole, W-H-O-L-E.  Because I know what it is like to be able to do both things [speak te reo and English] I consider myself absolutely both bi-lingual and bi-cultural.” 

Experience tells us that when we are well-grounded in at least two cultures, we are also able to experience true multi-culturalism in its setting.  The recent tangihanga of Ta Ranginui Walker was a wonderful example of that, and it simply could not have been wholly appreciated within a mono-cultural setting. 

The beauty of cultures is that they can be learned by the willing.  One outcome of the cultural exchange between Ngati Kahu and Shanghai is the sharing of our languages.  Some of us are also learning New Zealand Sign Language.  Already we appreciate how much we miss in those cultural settings without their respective languages, and we love the learnings.

As heirs of the Rangatira who declared sovereignty in He Wakaputanga oTe Rangatiratanga o Nga Hapu o Nu Tireni 1835 and reaffirmed it in Te Tiriti o Waitangi 1840, we embrace our multi-culturalism in its true form.

And as successors to Taniwha like Miria Simpson, we remain whole, regardless of our cultural settings.

  

SPURRING ON TRANSFORMATION

In the introduction to the report of Matike Mai Aotearoa – the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, Moana Jackson wrote, “What some might see as an ‘unrealistic’ discourse, [is] in fact an expression of a deeply-held understanding about what was promised in Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”

For te rangatiratanga of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the reality that is being lived now is therefore never seen as a straitjacket that inhibits discussion.  Rather it is a spur to imagine and work towards something different. 

Yes, we know that any constitutional change of the magnitude we envisage will require time, but we also know that seeking constitutional transformation is simply the tika thing to do, and so we will do it.

Matike Mai Aotearoa’s report was released on 5^th February, less than four weeks ago.  Since then we have been provided with more spurs to not only ‘imagine something different’ in the constitutional arrangements between us and te kāwanatanga, but to also do it.

For example, in 2013 te kāwanatanga changed its law regards burials at sea, putting that activity under the consenting authority of the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA].  At the time Ngāti Kahu reissued its consistent statement to the EPA and all other government agencies reminding them that they do not have authority to issue any consents for any activities in a rohe without the express consent of the relevant hapū, and that anyone seeking to action such a consent will be dealt with directly by the hapū.   In short, kāwanatanga laws do not override rangatiratanga sovereignty.

It generally takes a little time for kāwanatanga to action its laws, so we will fast forward to today. This particular law is now being rolled out under the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects—Burial at Sea) Regulations 2015. 

Yesterday (Monday 29^th February 2016) we were alerted by a Radio New Zealand reporter that under those regulations, one of the five places the EPA will give consents for burials at sea to take place is an area 38 kms northeast of Rakaumangamanga (Cape Brett).  That was news to Ngāti Kahu.

How did we not know before yesterday what the EPA was up to?  It didn't consult us, that’s how.  Instead it consulted with a group called Te Hiku Fisheries Forum which, according to the EPA, represents Ngāti Kuri, Te Aupōuri, Ngāi Takoto, Te Rarawa and Ngāti Kahu.  That was also news to us.  We are not a member of that forum, and our hapu never authorised it to represent us.  Additionally, that had already notified the EPA of our position. 

We know none of our whanaunga from the other iwi consented to this, because the area 38kms northeast of Rakaumangamanga is not in any of their hapu rohe, it is in ours. 

 

So why has this kāwanatanga agency chosen that area without consulting us?  We can only surmise that it is either not yet capable of imagining and doing something different in its relationship with te rangatiratanga, or that it has chosen to deliberately thumb its nose at that relationship. 

Either way, it is spurring on transformation.