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'Trust the process' is more than a tagline for self-love or enlightenment. In her first Spinoff column, Hana Tapiata uses the Māori creation story to reveal a blueprint for living well and realising potential.
It's easy to be grateful when life is good, when everything is going the way you want it to. You often can't think of anything more, or less, because your blessings are neatly wrapped and flowing to you one after the other. But what about when Tāwhirimātea decides to blow the wind into your sails in a direction you had no intention of heading? When the universe presents those blessings a little differently, like: 'I'm giving you no obvious signs that it's gonna get better anytime soon but, trust me, trust the process.. oh, and remember to be grateful and look for the opportunities. K, bye.'

It's not until after you've clawed your way out of the darkness, after being upset at how unfair life is, after freaking out because you didn't know how you were going to make it work, that something clicks and the bigger picture starts to take shape. You start to see the blessings and opportunities after all.

You reflect on what you've been going through and begin to appreciate that if you hadn't struggled, there would be no depth to your character, no perspective, no compassion. You wouldn't be who you are today. You might learn you're more capable than you once thought and maybe there's something to 'trusting the process' after all.

What is that process though and why should we trust it?

In te ao Māori, the whakapapa (process) of creation begins with Io: the Supreme Being, energy and existence itself. Then comes Te Kore, which technically means 'the nothingness', but c'mon now, there's never nothing in life. Te Kore encompasses the space, the formless, the thought, the realm of possibilities, the infinite potential. This potential manifests and evolves into Te Pō - the darkness, the night. In this phase, the formless begins to transform and assemble for the next phase in the process: Te Ao Mārama, the world of light. The physical world as we know it today.

In the beginning of creation, Ranginui and Papatūānuku were in a tight embrace, their 70 or so children between them. With no crowd control procedures yet in place, the children became restless and uncomfortable, devising plans to free themselves from the prison they'd been born into.

Tūmatauenga (atua of people and war) suggested to kill their parents, but was convinced that while there are no dumb ideas, that one was borderline. Each of the brothers had attempts at pushing their parents apart and failed. They pushed with all their might; they dug their heels into the ground and pressed their shoulders up against the sky, to no avail.

That was until Tāne Mahuta changed it up. He laid down on the ground, lifted his feet up and placed them on his father's chest, with his shoulders firmly against Papatūānuku. The change of position meant he could absorb more weight and generate enough force to push apart and, finally separate his parents. Cue, Te Ao Mārama.

Te ira atua were then free to stretch themselves, to grow and reside over the different domains we know as our natural environment today. From there, we can trace whakapapa down to us, te ira tangata.

Stories such as this have been handed down through generations for a long time. Often they've been treated as nothing more than myths and legends. When in reality, my tūpuna wove layers upon layers of metaphor, insight and wisdom about the world, into the arts. They left a literal blueprint of how to live well and how to realise potential. They knew the most powerful and effective way to transfer this knowledge and information, was through storytelling.

The lesson from our creation story that can be applied to almost anything goes:

An idea (Te Kore: formless, potential) > developing phases (Te Pō: takes on form) > actualised and created (Te Ao Mārama, realisation)

Our confidence and willingness to trust what comes our way comes from understanding that we also underwent the same process to come into this world.
Hana Tapiata is a lifestyle blogger who writes about matauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), organised by a new kaupapa at the beginning of each new moon cycle.
The Bulletin is The Spinoff's acclaimed, free daily curated digest of all the most important stories from around New Zealand delivered directly to your inbox each morning.

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Understanding the world through whakapapa: introducing our new Māori lifestyle column

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'Trust the process' is more than a tagline for self-love or enlightenment. In her first Spinoff column, Hana Tapiata uses the Māori creation story to reveal a blueprint for living well and realising potential.

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Summer reissue: The go-to argument for many people spouting anti-Māori sentiment often starts with '... but Māori killed all the Moriori'. Researcher Keri Mills was eager for fellow Pākehā to do some reading before reaching for this lazy argument, sparking a major nationwide conversation. This post was first published 3 August 2018.
Firstly, the myth. You've heard it before. There were a pre-Māori people in New Zealand, called the Moriori. When Māori arrived in the country they set about obliterating these peaceful Moriori inhabitants until not a single Moriori remained alive.

This story is completely wrong. But it is astonishingly pervasive. You might have heard it referred to recently by a former leader of the National Party on our national broadcaster. The interviewer, Kim Hill, responded by exclaiming "for heaven's sake! If only Sir Michael King were here today" and drawing the interview to a close. I understand her exhaustion, but I wish she had taken the time to briefly explain her invocation of the late historian, because Don Brash is only one of many New Zealanders who are confused about this part of our past.

Let's take it to bits.
Were there a pre-Māori people in New Zealand called the Moriori?
No. Moriori are a group based in the Chatham Islands / Rēkohu. Their ancestors came from East Polynesia, like Māori, and probably via Aotearoa. The recent archaelogical evidence shows that Moriori arrived in the Chatham Islands around 1500 - either from the Māori migration to Aotearoa (i.e., they were part of the original migration of Māori to Aotearoa, and left for the Chathams later) or, possibly, they came independently to the Chatham Islands from the same region as the Māori migration. On Rēkohu they developed a distinct language and culture.
Were there a pre-Māori people, at all?
As far as the scientific evidence is concerned, there were no pre-Māori people. There is no substantial evidence of any sustained human presence in this land before the 13th century, and past then all the evidence is of a fairly homogenous group of people with Eastern Polynesian origins.
Did Māori kill the Moriori?
In 1835 a group of about 900 Taranaki Māori (from Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama) sailed from Wellington to the Chathams, with the intention to make it their new home. They had recently been driven out of their own rohe during the Musket Wars. Shortly after they arrived they killed around 300 Moriori and enslaved the rest. So yes, some Māori did kill some Moriori, and the story is an awful one - but to attribute this to all Māori is wrong, and if you find yourself wanting to do it you should question your motives in doing so.
Are there any Moriori left?
Yes. Moriori are a distinct and surviving kin group. Some still live in the Chathams, some live on mainland Aotearoa and overseas. Their genealogical heritage is now complex and intermingled, as with Māori and almost every other ethnic group on the planet.

So, on to another, and perhaps a bigger, question: why do so many people believe the Moriori were a pre-Māori people living in Aotearoa that were wiped out by Māori?

There are several answers to this question. The shortest one is that this story was taught as history in New Zealand schools for most of the 20th century.

But this doesn't fully explain the story's pervasiveness. Plenty of incorrect things have been taught to Kiwi schoolchildren in the past, but few have lingered as long in the popular imagination as the Moriori myth. Parts of the story were disproved as early as the 1920s, and the whole narrative was meticulously debunked in David Simmons' The Great New Zealand Myth, first published in 1976.

The historian Kerry Howe has written about the misconceptions relating to first arrival in Aotearoa. His book The Quest for Origins shows how the Moriori myth arose in a period when Pākehā believed Māori were dying out. Howe argues that the Pākehā at that time had a desire to justify what they saw as the imminent extinction of Māori, and excuse themselves from blame for it. They did so using evolutionary arguments about some "races" being stronger than others. The story of the extinction of Moriori at the hands of Māori was another example of a "natural" process of a stronger race replacing a weaker one. It was a useful story for Pākehā, and so it stuck.

Today, with a thriving Māori culture all around us, the narrative has a different, though still qualitatively very similar use. It surfaces in the comments on news stories relating to Treaty settlements. It bubbles up in the stream of discontent about the increased use of Te Reo on the airwaves. It provides a convenient defence for Pākehā colonisation of New Zealand - or at least an argumentative strategy to silence Māori grievance about it. The strategy goes along the lines of: 'Who are you to complain? You did it yourself.'

They didn't, though. So as tempting as this myth seems to be to people like Don Brash, they should stop using it, and not only because Kim Hill will burn you. Just because it's wrong. This is not an appeal against free speech. It is an appeal to use free speech that is true, instead of free speech that isn't.

One last thing. Many Māori histories speak of a people before their arrival in Aotearoa, who were variously conquered, absorbed by marriage, or in some cases simply remained, and have descendents alive today.

I have no wish to trample on these traditions, but I do have a dear wish to deprive my fellow Pākehā of a racist narrative that has no Pākehā evidence behind it. If Pākehā want to use Māori traditions as evidence for their arguments, they can go and learn Te Reo me ōna tikanga in one of the many wonderful wānanga in this country, and find out the proper context of those histories first. The invitation is open to you, Dr. Brash.

The Bulletin is The Spinoff's acclaimed, free daily curated digest of all the most important stories from around New Zealand delivered directly to your inbox each morning.

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Summer reissue: The Moriori myth and why it's still with us

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Summer reissue: The go-to argument for many people spouting anti-Māori sentiment often starts with '... but Māori killed all the Moriori'. Researcher Keri Mills was eager for fellow Pākehā to do some reading before reaching for this lazy argument, sparking a major nationwide conversation. This po

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The 150th anniversaries of several brutal events in our local and national history has prompted Ernie Barrington to dip into the historical records - to remember "episodes that call out to be remembered and not to be airbrushed away".
Matawhero, just outside Gisborne (Turanganui), is where I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. These days, they grow grapes and avocados there, as well as maize, citrus trees and other crops. It's 20,000 fertile hectares known as the Gisborne Plains or the Poverty Bay Flats.

In 1946, my parents, Fred and Clarice Barrington, established a market garden there, on Bushmere Road. It was a challenge, but they came from a farming background, and they knew what they were in for.

My three younger brothers and I went to the local school, Makaraka Primary, and it was there that we first heard about Te Kooti and his guerilla followers and the part they'd played in the "Matawhero Massacre".

We heard how, back in 1868, they came down from the hills, forded the Waipaoa River, murdered the Matawhero settlers in the dead of night, and set fire to their houses.

In Sunday School, at the historic Matawhero Church, we were told that this was one of the few buildings left standing after the raid (true), and that some settlers sought refuge there during the attack (unlikely).

Last year and this year are the 150th anniversaries of several brutal events in our local and national history. There was the "Matawhero Massacre", in 1868. The "Siege of Ngatapa", in 1869. And a few years before that, in 1865, there had been the "Siege of Waerenga-a-hika".

As kids growing up in Matawhero, we weren't inclined to question the world around us. It didn't occur to us to ask why Te Kooti attacked the Matawhero settlers. And why he targeted particular people.

Through all of my years of school - at Makaraka Primary, Gisborne Intermediate, and then Gisborne High School - no teacher ever explained what happened at Matawhero. Nor was I, or any of my contemporaries, ever taught anything about the uprisings in or around Gisborne in the 1860s. They were simply never mentioned.

Instead, in our history classes at high school, we learned mostly about England. I left school knowing more about Henry the Eighth's England than I did about our local or national history. We did have some discussion about the "Māori Wars", but very little about the Treaty of Waitangi, and certainly nothing about the breaches of the Treaty.

We heard a lot about the arrival of Captain Cook in 1769, and his heroic journey in the Endeavour. But there was hardly a mention of the even more heroic Polynesian waka voyages to New Zealand from the Pacific, some 500 years before Cook. There was a sense that this aspect of our culture and history was not important. Nothing to celebrate there, apparently.

In the fourth form at Gisborne High, there were two Māori classmates with the same surname as Te Kooti Rikirangi. I asked them once if they were his descendants, and they said they were but confessed to knowing little about him. My impression was that they were uncomfortable, perhaps even ashamed, to be associated with the name. So the silence in the wider Gisborne community about the story of Te Kooti was echoed, so it seemed, within some of his own family.

Silences help to mask truths that are unpalatable - and enlightenment, if it comes, can be a slow process.

Despite my interest in history, my awareness of historical issues grew slowly. It came long after I'd left Gisborne to study at university in Christchurch - where I graduated, in 1963, with a Bachelor of Science from Canterbury University.

My history education didn't begin until the 1980s when, sandwiched between family and work, I embarked on part-time studies and landed a second degree in history and sociology, in 1989, from the University of Auckland. Those studies helped me find the answers to some of those why questions.

Books have also helped me understand the events leading up to, and following on, from the 1860s. Two of my Gisborne compatriots, Witi Ihimaera and Anne Salmond, have written compellingly about Gisborne and its history. Judith Binney, James Belich, and Vincent O'Malley have been among other writers to fill in the historical gaps left by our education system.

Then, of course, there have been the hearings of the Waitangi Tribunal and, of particular interest to Gisborne people, the Turanganui-a-Kiwa Claim, 2004.

These voices made me realise that, in my schooldays, we'd been getting our history from the perspective of the dominant Pākehā culture. Māori voices and alternative explanations weren't available to us.

So this year, in retirement, I've had a chance to revisit some of those unanswered questions and fudged explanations from my youth. In doing so, I especially noted Moana Jackson's column here on E-Tangata about the "deliberate misremembering of history that has obscured the reality of what colonisation really was, and is."

That "misremembering", he wrote, had replaced the harsh reality of colonisation's "racist violence and its illegitimate usurpation of power, with a feelgood rhetoric of Treaty-based good faith and Crown honour".

Moana's assessment is very true of my home town, Gisborne, which has had its fair share of historical feelgood stories and quite a bit of misremembering. So we have learned that 24 Māori in the district signed the Treaty of Waitangi. That there was harmony, and intermarriage, between Māori and early Pākehā settlers. And that, eventually, there was a "successful" settlement with the Crown.

However, the anniversaries over the last year or so are reminders that the very same Crown was instrumental in brutal racist episodes in Gisborne in the 1860s - episodes that call out to be remembered and not to be airbrushed away.

In researching this, I went back to the prominent newspapers of the 1860s to see what they had to say about the major events. What I discovered was that, while the reports of the events in Gisborne were not particularly distorted, the motivations were unexamined. No one asked " why?". Why was Te Kooti so vengeful? What did he have against the Matawhero people?

Well, it turns out that he had quite a few reasons to be aggrieved. He'd been treated very badly and illegally.

Te Kooti was born in Turanganui. He was Ngāti Maru, a hapū of Rongowhakaata, at Pā-o-Kahu. But, unlike most Māori in the area, he didn't take up the Pai Mārire (Hau Hau) faith. One of their central tenets was to resist land confiscations, which was definitely an issue in Turanganui at that time.

In 1865, about 500-800 supporters of Pai Mārire in Turanganui were living at a pā at Waerenga-a-hika, a short distance north-west of the main settlement. They were seen as a serious threat by the colonial authorities, and Donald McLean, the Crown's principal agent on the East Coast, saw a chance to put an end to their influence.

So he used a combination of Ngāti Porou and colonial forces to attack the pā at Waerenga-a-hika. In the siege that followed, 71 Māori defenders were killed, along with 11 attackers. The pā was completely destroyed.

The siege was a case of the Crown and its allies attacking its own people without good cause. Indeed, the Waitangi Tribunal Report (2004) on the Turanganui-a-Kiwa claim, found "that the attack was unlawful and in breach of the Treaty of Waitangi".

Unfortunately, Te Kooti got embroiled in the aftermath of the siege. He had sided with the Crown and Ngāti Porou in the siege but then was later accused of espionage by the local magistrate, Major Reginald Biggs. He was arrested and, along with about 100 prisoners from the siege, he was expelled to the Chatham Islands. Our very own 1860s gulag.

This was an illegal act because there were never any charges laid, and no trial or convictions. It was made worse because the detention duration was indeterminate. And it was to have serious repercussions.

Through a well-executed plan by Te Kooti, he and his followers eventually escaped from the Chathams in a captured schooner and landed back at Whareongaonga, south of Gisborne, in 1868.

This got the concerned attention of the colonial authorities, especially Turanganui's resident magistrate Major Biggs, who sent Māori emissaries instructing Te Kooti and his followers to surrender all their weapons and "await the decision of the government as to their future".

It was an audacious instruction by Biggs, seeing that he'd had a hand in sending them, without trial, to the Chathams in the first place. So it was unlikely that Te Kooti would take much notice of him. He sent Biggs a message to say he and his followers just wanted to be left alone. Te Kooti's intention was to move out of the district, but he was thwarted in those efforts.

Among his concerns was that 30 acres of his land at Matawhero had been sold, and some Matawhero Māori had been complicit in the sale. Major Biggs was one of those who'd settled on the land.

As a result of these and other tensions, Te Kooti went on the offensive in late November, 1868, and, in a well-organised lightning strike, he hit Pākehā and Māori settlers at Matawhero east of the Waipaoa River.

Biggs and his family were killed, along with other military officers - and it was seen as utu directed at those who'd wronged Te Kooti. Of the 50-70 Matawhero men, women and children who were killed, about half of them were Māori. Another 300 Māori were taken as prisoners.

That action by Te Kooti and his followers prompted considerably more violence once the Crown and its allies mobilised against him. This included Ngāti Porou and Kahungunu contingents, and Crown forces led by Colonel Whitmore. Te Kooti was eventually forced to retreat to a mountain-top pā in back country Ngatapa.

On January 1, 1869, government forces under Whitmore stormed the pa and, by January 4, it was besieged and around 50 defenders had been killed. Te Kooti, who was never captured, and a number of his followers, escaped, but a large number of prisoners were taken and many of them (perhaps 128) were summarily executed by the Ngāti Porou auxiliaries.

Not one of those executed had been charged, tried, or convicted of any offence. But it was sanctioned by Whitmore. The Waitangi Tribunal found that the executions were unlawful and in breach of the Crown's obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi, if not under the rules of war then in force in the British Empire.

I mentioned earlier that these accounts, and especially the Māori voices, weren't available to us in the 1940s and 50s. The acts by Te Kooti in 1868 at Matawhero, where innocent people were murdered, were unconscionable, but Te Kooti's illegal imprisonment by colonial forces was also immoral and indefensible. And, if it hadn't been for his organisational skills and the Ringatū faith that he developed, he and his followers might well have died on the Chatham Islands.

This brings us to the anniversaries. In November last year, the Matawhero Presbyterian Church held a service of Remembrance and Reconciliation, Lament and Healing. It was led by Rev Mary Peterson. In that spirit, the events of 1868 were referred to as the Matawhero Tragedy. Descendants of some of the families who were killed, including the Biggs and the Wilsons, spoke at the service, as well as a Ringatū priest, a descendant of Te Kooti's followers.

A little earlier, in September, 2018, Te Papa and Te Tira Whakaari Trust co-hosted Te Kooti: Ngā Reo o Te Motu (Te Kooti: Voices from the Iwi). It was a one-day symposium to activate discussion about the legacy of Te Kooti. During the symposium, speakers from a number of iwi challenged the myths and shared kōrero about his positive influence in their lives over generations.

At Waerenga-a-hika, there is now a handsome six-metre tall memorial to the conflict that took place there in 1865. That was unveiled in 2015. The atrocity that occurred there and the Māori who perished there haven't been forgotten.

We can't unmake the past, but we can at least remember it honestly.

I have just turned 80, and I can't help reflecting on the difference it would have made if I had known all the history that I now know. I had Māori friends at high school and university, and although those friendships were always sound, it would have deepened my understanding of them to know how their backgrounds differed from mine, and how Māori in my home town suffered with land confiscations and the devaluing of their culture.

And it would have armed me better to counter the frequent stereotypes about Māori and Pacific Island people that I have encountered in my home town and elsewhere - especially, but not exclusively, among uninformed Pākehā.

Learning this history has changed me, in the sense that my antennae is always alert to distorted racial stereotypes, and to histories slanted toward the dominant culture.
Ernie Barrington is a retired 80-year-old Pākehā who wishes he had learned more about the history of the place where he grew up. He was formerly on the teaching staff at the University of Auckland's Centre for Professional Development. © E-Tangata, 2019
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The 150th anniversaries of several brutal events in our local and national history has prompted Ernie Barrington to dip into the historical records - to remember "episodes that call out to be remembered and not to be airbrushed away". Matawhero, just outside Gisborne (Turanganui), is where I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s.

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Last week the Ministry for Children’s practices around uplifting children and putting them in state care were exposed in a harrowing investigation by journalist Melanie Reid. It’s no coincidence Māori are disproportionately targeted, writes Tina Ngata.

If you venture into the websites for the Ministry for Women, Ministry for Children and Ministry of Health, the images and language around a maternal healthcare journey, and subsequent support for parents and children, paint a very particular, positive picture: smiling upturned brown faces, the sun beaming down on them – full of hope and aspirations, looking up towards a bright future. Declarations of support for loving, nurturing environments and belief in young people living up to their full potential. The use of our potent moko kauwae as the logo for the Ministry for Women implies an acknowledgement of the sacred role of wāhine in the family and community.

What has been made very clear in the Newsroom article that rocked our nation is that the reality for young Māori mothers is very, very different. Like rats circling a bird’s nest, Ministry for Children agents come back, again and again, trying to wear down the mother and her family, trying to isolate and cajole, then threaten, intimidate and deceive. It’s a relentless assault upon the young māmā, her family and her child, a jarring testament to what young Māori mothers are put through within the health system.

This is not a new problem, but what Melanie Reid’s documentary did was put a face to the problem that Māori and Pacific whānau already know is out there. We live the reality of these intimidating tactics every day. Our health system has been identified as racist towards Māori from within its own ranks, and by the international Commission for the Elimination of Racism and Discrimination in Geneva. We have known for a long time that Māori children are many times more likely to be taken from their families than non-Māori. We have known for a long time (and unequivocally so since Aaron Smale and Mihingārangi Forbes’ reporting on Ngā Mōrehu) of the statecare-to-prison-pipeline. What Melanie Reid did was burst through the systemic walls – put up by the police, hospital staff and the DHB – that protected this practice, to expose the human face of this particular dimension of New Zealand’s colonial legacy.

What is also clear, in the documentary and in the language used by the state, is that overwhelmingly these babies are being considered and assessed as individuals, not as the child of a whānau or a community that is irrevocably damaged by their removal. Certainly not the victims of a racist system that was conceived to disadvantage non-Pākeha. But they are all of these things. They are mokopuna, and I would go into all of the beautiful, profound meanings of that word but I’m jaded from reading the hollow rhetoric on these state agency websites which demonstrate no idea of how to implement that understanding, let alone the intention to implement it.

All we need to know right now is that this is not an isolated case.

The figures show that excessive uplifts for Māori and Pacific Island whānau are happening nationwide, but now we also have evidence that the intimidation captured by Reid on camera is used as a matter of routine.

The E Hine – reducing barriers to care for pregnant Māori women under 20 years and their infants study has walked with Māori women aged under 20 in Hawkes Bay and Wellington through their journey into motherhood, seeking to understand their lived experience of a health system that is clearly failing them, their whānau, and their babies. This study included a maternal care system stocktake, and interviews with state agencies and service providers, whānau, fathers and of course the mothers themselves.

Having walked alongside and advocated for a number of young Māori mothers over the years, I can say that the Newsroom video did not shock or surprise me in the least. Many who are unfamiliar with the system may assume a parent must have demonstrated harm to a child in order to come to the attention of these services. In fact, the only thing you need to do is be considered ‘high risk’. The statistical storytelling of our colonial government means that when a Māori mother is xx% more likely to suffer violence, to not engage in healthcare, or to have a difficult birth, this is not treated as an indication of a flawed system – it is treated as an indication of a flawed mother. In that sense, minister for children Tracy Martin and her staff – who consistently point the finger of blame elsewhere – are very much the voice of the system.

Consequently, belonging to the statistical at-risk category (by virtue of being young and Māori) and walking into a hospital triggers a systemically racist treadmill of hyper-vigilant surveillance, unrealistic expectations and increased risk of state intervention. If you meet the additional criteria of having a Māori mother who was caught up in this same treadmill when you were born, it increases the likelihood of state assault significantly. It may never occur to most parents that going to hospital to give birth or taking their child to hospital for treatment will result in having them removed or permanently taken. But this is a real consideration for young Māori and Pacific Island parents. The young wāhine in the E Hine study were also therefore not unique in facing this threat.

Here are some of their experiences:

“Cause CYF got involved with my first son so we’ve had all that stuff and we’ve had to be like monitored… You never know what’s going on because they never tell you anything… I don’t like it. (Ngaio, interview 3)”

“They turned up on my doorstep… apparently we were beating up the kids… ‘Do you see anything on my kids? Do they look hurt? No, they look happy.’ And I wouldn’t let them in my house, because my house was a big mess, and ‘cause they would have claimed that as neglect… So I just talked to them at the door. And they just wanted me to strip my kids down so they could see them and see if there’s any bruises. (Mere, interview 6)”

“[CYF were] trying to trick me with questions like, ‘So you would leave your daughter with your mum if you go out drinking and that and do drugs and that?… And then they tried to ask me that again and I told them again, ‘I don’t do it!’ They just wouldn’t listen to me. Trying to be real assholes… It was just ticking me off. (Marama, interview 1)”

“Mum had spoken to them not to speak to me by myself, a few times… but they kept coming in and asking me questions, and I had already said to them, ‘I’m not in the state of mind to answer questions,’ and they’d just come back in, keep on coming in and out… I was not in the state of mind to be answering questions from them, I was worrying about my son, not them. (Tia, interview 2)”

This last quote is from a young mother who came under Ministry for Children surveillance while in hospital with her baby son who had nearly died of SIDS. While he was recovering, the ministry agents and hospital social workers closed in on her in a manner she found intrusive, intimidating and judgmental, and the pressure remained that way for months afterwards.

Over the years I have seen this betrayal of trust – young mothers who go into hospital and are then subjected to questionnaires asking a raft of hypothetical, convoluted questions, or intrusive questioning about their home life that lack clarity and context. In some cases the young mothers innocently believe the social worker is there to help them, and answer the questions openly, not knowing that the information is being interpreted and used to justify putting them under scrutiny.

So no, what Melanie Reid has reported on was not an isolated case. Nor will it be fixed by the replacement of any one person. Should accountability be held by Oranga Tamariki CEO Grainne Moss and minister Tracy Martin? Absolutely. But just as this treatment is not isolated to Newsroom’s report, accountability is not isolated to those specific workers who facilitated that invasion, or even the leaders of that agency. This is a systemic issue that is fed into through education, health, justice and corrections, not to mention economy, culture and heritage. This is a colonial, racist system doing what it was set up to do from its very inception: dispossess indigenous peoples in every way. Make no mistake: the system is not broken. It is operating exactly as it is intended.

As Dr. Rawiri Karena points out in the clip below, the taking of indigenous children is a purposeful technique of the colonial commonwealth machine that was developed in England for application around the world.

https://www.facebook.com/joe.trinder/videos/10216805714767821/?t=31

For a clear understanding of how effective this has been we need only look to other settler colonial nations and their records of indigenous children, youth and adults in state custody:

Source: Te Wharepora Hou

If you look at these locations, all of the indigenous groups associated to them are radically different from one another, and there are even radical internal indigenous differences in countries like Australia and Canada. There’s no cultural common ground that predisposes us to crime, but what we do have in common is an experience of colonisation.

As Moana Jackson states:

“Māori and other Indigenous peoples aren’t born genetically poor nor collectively dysfunctional. Instead, it has been the dispossession through colonisation that has created the deprivation and that has destroyed the cohesion of once strong family units. No Māori prisoner can be isolated from the collective costs of that traumatic dispossession”.

Indeed, in reflection of the above statistics, it is quite clear that no indigenous prisoner can be isolated from the cost of their traumatic dispossession from their whānau. As Khylee Quince reported in a recent article:

Over 70 percent of our prison population has a care and protection background – many removed from families into state care. Children in care are 107 times more likely to be imprisoned by age 20 than other children.

Equally disturbing and connected – the ‘state care’ to mental health pipeline:

Watching the story about stolen children unfold is heartbreaking. @k_quince has talked about their direct pipeline to ‘justice’. One evening shift on a mental health unit we did a quick poll of the 30 or so people who were admitted. 28 had a CYFS background. 28 of 30.

— Jacquie (@JacquieKidd1) June 17, 2019

It is not an Aotearoa problem, it is not a Māori problem. It is a racism problem.

We cannot continue to look at these issues besetting Māori and Pasifika people – abuse in state care, homelessness, hyper-incarceration, higher mortality rates, and the taking of children from their homes – and assess them independently, as if the core issue of colonial racism is not the driving factor. How many times must our government continue to address these issues at an agency level before it will accept that the entire system needs an overhaul?

In the same article, Khylee recalled:

“A couple of months ago I met with a Māori inmate in Mt Eden Prison. He was 50 years old, and told me that his cellmate had first been his room-mate when they were eight years old in Hokio Beach Training School 42 years earlier. He talked of their life-long relationship, and their “graduation” from state care, to youth justice residence, to adult prison as if it was inevitable. This is one of the “pipelines” those of us who work in criminal justice refer to – the “welfare-to-justice pipeline” – a metaphor referring to the connection between being removed or uplifted from family into state care, and offending as young people and as adults.”

It is chilling to think that this is the same trajectory that could have been set were the midwives and whānau of the young woman in the Newsroom story not as vigilant as they were – and equally chilling to consider the other families, every week, who are not as fortunate. Each of them will have a story as heartbreaking and harrowing. Ironically, this evening while I was writing this, a tweet from United Nations Rapporteur for Indigenous Rights Vicky Tauli-Corpuz popped up:

Our māmās are sacred. They are strong, resilient, and capable. Given a chance they are amazing mothers. We must view this as the default for our young Māori mothers. Wraparound, whānau-inclusive support and protection for a young Māori māmā does not just serve her – it serves her baby, her whānau, and as that trajectory continues, it serves our entire community. We must shift the perception from one of a young parent as an individual, to that of us as a community who, in failing them, are failing ourselves.

We must also strip these harmful organisations of the Māori façades they use to cloak their ongoing colonial project. The first step on the pathway to justice is truth, and every day that we allow these groups to maintain their lies about caring for and supporting Māori whānau we are denying them an important opportunity to confront their own racism. For 250 years now, colonial forces have assumed rights over Māori lands and Māori bodies that simply are not theirs to take. This will only halt when we call it for what it is: a continuation of the racist colonial project of indigenous dispossession.

Then, and only then, will we start our journey to true justice for our children, their māmās and whānau.

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Uplifting children is not a Māori problem. It’s a colonisation problem

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Last week the Ministry for Children’s practises around uplifting children and putting them in state care were exposed. It’s no coincidence Māori are disproportionately targetted, writes Tina Ngata.

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Dame Anne Salmond is Distinguished Professor of Maori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland.

I agree with Alan Duff when he says, "Real men don't beat up kids, or wives, or anyone else. Real men love." I know that, as a child, he experienced domestic violence. I respect him as a writer and for his fantastic work with Books for Homes. I admire the passion with which he tackles the burning issue of child abuse among Maori and violence against women.

At the same time, when he suggests this hateful violence is a legacy of a "simple" pre-European Maori culture, with its "screaming, eye-popping haka", he is wrong. In saying that, I realise I run the risk of being flagellated as a bleeding-heart liberal, or worse, by some of the Herald's readers.

Rather than appealing to scholarly authority, then, let's turn to the accounts written by European men who visited New Zealand in the very early days and saw with their own eyes how Maori family life was conducted. We can begin with the traveller John Savage, who wrote in 1807, "The children here appear to be treated with a great degree of parental affection. They are robust, lively, and possess, in general, pleasing countenances."

Samuel Marsden, the leading missionary who visited New Zealand for the first time in 1814 (and could never be accused of possessing a bleeding heart), noted: "I saw no quarrelling while I was there. They are kind to their women and children. I never observed either with a mark of violence upon them, nor did I ever see a child struck."

In 1824, Richard Cruise remarked: "In the manner of rearing children, and in the remarkable tenderness and solicitous care bestowed upon them by the parents, no partiality on account of sex was in any instance observed. The infant is no sooner weaned than a considerable part of its care devolves upon the father: it is taught to twine its arms round his neck, and in this posture it remains the whole day, asleep or awake."

As the artist Augustus Earle wrote in 1832: "They are kind and hospitable to strangers, and are excessively fond of their children. On a journey, it is more usual to see the father carrying his infant than the mother; and all the little offices of a nurse are performed by him with the tenderest care and good humour."

In 1839, the missionary Richard Taylor observed, "One of the finest traits I have noticed in the New Zealanders is that of parental love; the men appear chiefly to nurse their children, and are generally to be seen with one on their back covered up under their mats, the little things appear likewise sensible of their fathers' love for they seem principally to cling to them."

I'll end with this quote by the trader Joel Polack in 1840: "It is not uncommon to see young children of tender years, sitting next to their parents in the councils, apparently listening with the greatest attention ... They ask questions, [and the chiefs] answer them with an air of respect, as if they were a corresponding age to themselves. I do not remember a request of an infant being treated with neglect, or a demand from one of them being slighted."

These quotes from early European visitors could be multiplied ad infinitum. According to their reports, Maori domestic life was generally harmonious, and the men were kind, loving and devoted to their children.

At the same time in Britain, it must be noted, the violent chastisement of women and children was commonplace, in the law and in everyday life. Under the doctrine of "coverture", women and children were legally the property of their husbands and fathers, who were entitled to use corporal punishment as a form of discipline.

This accounts for the air of amazement, and sometimes disapproval, with which European men in the early 19th century described the lenient way in which Maori domestic life was conducted.

In order to tackle domestic violence in 21st century New Zealand, it's vital to identify accurately the most likely causes for our shameful record of abusing women and children. Unfortunately, the Once Were Warriors storyline which indicates that Maori domestic violence is an ancestral legacy is part of the problem, not the solution.

It is wrong in fact, and it props up stereotypes that do a great deal of damage to Maori people and to our society.

If you teach children for long enough that their ancestors were violent, abusive savages, after a while, they are likely to believe you. This in itself can be a cause for shame and self-loathing. When they become adults, they may use this myth as a convenient excuse to beat up women and children.

Children like Moko (and maybe Alan Duff, as well) are the victims in all of this. Rather than condemning tikanga, it might be wiser to draw upon ancestral Maori ways of conducting family life for inspiration and healing. As Samuel Marsden wrote in 1820, "There can be no finer children than those of the New Zealanders in any part of the world. Their parents are very indulgent, and they appear always happy and playful and very active."

This is as true today as it was then in many Maori families. Instead of blaming Maori ethnicity or culture for New Zealand's terrible record of domestic abuse, we need to look to poverty, alcohol, drugs, gang culture, prisons and other role models for brutal behaviour - in sport for instance - for the root causes of domestic violence in New Zealand, and tackle these at the source.

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Anne Salmond: Maori once were tender fathers

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Dame Anne Salmond is Distinguished Professor of Maori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland. I agree with Alan Duff when he says, "Real men don't beat up kids, or wives, or anyone else. Real men love." I know that, as a child, he experienced domestic violence.

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Historians and language experts agree that the original meaning of the word Pākehā is most likely to be 'pale, imaginary beings resembling men', referring to a sea-dwelling, godlike people in Māori mythology. It has been used to describe Europeans, and then New Zealanders of European descent since before 1815. So why do some people object to it so much? Branko Marcetic looks at the history of outrage.
As a high-profile Reddit thread reminded us some weeks back, the word 'Pākehā' has always had a somewhat tumultuous history, asking, as it does, the coloniser to refer to themselves by the language of the colonised. Backlash to it is often based on persistent urban myths about what the word means or translates to, probably the silliest of these being that it's a transliteration of "bugger ya."

Pākehā is not the only te reo word out there to refer to non-Māori - Tauiwi and Tangata Tiriti (literally, "people of the Treaty" which includes all cultural backgrounds, not just European) are also acceptable, though they can invite outrage of their own. Still, Pākehā is used most widely, and has received the lion's share of this outrage, with the Human Rights Commission recording in 2001 that being labelled Pākehā was one of the most frequent complaints received by the former Race Relations Office. Let's take a tour through some recent flashpoints where 'Pākehā' has decidedly not been embraced by Pākehā.

It wasn't acceptable in the 80s

The late 1980s saw several attempts to ban the word. In 1988, a Jaycees Club - a type of male-only fraternal club that hit the peak of its New Zealand popularity in the 1970s - to end its use on the basis that it was derogatory and came from the words for flea or pig in te reo. A year later, National members from the Bay of Islands pushed to ban it in the coming round of National Party conferences. They were backed by John Carter, their local MP at the time and the current mayor of the Far North District, who said that his Māori friends were worried it was "being used as part of the lever" towards "separatism and apartheid" in New Zealand, though he admitted none of the party members pushing for the ban were Māori. In a piece titled 'Don't try to call me pakeha', Dominion Sunday Times columnist Frank Haden supported the measure because "a significant number of white people object to being called Pakehas, and that's really all that matters."

The 1996 Census

1996 saw a couple of high-profile eruptions of outrage, the first of which was the decision to list 'NZ European or Pakeha' as an option on the 1996 Census. An embattled Statistics NZ removed the option from the 2001 Census to quell resulting outrage, after many crossed the word out or complained about its inclusion (one person was "ecstatic" it was gone, wondering, "is the politically correct worm turning?") only to then face counter-outrage for doing so. A Statistics NZ employee protested that its removal had been for the sake of accuracy, but in 2006 the agency bowed to pressure and added a new ethnic category, 'New Zealander', that Massey University's Paul Spoonley said made its results impossible to compare with previous Censuses. People continue to write 'Pākehā' in the 'Other' category to pressure the agency to reinstate the word.

This is your brain on Pākehā

The second 1996 controversy came when the Race Relations Office was inundated with more than 100 calls and letters complaining about an anti-racism ad campaign transplanted here from the UK. The ads, which showed three brains of identical size labelled Māori, Pākehā and Asian, and a fourth, smaller one labelled racist, were objected to chiefly by older British immigrants who thought Pākehā meant something offensive. But, a spokesperson said, people continued to object even when it was explained this wasn't true, "because they say it is a Maori word and they are not Maori." The Advertising Standards Complaints Authority also received a complaint that charged the use of Pākehā - a word of "extreme contempt" - "aggravated racism." The complaint also protested that there were plenty of people with full-size brains who thought there were racial differences between people.

Don Brash drops "the P word"

While hardly the most offensive thing Brash did during his time as leader of National - or during his entire career, for that matter - Brash announced in 2004 that he was giving up on 'Pākehā'. "I've been told that in recent years a lot of New Zealanders of European descent find the term offensive so I've started using the term non-Maori," he explained in 2004. The writing had been on the wall a year earlier, when a 150-strong crowd of senior citizens greeted Bill English in Waikanae, complaining that the word meant rat or originally referred to gay whalers and sailors.

To capitalise or not to capitalise

While capitalising 'Pākehā' is standard now, most newspapers avoided it until relatively recently. The Otago Daily Times resisted , before then stubbornly removing contributors' every capitalisation of the word, while the Waikato Times received numerous angry letters - from Pākehā, interestingly - well into the 2000s calling the lack of capitalisation racist or simply incorrect. The paper's editors contended it was a style issue, because it "does not describe a race or tribe, but is instead an all- encompassing term meaning non-Maori." One of the more curious episodes came in 1996, when a member of Kiwis Against Further Immigration asked the Complaints Review Tribunal to rule if the Sunday Star-Times breached the Human Rights Act by using the small p, because it undermined the Pākehā ethnic identity. The tribunal dismissed it as a "nutter complaint," and pointed to other literary authorities that did the same. Meanwhile, the use of the macron still remains elusive.

A survey reveals lingering attitudes

Even as late as 2013, some ambivalence remained about the word. After surveying 1,500 people about words or phrases they thought unacceptable in broadcasting, the Broadcasting Standards Authority released the resulting list of 150 words, which 'Pakeha' sneaked into, alongside words like 'ding-dong', 'chick', 'peckie', 'yoos fellas', 'doodoohead', and even 'sex'.

We shouldn't entirely dwell on the negatives, however. While the number of New Zealanders identifying themselves as Pākehā is relatively low at , the last few decades have seen an increasing mainstream acceptability of the word. Objections that the word is racist or derogatory, rife during the 1990s and the 2000s, are also few and far between, at least in public, helped along by education and greater acceptance of te reo in daily life. And while Pākehā continues to be kept oft the Census, around 15,000 people wrote the word in as their ethnic group in 2007, and it's regularly used in official reports and documents. While it's got a way to go yet, it's fair to say 'Pākehā's' worst days are probably behind it.

The Bulletin is The Spinoff's acclaimed, free daily curated digest of all the most important stories from around New Zealand delivered directly to your inbox each morning.

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A history of outrage over the word 'Pākehā'

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Historians and language experts agree that the original meaning of the word Pākehā is most likely to be 'pale, imaginary beings resembling men', referring to a sea-dwelling, godlike people in Māori mythology. It has been used to describe Europeans, and then New Zealanders of European descent since b