thanks to the Angryindian
The Maze of Rhetoric
We hope our title is sufficiently unequivocal to convey our reaction to the events of Wednesday June 11, 2008. Maybe by example we can show how one must approach issues which require the utmost clarity. On the other hand, this probably won’t work, especially when it’s clear the predominant intention behind a communication is to obscure. Whatever… in any event, for us, sitting on a spiky metal fence is uncomfortable posture.
We listened with attention to what Stephen Harper had to say yesterday, and we did not hear what we needed to hear. Instead, again we watched and heard one more opportunity being thrown away, this one with more ceremony than those preceding it. We watched and heard the studious avoidance of truth, in what we can only regard as the hope that the repetition of a lie will somehow substitute for reality, a concept now reduced to another mantra (as is nowadays the case for, for example, “truth” or “reconciliation”).
To those surprised or appalled by our reaction, or to people who simply have no idea that there’s an issue here at all, let us begin by pointing to at least a few of the facts we had to keep in mind when listening to the statement of the current head of a political process that has, since it origin (Confederation in 1867), had the elimination of aboriginal peoples as its consistent policy:
(1) the “settler” population of Canada has had, from the point of its inception, a qualitatively different relation with indigenous peoples than the remote colonial bureaucracy that preceded it: for England, the Indian Nations were allies (who, arguably, saved Canada on more than one occasion); for the newly-formed Dominion of Canada, they were impediments to expansion, like swamps and vermin. However, in the transfer of authority, the Dominion was honor-bound to respect them, their rights, and their historical status.
(2) with legal and ethical limits placed upon their treatment of indigenous nations (so that, for example, the Dominion couldn’t just set out to slaughter them all, as became the policy in the United States), tactics had to be adopted that had the effect of extermination without giving its appearance (and the British empire had many models to emulate, particularly Tasmania). A simple but accurate characterization of the array of government programs, policies, and laws aimed at indigenous peoples and nations, then, is that they were a range of “carrots” and “sticks” deployed to turn those of us (if any) who survived these artifices from “Indians” into “Canadians” (or, after the era of multiculturalism began, “Indian-Canadians”). Residential school was only one of those programs, one that was heavy on the “stick” and light on the “carrot.”
(3) church officials and government officials have, from time to time since the mid-1980’s, offered what they (and others) have characterized as “apologies.” These have not been apologies. An apology is not made an apology by the person offering it saying it is an apology; it is only an apology when those who have been offered it accept it as an apology. The fact that the rhetoric of pseudo-apologies has become more twisted as time has gone on should make all of us vigilant against immediately accepting what sounds like an apology without careful examination of exactly what was said, how it was said, and what was not said. And repetition is not an argument.
So, what happened Wednesday afternoon? Stephen Harper described the history of actions undertaken by the government of Canada against the children of indigenous peoples, specifically, their forcible removal from their families and communities and their placement under the unsupervised control of four major Canadian churches. Various aspects of these actions, characterized as “abuse” (including physical, mental, and sexual abuse), were enumerated, followed by variations on the refrain of “for this, we apologize” (or “we are sorry”) and “we were wrong” (or “this should never have happened”). That it happened was attributed to bad, arrogant attitudes of superiority. Finally, when mention was made concerning where “we” go from here, the upcoming work of the so-called “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” was proffered as the most appropriate forum. Afterwards, this performance was, by-and-large, repeated by the leaders of the other political parties.
The presentation was offered with every indication of honesty and sincerity. We do not doubt the honesty of what was said, for reasons we will give below. But for those who take honesty as evidence of truth, it would be good to remember what Marx once said: “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Groucho Marx, that is.
So what’s our problem? Actually, we have several: we did not hear an apology, we dispute characterizations that were made, and we do not believe the putative mechanism of resolution (the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”) will resolve anything useful.
An apology has at least three characteristics (some people will say there are more, some will list more specific traits… this doesn’t matter for present purposes). The absence of any of these three characteristics immediately disqualifies a statement as an apology: a sincere expression of remorse for the behavior, the promise never to repeat the behavior, and the undertaking to undo, as far as possible, the damage done by the behavior.
“Well,” we hear some say, “the first conditions was obviously met… we all heard Mr. Harper recount a comprehensive list of offenses, halting at each one and saying ‘Canada apologizes’ and ‘it was wrong,’ didn’t we?”
Suppose, after beating his wife to the point of hospitalizing her, a man attempted to make amends in the following manner: “I’m sorry I gave you a black eye… it was wrong; I’m sorry I chipped your teeth… it never should have happened; I apologize for breaking your arm… it never should have happened; I apologize for bruising your ribs… it was wrong;” and so on.
Does this sound odd to you? It does to us. Why would anyone choose to express his remorse in such a fashion? In “apologizing” to his wife, has the man adopted this manner of speaking, perhaps, to be more thorough (the list could go on and on…)? We think not. In this instance, the specificity of the list helps him avoid saying something, something more comprehensive, something more general, but in this case, something much more accurate: “I’m sorry I physically assaulted you. It was a criminal action on my part.”
We don’t believe Prime Minister Harper adopted this obscurantist form of address to be more comprehensive; we believe he did so to avoid saying I’m sorry the Canadian government committed genocide against you. It was a criminal action on our part.
(Of course, Mr. Harper was unauthorized to avoid saying something similar on behalf of the churches; they’ve been doing their own artful dodging for years.)
Consequently, if we’re right the sincerity of what was said evaporates as an apology for residential schooling. Thus it was no apology at all, but bluff and continued evasion. We believe he said what he said honestly; that is, that he sincerely believed in what he was saying, but only because, for the governments and individuals he was representing (past and present), he had to craft an evasive statement that he could, in all sincerity, endorse. Did Mr. Harper, all on his own, come up with this muddied, tortured declaration right off the cuff, or perhaps just a few minutes before he came down the stairs with his escorts in tow? Well, since Indian Affairs Minister Strahl has been telling us for weeks now what Harper was going to say, we doubt it. We also doubt that the Conservative party didn’t have a team of lawyers, rhetoricians, and spin doctors, if not writing the statement, at least agonizing over every phrase, every word, every revelation in the evolving document, considering in detail every implication and weighing each possible consequence. Someone was even counting the number of words. No, what we saw was carefully considered, and when such a carefully prepared and comprehensively vetted document does some things (and not others) it is no accident.
So then, is our “belief” about what Mr. Harper was evading correct? We had no trouble seeing through the Prime Minister’s tortured prose because we’re well aware of related issues (such as the ones we began this essay with) that are no part of what the average Canadian is supposed to know and what government and church officials know all too well: the United Nations Genocide Convention and Canada’s role in it.
Take a moment and judge for yourself: go online (if you’re not online already) and find the text of the UN Genocide Convention. If you know anything about the internet you’ll have no trouble finding it; we give the text of Article II below:
Art. 2. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Many of you will be reading this for the first time. You aren’t supposed to be reading it at all. We call attention to sections (b) and, especially, (e), which we call the “Slam Dunk.” If pressed we’d be willing to argue the entire list, but we don’t have to: the Article says any, not all. Even Mr. Harper in his statement comes perilously close to the Slam Dunk a couple of times:
“…very young children were often forcibly removed from their homes…”
and
“…it was wrong to forcibly remove children from their homes and we apologize for having done this.”
Was he, in subconscious guilt, aping a phrase he had read a million times before with the understanding he must avoid it at all costs? … or, perhaps, intentionally teetering along the edge of a precipice, in order to mock the dozen or so of us who were waiting to see if he used the correct word? We don’t know. He creeps into another neighborhood (b) once again when he mentions:
“…emotional, physical and sexual abuse and neglect of helpless children…”
but that’s as close as he gets to any of the other categories of acts constituting genocide in international law. It isn’t crucial, however; we already have the Slam Dunk.
Well, isn’t there some way around this… this… embarrassing fact? No. One of the contributors to the current document wrote a book 14 years ago that established the genocide that was Indian residential schooling, and the absence of ways around it was thoroughly dealt with there. However, no one read it then and no one is going to read it now (although it’s still available in print form, and free on the internet at www.nativestudies.org), particularly when we’ve gone and spoiled the ending for everyone.
But then, is there no “responsible” authority (not just a dozen or so Indians, and worse, Indian-lovers, who can read and add and reason) who can tell you, our present readership, whether our “interpretation” is right or wrong? (Over the years, time and again, work on this issue has been slighted by phrases like “X believes that the residential schools were genocide,” or “In X’s opinion, Canada and the churches are guilty of genocide,” like it was some disputable quirk on X’s part that is at issue. Well, it’s the United Nations “opinion,” as expressed in the black-and-white of the Convention, that Canada and the churches committed genocide, and the UN is the body that in 1948 got to say what genocide was.) Okay. In support of our “interpretation,” we call what all must agree is a “responsible” authority… the government of Canada.
Also available on the above web site is a paper that provides more detail and references concerning Canada’s disreputable collusion with the United States in gutting a form of the genocide convention that would have been much more explicit with respect to the point we’re making. The current convention is a watered-down version of the proposals of Raphael Lemkin (the man who coined the term “genocide” in 1944), but even watered down it is sufficient. So sufficient that, when it came time to implement the Genocide Convention in Canada’s criminal code (which was what each nation of the United Nations was supposed to do), Canada omitted entire subsections of the UN Convention (by 1970, (b), (d), and (e) were gone, Canada telling anyone who asked that the laws against murder and manslaughter already banned genocide – reducing genocide, as they discussed in the early 50’s, to outright killing). No less an authority than eventual Prime Minister Lester Pearson had suggested that surgery had to be performed on the UN Genocide Convention, or otherwise Canada and its churches would be in violation of it… and, for heavens’ sake, Indians might someday learn to read!
It’s true that even the Convention as articulated provided sufficient wiggle room to allow countries to adopt modified versions of it. But, as remarked by a commentator who first encountered the Convention last Wednesday, Canada’s excisions and elisions betoken a guilty conscience about what it had been up to. After all, this is what the US, with Canada’s aid, had forced through the conference dealing with this particular issue, and if it was good enough in principle for everyone else in the world, why was it inappropriate for Canada?
Finally, sometime in the late 1990’s, Canada quietly, surreptitiously, and without ceremony removed genocide as a chargeable offense from its criminal code, leaving mention of it now solely in the provisions against hate crimes.
We find it interesting how closely the vaporization of genocide in Canadian law coincided with rising consciousness in Native America on the distance between what international law said and what governments had done, and with a government-commissioned secret study that warned the Chrétien government that Canada was liable with respect to the “genocide issue” and recommended it bite the bullet and ‘fess up. As always, Canada provided itself with some explanatory “wiggle room” about why they did what they did, but we would certainly like to ask some direct questions of the officials involved, as well as examine documents and internal correspondence on these subjects (but see below). But, to summarize in a fashion both short and blunt, the history of Canada’s involvement in the creation and implementation of genocide law, nationally and internationally, betokens an overriding concern with its culpability and liability with respect to its treatment of indigenous peoples in general, and its operation of Indian residential schools in particular.
So, Canada itself agrees that our reading of the UN Genocide Convention is correct, and that it accurately characterizes its behavior towards Native Peoples.
Okay, you might say, Canada’s behavior is at variance with international genocide law… but didn’t implementing what they did, however maimed and deformed, into Canadian law remove all future problems? After all, aren’t their actions simply a version of what the United States, also worried about the possibility of being charged with genocide, undertook… adopting a limited version of the Convention, finally, at the end of the Regan administration, and then subjecting it to interpretation by American courts?
It’s true it was pure evasion, but it isn’t true that it lets Canada off any hook. Apart from the “guilty conscious” their behavior evidences, putting aside any question of legal liability that might or might not be attached, and forgoing any discussion of what jurists have long ago established concerning the priority of international law (e.g., that countries and government officials can’t exempt themselves from accountability to international law); instead of all that, just ask yourself: was it merely the failure of the corrupt powers of Rwanda (or Slobodan Milosevic) to exempt themselves (or himself) from the Genocide Convention that got them (or him) into trouble? Suppose the Genocide Convention was in force during the Holocaust… would Hitler’s declaring himself and his chums “immune” have rendered it inoperative? Is that the length the average Canadian is willing to have her or his government go to avoid having to deal with its genocide of indigenous peoples?
It has taken us some time, but Mr. Harper’s statement:
“…it was wrong to forcibly remove children from their homes and we apologize for having done this.”
…must be amended to say:
“…it was wrong for the government of Canada to forcibly remove children from their homes and we apologize for having done this. And it was a crime.”
Bank robbers, thieves, drunk drivers… all criminals, in fact… don’t get to erase their crimes by saying “I’m sorry,” regardless of how sincerely they might say it.
Genocide on the Table
A television snippet from country-wide reaction on Wednesday featured Diane Blair crying out “It was genocide! Why not just admit it?!”
A fair question, and one well-put. As we have seen, Mr. Harper could have used the term, and it was a deliberate act not to. What motivated him? Without too much thought we can see several reasons, grounds sufficient for us to have anticipated long before Wednesday’s circus that what we weren’t going to hear would be a genuine apology. To answer the woman’s question, first, keep on reading the Convention; immediately you will find:
Art. 3. The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
Art. 4. Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
So we have Reason 1: rulers, public officials, and private individuals, criminals all, prefer to avoid being punished for their actions. It is very common, we think, for criminals to not want to be punished. In most cases, however, and unlike the case under consideration (i.e., the Indian residential schools), criminals are not in charge of the political, economic, legal, and journalistic controls of a nation. Journalistic control, of course, is particularly necessary if one is going to maintain the manufactured ignorance of multiple millions of Canadians.
Reason 2: Canada has held other nations accountable to a standard of international law that it has itself evaded. That is hypocrisy. Canada wants to complain to China about its human rights abuses; it does not want its own abuses thrown back into its face.
Reason 3: Assaults, rapes, and every other form of abuse expire in national law, perhaps even in international law, according to their Statute of Limitation. Genocide has no Statute of Limitation.
Reason 4: Canada presents itself as a good world citizen, a paragon of virtue. However, a country that bears comparison with Nazi Germany is a paragon of virtue like Charles Manson is a boy scout leader.
Reason 5: Speaking like a psychologist for a moment, abusers frequently tell themselves they have good grounds for the abuses they perpetrate. Often they repeat the lie to themselves with such regularity that they come to believe it.
Reason 6: This is a reason the head of the United Church gave us in a public meeting in 2002: “genocide” is such a harsh word that the membership of his church would be upset by its use, however appropriate. Thus, it’s better to perform genocide than give it its proper name. So perhaps Canada is similarly just thinking about the tender sensibilities of its real citizens, and not those of its pseudo-citizens against whom the genocide was implemented.
Reason 7: The lengths Canada has gone (first, to limit the definition of genocide, and second, to obstruct every way there might have been for indigenous peoples to even raise it as an issue) shows the fear that, if the governments and churches show “weakness,” Indians will treat them with the same rapacity Westerners show weaknesses detected in one another. That is, that Indians will behave like Westerners (the irony that this transformation is what the residential schools were trying to institute has not escaped our notice). It is to our credit that there is no evidence at all that we would behave in such an inhuman manner. More than for any other reason, the moves that have been made toward litigation have been motivated by the government and churches closing off any other ways of seeking redress. From the beginning, all the survivors wanted was a genuine apology, along the criteria we’ve mentioned at the beginning of this commentary.
Reason 8: For us, Reason 1 and its first cousin, Reason 7 are is the overriding motivations behind avoiding the word “genocide.” But it takes not a moments reflection to appreciate that, once “genocide” is on the table, its application across the entire range of policies and programs affecting Native Peoples, historically and contemporaneously, must be considered.
Let’s briefly look at some specific cases in light of Reason 8. So; how well does “genocide” fit the various incentives manufactured over the years for Indians to enfranchise themselves or to be enfranchised? Perfectly, we think. So; how descriptive is “genocide” concerning the 60’s and 70’s Scoops, where uncounted numbers of indigenous children were adopted out, some overseas, to non-Native foster parents? Flawlessly, in our opinion. (Sterilization? Who said that?) Or, can “genocide” accurately characterize the current status of suicide in aboriginal communities? It can and it does, we would argue.
And on and on. Maybe some of you would prefer to argue the point, but that’s our point: the Indian residential schools were not isolated idiosyncrasies of a few members of a governmental department or two. Genocides involve a host of interrelated and interwoven policies and programs, the understanding of which requires sustained effort and the application of all 5 of the specific headings given under Article II. The Nazis, for goodness’ sake, made it illegal for Jews to own parrots!
Bringing genocide to the table would take the churches, but more centrally the government of Canada, into the exhaustive examination of additional regions of its policies and programs with respect to indigenous peoples, regions that, up until now, it has successfully avoided (or at least, as it is now trying to do with residential school, managed to isolate from other policies). And, what is perhaps even more important, establishing that Canada’s policies toward indigenous peoples constitute an historic and ongoing genocide rules out Mr. Harper’s statement as an apology, since such would violate the second feature of a genuine apology; someone who is still doing it can’t be promising not to do it again.
If Genocide, Why?
So far we have only dealt with why what Mr. Harper said on Wednesday was not an apology (to summarize, he meticulously avoided using the proper term “genocide” to characterize Canada’s actions, thereby impugning the sincerity with which he had worked so hard to infuse his words). But at the outset we objected to more than the non-apologetic nature of his statement; we took exception with characterizations he made of the actions of the churches and governments.
We don’t dispute his repeated assertions that “it was wrong.” For us, this was a no-brainer: genocide is wrong. Mr. Harper’s pathetic attempt to insinuate mitigating circumstances (“While some former students have spoken positively about their experiences at residential schools…”), another evasion which disqualifies his statement as an apology (just try to apologize for killing someone while driving under the influence of alcohol by saying “I always do silly things when I’m drunk”), also boomerangs when we consider the irrelevance of the specifics of a genocide to decide upon its “wrongness.” After all, some Jews learned a useful trade working as slave labor in concentration camps; some made new friends; many lost weight; and some even had their metabolisms re-set, so that they were able to maintain a healthy weight for the rest of their lives! But when you make the moral decision that genocide is wrong, you don’t have to listen to sophistry that tries to turn the task of making moral judgments into an accounting of the “goods” and “bads” of a particular program.
There are numerous other places we could be picayune. Calling residential schools “educational institutions” grated on us, for example. But in at least one more point the presentation descended much too far into pure fiction for us to leave it uncommented. With genocide now revealed as the accurate term to characterize the governments’ and the churches’ actions, the question of why arises. Even Mr. Harper, in evading the issue of genocide, still felt compelled to provide his listeners with an historical vignette of the underlying cause of creation and operation of the schools:
“Two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture. These objectives were based on the assumption that aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal.”
There you have it; the objective was to assimilate Indians, because we were believed to have inferior cultures (spiritual beliefs are an expression of culture, and thus redundantly included in Mr. Harper’s statement). This was “wrong,” “caused great harm,” and has “no place in our country.”
We have no doubt about the “great harm” part of his statement; however, you should notice how it leaves the agents of all this misery unnamed. It was “the residential school system” that had objectives (and not people working for the churches and governments), and the “inferiority assumption” apparently just hung in mid-air during the years of operation of residential schools, unattached to anything identifiable as a human being wearing a frock or business suit.
Are things any better when we supply warm bodies to this dodge? Well, inserting human beings into all this would at least make explicit that it was people who had the objectives of (1) removing Indian children from their forms of life and (2) insinuating them into mainstream culture, and that people had the (now more obviously racist) assumption that Indians were inferior. So now, our agreeing that this was “wrong” allows us to encapsulate and restate this part of Mr. Harper’s little history lesson into “people did harmful things to Indians because those people were racists.”
But anyone who thinks we are satisfied with this rendering is much too used to bad movie scripts, where bad people do bad things because they are bad. As if the clergy and governmental officials responsible were all wearing black hats. Life is not so simple.
First, the image that in Indian residential schools an “inferior” culture was being replaced with a “superior” culture (which thinking, thanks to the P. M., we now know has “no place” in Canada) is simply wrong. Indian children were not being taught to drink tea with their pinkies extended, speak with an affected English accent, or appreciate poetry and opera; they were being taught to perform as menials (domestics, farm hands, cooks, etc.) for members of the superior culture (and even the not-so-elevated members of that culture). If they were expected to learn anything in residential schools, it was to learn their place; to perform, without question and with dispatch, the commands of their betters. If this was assimilation into “dominant culture” it was into its lowest, most wretched, most disposable stratum, where the inhabitants moiled to eke out a marginal existence. It was alright that these serfs would be Indians; after all, our “betters” have never really concerned themselves with the color of their peons.
Second, attributing this all to “the racists” (who, thank heaven, no longer have a place in Canada) erects a faceless, nameless straw man we’re all supposed to take a turn at pummeling. But this piece of misdirection insinuates that ideology determines actions, rather than actions determining ideology. This is too big a subject to go into here, but ideologies of race, race inferiority, and sub-humanity arise from the material needs to dispossess and expropriate, and not vice versa. Canada’s wealth has arisen from the willingness of the settler society to simply take what they want from indigenous populations (just ask the Lubicon, the Cree of Northern Quebec, and the Labrador Innu, for recent examples). It’s in casting about for some excuse to justify satisfying a material agenda that Canadians have had to create and then invoked the non-humanity of the real owners of Canada.
Consequently, holding anonymous racists responsible for the woes of Indians and assuring us they no longer abide here is nothing but additional falsification on a heroic level. For banishing faceless and nameless spirits to some vasty deep does no such thing as long as the material need to do away with Indian rights and claims continues to abide here. Thus Mr. Harper’s history lesson is nothing more than another kind of bribe… like the forthcoming Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “Just let us insinuate a comic-book version of Canada,” it says. “We don’t have to name the ghosts in the story; we all know who they were anyway. We’ll just pretend they’re all gone now, so you can sleep better at nights. And we get to pretend there’s a clean and complete split with this admittedly reprehensible past.” But the past is present, and it seems, the future.
Resolving Anything Useful?
For a “clean break” the events of Wednesday leave an enormous number of loose ends (some thicker than the Atlantic Cable) flailing around, at least for us. Even several of the leaders of the other political parties, in their responses to Mr. Harper’s statement, noted on Wednesday that it was short on detail. That may be true; however, directly by Mr. Harper’s words and indirectly by implication the upcoming Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been accorded the task of sorting out the remaining specifics.
Is it up to the task? Not even in the cartoon world Mr. Harper has created, much less in the real world.
As already mentioned the statement not only said things we dispute, it left unmentioned a host of issues we needed to see addressed. Let’s run through a few of the omissions:
(1) Genocide. Is the commission going to bring this up? And so what if it does? Canada has already demonstrated it will simply ignore the charge if it’s made, and has been careful to eliminate any possibility of treating the matter in a serious way. Minister Strahl, for example, stated repeatedly in the run-up to Wednesday that nothing Mr. Harper would say would prohibit an ongoing, aggressive investigation into crimes associated with the residential school. But he knew, as we did, that the central crime had already been removed from consideration. Even if Indian after Indian stands before the commission and charges genocide, nothing will happen about it. Most of all, such repetition will only dispose the “average” Canadian, who is supposed to be getting an education on these things, into the familiar stupor of “there go those damned Indians again, always complaining about something.”
(2) The Cover-Ups. Once “wrongs” are correctly identified as “crimes,” can anyone else see that Canada and its churches have been covering up the crimes of the residential schools for quite some time now? The pattern of responding to charges made by former prisoners of Indian residential schools was predictable and familiar: stonewall, then impugn the testimony and motives of the victims (“those troublemakers just like to make noise, or they’re looking for another handout”), then admit that maybe, just maybe there was a “bad apple” here and there in a gigantic barrel of nice apples (“some bad things may have happened, but it was all done with the best of intentions”), then throw a sacrifice (preferably one already dead) to a dissatisfied and growing crowd of lawyers, and then go back to stonewalling (“Hey, enough already! The issue has been settled!”).
Canada and the churches have worked long and hard to avoid admitting anything (in 1998 it was estimated that the Anglican Church, for one, had spent the overwhelming bulk of their budget for dealing with residential schooling on advice from publicity agencies), much less general and specific criminal acts. As anyone paying attention could probably guess, here the government has long ago moved to limit its own possible damages from colluding in knowingly hiding crimes and hindering investigations, so that, for example, while it’s illegal in Canada to destroy documents needed for criminal investigations the people who do the destroying can’t be charged with anything (the “Naughty-Naughty” Principle).
But the churches have long looked out for their own, with known pedophiles in their ranks given a “time out” and then transferred to a new assignment without the inconvenience of having to face a criminal charge. By the way, isn’t this what Becket and King Henry were arguing about back in the 13th century? Eventually, didn’t English law come down on Henry’s side? We have to agree with Henry on this one.
The victims of abuse at residential schools have had to endure not only the original abuse, but the vituperation and calumny of criminals and those assisting criminals in evading disclosure and prosecution. And, for parliamentarians and bureaucrats, even if they’ve removed themselves from the possibility of formal criminal charges under the existing criminal code, justice demands an accounting and acknowledgement of the cover-up as much as it demands them of the original crimes.
(3) The Secret Histories. Attention has been focused so much on church and governmental abuses that there is a clear and present danger that an additional unknown number of malefactors will slip through the cracks. It has already been acknowledged that, for example, in the 50’s the Canadian Medical Association asked for, and received, permission to study the distribution and growth of tuberculosis in “human” populations by giving unpasteurized milk to the children in residential schools. Around the same time, the Canadian Dental Association asked for, and received, permission to study the lifelong development and growth of caries (tooth decay) in “human” populations by giving “sham treatments” to Indian children in residential schools. Here, not only are the people who “authorized” these child abuses culpable, so are the people who ask for them. Both these cases, of course, took place long after the Nuremburg Protocols for ethical research with human beings had been articulated and accepted.
Nor does it end here. The notorious Dr. Cameron, who, while in the pay of the Central Intelligence Agency, used electroshock and mind-altering drugs to experiment on innocent Canadians (a chapter in Canadian history immortalized, so to speak, in a CBC movie), also had some kind of involvement with Indian residential schools, mainly in the Prairie provinces. Rumors abound (since at least the early 90’s), but there has never been enough hard evidence to sustain charges. Doesn’t this bear investigation?
In fact, with a captive population and a supervening authority at best indifferent to their well-being and without any mechanism of complaint or due process available to the victims, what could not have happened? On this subject our imaginations have already been far outstripped by what everyone admits actually did happen; what a broadly-thrown finely-gauged net might dredge up is, in our opinion, anybody’s guess. The (now, finally, at last) movement to start digging in church graveyards and remote, unmarked locations is merely the tip of an iceberg, one that could well nail, even for those Canadians at the utmost levels of denial, the concept of genocide to Canada’s treatment of indigenous peoples.
There’s more (Sterilization? Who said that?), but this is enough for now. These three loose ends, rather than “details” that can be dealt with summarily, are, we predict, Hydra’s Heads that will sprout hundreds or even thousands of additional inquiries if pursued with due diligence. We have a number of problems with the upstart commission, but our question here is: Is the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” equal to this task?
This commission can (1) subpoena no witnesses, (2) compel no testimony, (3) requisition no document. It cannot find, charge, fine, or imprison. Thus far, the only ones lining up to testify are members of groups who have already testified (the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples generated thousands of pages of testimony from school survivors, a corpus, we must add, that has not in the slightest way entered into the consciousness of the average Canadian in the 12 years since its publication) and those who still maintain sufficient plausible deniability to publicly defend its inactions (the RCMP, for example). Those most obviously culpable have already stated their intentions not to bother showing up.
Will, somehow, the victims of residential schooling show up dragging bales of documents proving abusive actions, abusive policies, collusion, cover-ups, etc. on the part of ministers, bureaucrats, clergy, professors, bag-men, pedophiles, and the full host of assorted miscreants? They’d better, for the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” won’t have them.
Or maybe we just need to pray for our own version of a governmental or ecclesiastical “Valachi,” who will show up and rat out the Dons, all the way up to and including the Capo de Tutti Capi. However, not only is this an extremely thin thread upon which to hang our hopes for truth (and more importantly, JUSTICE); what “witness protection program” is going to protect him or her?
“Truth” is an odd name for a body that can trade not at all in that particular commodity. “Reconciliation,” too, is an odd word for five years of allegations that can be either scorned or ignored, according to the tastes of those who are its subject. It invokes the same fantasy world Mr. Harper constructed, where Canadian and indigenous peoples are returned to that happy state of mutual respect and cooperation that existed before the bad old residential schools came along and ruined everything. In “truth,” however, there never has been any “conciliation” to “re.”
Conclusions
We don’t know about you, but we’ve been unable to swing a dead cat since Wednesday without whacking someone telling us about how the “apology” has “closed a painful chapter” and signals “a new beginning in relations” between “Canadians and Indian-Canadians” (sic). Like someone tearing apart a picture of a former boyfriend or girlfriend, spitting on it, and walking away from the pieces tossed over the shoulder, however, we’ve been witnessing a made-up ceremony, one where the participants, for various reasons, are trying more to convince themselves they’ve dealt with all the serious issues rather than actually putting an end to them.
Canada has, once again, missed a truly historic opportunity, putting paste on display rather than an authentic diamond, because the diamond, in someone’s estimation, would have been far too expensive. Already, after the patina of ceremony has worn off, there have been some rumblings, primarily around the fact the Mr. Harper’s statement was long on being sorry and short on being active. And as we pointed out at the start, a real apology promises to undo, as far as possible, the damage done. But now that the statement is revealed as just another evasion, we must caution against whatever action the governments of Canada would propose; as we’ve tried to make clear, the “action” Mr. Harper’s statement endorses, the “Truth” and “Reconciliation” Commission, is no action at all. And someone who steals your car, wrecks it, and is unrepentant about his/her actions is most definitely not the person you’d choose to repair it or replace it.
But that person most certainly at the very least would be responsible to pay the costs of repair or replacement. If this be genocide, the role of Canada’s government (and churches) is to make it possible for us to once again make ourselves whole, nothing more and nothing less. How should we do this, how long it will take us, where do we start… these questions and more crowd in on us all. But they are questions we must identify, discuss, and answer ourselves.
Those of you who saw clearly and immediately the farce that was being played out; those of you who felt in your heart of hearts that the whole orchestration was out of tune but couldn’t identify the offending instruments until now; and those of you who were misled until you brought the powers of your own intellect to the examination of this exercise in rhetorical excess; whatever your history is that led you to complete this overlong commentary; we invite you to join in the task of building what ultimately must replace this charade, some kind of response authentically committed to truth in this history and justice in its resolution.
Roland Chrisjohn
Andrea Bear Nicholas
Karen Stote
James Craven (Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi)
Tanya Wasacase
Pierre Loiselle
Andrea O. Smith
Showing posts with label Colonisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colonisation. Show all posts
6/27/08
An Historic Non-Apology, Completely and Utterly Not Accepted
11/7/07
The Fourth World: Struggles for Traditional Lands and Ways of Life
By Ward Churchill
Published on: June 16, 2007
- Our conceptions of “First-”, “Second-”, and “Third-” world nations dates back to the theories of Mao Zedong. Although instructive, this framework did not account for subsequent neocolonial strategies, puppet governments, and the Indigenous peoples in “First world” settler states and those whose land was dissected by emerging “Third world” nations. In this article, Ward Churchill writes about the indigenous “Fourth World” and the hopeful implications of idigenist resistance struggles worldwide.
At the 1963 Bandung Conference, Mao Zedong set forth his famous vision of a planet divided into three “worlds.” In Mao’s view, the “First World” consisted of industrialized capitalist states in the northern hemisphere, overwhelmingly white in racial composition, and pitted—economically, philosophically, and militarily—against a “Second World” of their industrially-developed socialist counterparts. There was as well a “Third World,” he said, composed of countries or “territories,” mostly to the south of the other two and populated almost exclusively by peoples of color, which were either maintained as colonies within the ambit of several first world imperial powers, or had recently freed themselves from colonial domination.
The Third World, Mao asserted, was inherently aligned with neither side in the first/second world conflict. Rather, its agenda was situationally-defined within each colony or former colony in accordance with the requirements of attaining political self-determination and economic development. In other words, the overarching goal of what soon came to be known as the “Third World Revolution” was “national liberation” on whatever terms and by any/every means through which it could be attained. It was a potent recipe, all in all, giving both shape and voice to sustained struggles which led, between 1945 and 1990, to an across-the-board decolonization of Africa and Asia and a corresponding repeal of European imperialism in its classic form.
For all its undeniable triumphs, however, the Third Worldist formulation was afflicted from the outset by many deficiencies. Insufficient weight was placed upon the prospect that the extent of colonialism’s often protracted underdevelopment of the Third World might have created structural conditions within the newly-independent countries that would leave them virtually defenseless against “neocolonialist” exploitation by their former colonizers. Nor—despite the warnings implicit to pioneering studies undertaken by Fanon, Memmi, and others—was the virulence and intractability of the psychological maiming inflicted upon those subjugated under colonialism’s genocidal yoke ever truly taken into account.
Scant attention was paid as well to the implications of the reality that those who typically instigated and led the Third World liberation struggles, thereby assuming control of the state apparatus in the wake of formal decolonization, had themselves been “educated” in imperial institutions. As a result, their perspectives and priorities—even their most personal sensibilities—often displayed a far greater commonality with those of their former colonizers than with those of the grassroots populations whose destinies they now presumed to decide and direct. In short order, the ostensible constituents of many such “revolutionary leaders” had come to complain that they were “more European than the Europeans” and were often “worse than they themselves.”
Perhaps most significant in this regard, little or no consideration was given in the canons of Third Worldism to the fact that the territorial boundaries of what were now proclaiming “sovereign states” had been drawn by the colonizers, not the colonized. By-and-large, the geographical demarcations defining the “possessions” of each imperial power were established in a manner amalgamating/partitioning the homelands of various peoples indigenous to the areas cast as “colonial compartments.” Their right to govern themselves in accordance with their own traditions was usurped by the centralized authority embodied in colonial administrations, their very identities as peoples subsumed under the homogenizing nomenclature of “colonial subjects.”
Self determining
Thus, while “liberation” was seen by Third Worldists as the transformation of Europe’s overseas colonies into states independently governed by their former subjects, the subjects themselves often envisioned it in dramatically different terms, i.e.: the restoration of control over their traditional territory to each of the peoples encompassed within colonial boundaries and, on that basis, resumption of their self-determining modes of governance, social organization, and economy. In substance, these indigenous peoples—nations, actually—comprised a “Fourth World,” unmentioned by Mao, upon the expropriation of whose lands and resources all states depend for their very existence.
It follows that for Fourth World peoples the success of Third World revolutions added up, not to a repeal of the system of subjugation imposed under European imperialism, but instead to something more nearly resembling a consummation of such oppression. Certainly, any difference between the forcible subordination of indigenous nations by a colonial regime imported from overseas and relegation to the same status by a “domestically-constituted” central government was/is negligible at best. In effect, colonialism in its classic form was merely supplanted by a still more insidious “internal” form resembling that which had facilitated consolidation of Europe’s imperial states themselves a few centuries earlier.
The results, while often misinterpreted, were both predictable and soon apparent. In “India,” an entity which did not exist until it was forcibly synthesized by British colonizers from the territories of nearly 300 indigenous nationalities. The Nagas—to provide but one example—were waging what turns out to be an ongoing armed struggle to recover self-governing control over their traditional homeland even before the “broader” society’s independence was announced in 1947. Across the European-drawn border separating India from “Burma,” the Karins had commenced a similar struggle in the south, as had the Kachins in the north. So, too, in what was known until 1954 as “French Indochina,” especially as regards the Hmongs in Laos and the various “Montagnard” peoples of Vietnam’s highland regions.
By the 1970s, such resistance had emerged in Indonesia, notably among the Papuans of “New Guinea” and the peoples of East Timor. In the Philippines as well, native peoples of the more southerly islands like Mindanao had begun to actively pursue agendas of their own, distinct in many ways from that of the maoist guerrillas operating in such locales. Across the vast reaches of Micronesia, from Samoa, Palau and the Solomons in the south, northward through the Marianas, westward to Okinawa and other islands along the Ryukyu chain, and eastward through the so-called Marshall Islands, comparably “indigenist” phenomena could be discerned.
Primary barrier
Much the same process began to unfold in Africa almost from the outset, probably the most notable example being the bloody and protracted effort mounted by Katangese “secessionists” to free themselves from the Congo, created as a personal holding by Belgium’s King Leopold towards the end on the 19th century. During the early 1960s. Scores of similar struggles materialized throughout the sub-Saharan regions of the “Dark Continent” over the next decade—the Ibos’ attempt to separate their Biafran homeland from Nigeria, for instance—a matter that so eroded claims of cohesion both within and between the various components of Africa’s emergent statist system that Kwame Nkrumah, a leading advocate of a Pan-African Union, was led to observe that “tribalism” rather than the ravages of neocolonialism stood as the primary barrier to actualization of the Third Worldist vision.
Nor have North Africa or the Middle East been immune. Since 1948, by far the most visible has of course been the sustained resistance of indigenous Palestinians to the impositions of the Israeli state. Less noticed, but sustained over an even longer period, has been the struggle of the Kurds to free their traditional territory, spanning the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Armenia. By the 1970s, Bedouin resistance to statist rule in the Western Sahara had also congealed into the Polisario Liberation Front, a movement aimed mainly at securing the self-determining rights of tribal peoples against the self-anointed authority of Morocco’s central government.
Throughout Latin America, what might otherwise be viewed as typical Third World national liberation struggles and/or their precursors, have all along exhibited a pronouncedly indigenist dynamic. This became apparent at least as early as 1915, with an attempt by the Yaquis to (re)establish their own “free state,” separate from that born of the Mexican revolution. Comparable objectives were apparent in the “Land or Death” program for reorganizing property relations in the Andes advanced by Quechan revolutionary Hugo Blanco during the 1960s, and in the armed resistance of the Miskitos and other native to consolidation of the Nicaraguan state by the Sandinista government 20 years later.
More recent struggles undertaken in the same vein include those of the Mayan population of Chiapas to assert their autonomy from Mexico’s central government, an initiative presently being replicated in the provinces of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Sonora. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, having apparently reconsidered certain tenets of Third Worldism, has become the first self-consciously revolutionary head of state to restore lands and rights to indigenous peoples (whether this initiative was gestural or programmatic remains to be seen). Meanwhile, in Bolivia—demographically, the most overwhelmingly indigenous of all the Andean states—Evo Morales, an Aymara, has been elected president, largely on a promise to usher in a “new day” for the country’s native peoples (what this means, and where it might lead, also remain to be seen).
Settler states
The issue of demographics brings up yet another major mode of colonialism the paradigm left unaddressed in Mao’s “Three Worlds” paradigm. This is that of “settler states,” wherein a colonizing European population, having sufficiently established itself in its new overseas domain, declares itself, or is otherwise declared, to constitute a country in its own right, independent of the colonizing power from whence it sprang. Structurally, settler states—examples include the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, Argentina, Northern Ireland, Israel, and, until lately, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa—resemble the above-discussed internal colonial model embodied in Third World states, other than that the dominant population has been imported rather than being of local origin, and must therefore be seen as continuing rather than assuming the role of colonizer vis-à-vis subsumed within the “liberated” state.
To be sure, the latter circumstances have served to foster conditions radically different from those prevailing in Third World settings. Since the society “freed” by the attainment of settler state independence was that of the colonizers themselves—for those actually colonized, colonial domination was not only sustained but in most cases intensified in the “postcolonial” context—there has been sufficient developmental continuity to place virtually every such entity on a First World footing. Nonetheless, Fourth World liberation struggles have been every bit as apparent in the most advanced of the First World settler states as they have in the least developed states in the Third, oft-times more so.
While the efforts of Australia’s aboriginal peoples have been quite fruitful, as have those of the Maoris in New Zealand, the sharpest confrontations have been in North America, a reality highlighted by the American Indian Movement’s 1972 seizure of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C.; AIM’s 71-day armed defense of Wounded Knee in 1973; the ongoing and sometimes armed resistance of the Big Mountain Dine (Navajos) to forced removal from their land, beginning in 1974; the armed occupation of Montreal’s Mercier Bridge by the Mohawk Warrior Society in 1990; the armed occupation of traditional lands at Gustafsen Lake, British Columbia, during the mid-90s; and, currently, the struggle being waged by the Mohawks and others of the six-nation Haudenosaunee confederation to regain control over their traditional territory around Caledonia, in the Canadian province of Quebec.
Other examples abound: the long struggle of the Newes (Western Shoshone), spearheaded by the sisters Mary and Carrie Dann, to assert their right under the Ruby Valley Treaty to most of present-day Nevada; the protracted struggle of the Lubicon Cree to preserve and protect the traditional territory in northern Alberta; the hard-fought campaign by the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) to assert the rights under international law to land and self-governance; the Makahs’ assertion of their right to maintain their traditional whaling economy; the successful drive by the James Bay Cree to block hydroelectric projects that would have submerged their entire homeland under 200 feet of water; the ongoing efforts of the Dine to block the construction of coal-fired generating plants on their land, and to prevent conversion of their most sacred sites into tourist resorts. The list goes on and on, from the Dene campaign to enforce their treaty rights in Canada’s Northwest Territories, to the Mik’maq insistence upon their treaty-guaranteed right to fish and take lobsters off the coast of Nova Scotia, to the ongoing Lakota effort to recover the Black Hills, guaranteed them in perpetuity under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.
Mother countries
Even in the European “Mother Countries” themselves, the Fourth World has increasingly made its presence known over the past 50 years, most spectacularly by a 30-year intensification, beginning in 1970, of the 800-year long Irish struggle to evict the last vestiges of British colonialism from their homeland. Less conspicuously, similar processes have been at work in Celtic Wales and Scotland during the same period. Elsewhere, the Basques have also engaged in an armed struggle to free their homeland, Euskadi, from its status of forcible incorporation into the Spanish state, while the Catalans have recently begun to openly pursue a similar agenda. So, too, the native Corsicans, whose island homeland in the Mediterranean has long been held as a settler possession by France. Far to the north, in the Arctic region of Scandinavia, the Samis (Lapps) are also seeking to resume their traditional autonomy vis-à-vis Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
Where does all this lead? One answer is to genuine and complete rather than partial or figurative decolonization on a planetary basis. Another, is to a redefinition of the relations between peoples in terms of the mutual acknowledgement of fundamental rights—hence, mutual respect—a matter establishing self-determination and free association as the cardinal principles upon which the affairs of nations are conducted. Perhaps self-evidently, such principles preclude the exercise of the kind of centralized, arbitrary, and inherently coercive authority which constitutes the very essence of statist organization. This, in turn, would serve to delegitimate in its entirety the 17th century Westphalian system of international relations, wherein states are the only entities deemed to be legitimate for purposes of deciding questions of world order.
The upshot would be a multiplicity of sociopolitical environments, wherein decision-making processes are inherently geared to what Kirkpatrick Sale once and aptly described as “human scale.” All but inevitably, this would lead to the contours of the resulting societies conforming closely to bioregional realities, a circumstance that would go far towards shaping the nature of their economies and facilitating a high degree of interactivity among/between societies through the medium of satisfying reciprocal needs.
Much more could and no doubt needs to be said, but constraints on length prevent its being said herein. Long story short, however, what has just been sketched goes a long way towards describing the restoration of the Fourth World, the indigenous or “host” world upon which all three of those identified by Mao were built, and without the perpetual subjugation/nullification of which none of the three could/can exist.
My personal preference of a term by which to refer to pursuit of Fourth World restoration is “indigenism,” although it shares much in common with certain variants of anarchism, a promise which seems worthy of further exploration. That too, however, is a discussion consigned by the limits of space to be had another day….
Ward Churchill is an indigenous activist and author. He has written over 20 books, including On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present.
9/28/07
“Policing the neighbourhood”—Australia’s new para-military police
Part 2
By Mike Head
28 September 2007This is the conclusion of a two-part series on the Australian Federal Police. Part 1 was posted on September 27.
The AFP and the Honiara riots The real face of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) as a para-military arm of Canberra’s neo-colonial policy has nowhere been more graphically demonstrated than in the Solomon Islands.
The New Matilda online magazine has published fresh evidence about the AFP’s role in the April 18-19, 2006 riots in Honiara, the Solomons’ capital. These riots, which began outside parliament house and culminated in the burning down of the city’s Chinatown and other commercial and tourism buildings, provided the justification for the dispatch of more than 400 Australian, New Zealand and other troops and police, bolstering the ongoing security contingent of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) to more than 1,000.
The WSWS has previously reported evidence that suggests that Australian forces may have deliberately provoked the rioting to create the conditions for the Howard government to reinforce the RAMSI operation following a general election in which its favoured candidate, Prime Minister Allen Kemakeza, was defeated.
After newly-elected MPs defied the thrust of the election outcome by voting to install Snyder Rini, Kemakeza’s deputy, as prime minister, Solomon Islanders reacted with outrage, generally believing the parliamentary vote to have been rigged through corruption and bribery. An angry crowd converged on parliament to demand Rini’s resignation.
Luke Johnston, an Australian NGO worker who was at parliament, told New Matilda he had not spoken out before because of fear of retribution from Australian authorities. He said the crowd that gathered outside parliament to hear the announcement of the new prime minister was agitated but not violent. The people were willing to negotiate—until the AFP’s riot squad stepped in.
“These guys [the AFP’s Operational Response Group] came flying down the driveway at full speed, right towards the crowd. There were two or possibly three Land-cruisers full with all the kit: bullet-proof vests, big shields, lots of weapons. The crowd just scattered. That was the first turning point. The second one was when they cleared the driveway, they started manhandling people. The first physical contact was made by the AFP officers. They weren’t brutal, but they were shoving and pushing, and that’s when people got cranky,” Johnston told the magazine.
“Then they [the police] tried to bust the PM out. They rushed him out to the car under guard of the riot squad, and that’s when the first stone came. The police began firing stuff, and that really set the crowd abuzz, because it sounds and looks like guns. They started freaking, shouting ‘you’re shooting us’. They went mad, just hysterical, and they trashed every vehicle, and they ran down the hill and started burning things down,” he said.
The police then withdrew and seemed to allow the burning and looting to proceed. “So I had to stand on my verandah for two nights with a crowbar with the whole town abandoned to these mobs, which just grew and grew, and watch as [the police] dealt with the situation from the air. They put the helicopter over the house and they were firing tear gas out of the helicopter.”
The New Matilda series also drew attention to a World Vision submission to the current Senate inquiry into Australian “peacekeeping operations”. The submission included claims by serving AFP officers that International Deployment Group (IDG) members of the ADF used non-approved munitions during the Honiara riots, and were instructed to fire at people’s heads or shoot them in the back as they fled. World Vision’s submission welcomed the AFP’s participation in RAMSI as a “positive development”, while voicing concerns that these practices could undermine support for the operation.
According to World Vision, the munitions “included either 40 mm bean bag rounds or 40 mm foam rounds, 12 gauge bean bag rounds, CS Gas and possibly Stinger grenades containing rubber balls. We understand that these munitions were used by IDG members on 18th April 2006 in Honiara, despite them not being approved use of force options at the time under Commissioner’s Order 3 (CO3). We further understand that on 19th April, CO3 was retrospectively amended for a 28-day period to permit the use of previously non-approved munitions.”
World Vision said its sources reported that an IDG Team Leader had given chilling instructions to Australian and New Zealand police officers in the Solomon Islands. He “reportedly informed participants that, from his experience in PNG [Papua New Guinea], a person’s neck was a good place to aim with a 12 gauge bean bag round, since this would render the person unconscious, and that shooting people in the back as they were fleeing was also acceptable.”
During a Senate committee public hearing in Melbourne, World Vision representatives were admonished for attracting media attention to “specific grievances”, and the committee refused to pursue the claims. Justice Minister David Johnston said he was satisfied that the claims had been investigated internally, but a World Vision spokesman said no eye witnesses had been interviewed in the internal probe, including the officers who spoke to the organisation.
The Howard government and the AFP have insisted that the police conduct during the Honiara riots constituted an exemplary display of the AFP’s new role. In the June 2006 edition of AFP News, the agency’s newsletter, AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty said the response by AFP members “would be remembered as a very proud moment in the AFP’s history”. He described the “bravery and courage” shown by police officers as an “inspiration to us all at the AFP”. They “did an incredible job in extremely volatile circumstances, exercising enormous restraint and putting their own safety at risk to protect others”.
As the WSWS has documented, the Howard government has sought to block or derail the Solomon Islands government’s own commission of inquiry into the Honiara riots. Its campaign has included attempts to arrest and extradite the country’s attorney-general, Julian Moti, on trumped-up statutory rape charges (see “Solomon Islands government rebuts Canberra’s child sex allegations against attorney-general”).
The fresh evidence raises many further questions about the IDG’s part in the Honiara riots. Did AFP commanders provoke the disturbances and then stand aside while Honiara burnt, in order to give the Howard government a pretext to fly in more troops to fortify the RAMSI intervention? Were orders given to use potentially lethal force? Were those orders retrospectively authorised? Has a high-level cover-up taken place?
A domestic “gendarmerie” Commissioner Keelty has referred to the AFP becoming a “pseudo-gendarmerie” of Australian foreign policy. The same could be said of its growing para-military and political role domestically.
As the Howard government has turned to military and police interventions in the Asia-Pacific regions, it has also dramatically escalated the AFP’s powers, resources and activity at home.
This was on display at the recent Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Sydney. According to official sources, some 450 AFP officers were deployed, alongside 2,500 state police and 1,500 military personnel, who included Special Air Services (SAS) commandos on standby.
The AFP said its contingent included dog squads (“canine explosives teams”), heavily-armed bodyguards (“personal protection officers”), intelligence analysts and airport security personnel. Commissioner Keelty described it as “a huge deployment, the biggest we have had”.
Because many police personnel removed their name tags, it was impossible to determine how many AFP officers were among the squads of armoured riot police, equipped with pistols, mace spray, taser guns, batons, shields, armoured vehicles, water cannon and helicopters, that surrounded the 10,000 demonstrators protesting against the Iraq war and the policies of the Howard government and the Bush administration.
In the lead-up to the summit, police commandos joined SAS and other military personnel in “anti-terrorism” exercises, featuring helicopters whirring through the city, gunboats speeding up Sydney Harbour and simulated live ammunition shootouts at railway stations.
Over recent months, the AFP has also played a leading part, as an adjunct to the military, in the Howard government’s takeover of Aboriginal townships and camps across the Northern Territory. Police have been stationed in scores of communities to enforce such measures as welfare cutoffs, medical checks on children, crackdowns on truancy and the seizures of control over houses and land.
The Howard government clearly regards the IDG’s experiences overseas as valuable for its internal operations. That was illustrated by the initial appointment as Northern Territory taskforce commander of Shane Castles, the former Australian police chief of the Solomon Islands RAMSI operation. Castles subsequently declined the Northern Territory post, and was replaced by an army officer, Major-General David Chalmers.
The connection between the foreign and domestic work of the AFP was discussed with rare candour in a June 27 Canberra ABC radio interview with acting Australian Capital Territory (ACT) police commissioner Andy Hughes, another AFP officer with neo-colonial experience. He had been forced to leave Fiji, where he had been installed as Police Commissioner, after last year’s military takeover in Fiji.
ABC host Ross Solly asked Hughes whether AFP officers had the “special set of skills” needed to go into indigenous areas, following reports that local people feared and opposed the intervention. Hughes replied: “Look I don’t think anyone is doubting that it is a big job. No question of that. But, ACT Policing members and indeed AFP have had considerable experience in difficult environments including recently of course, East Timor, Solomon Islands, and other UN missions over time. We’re in Afghanistan, Sudan, so you know, the track record of AFP and Australian Policing generally in difficult circumstances is very good.”
The AFP was also centrally involved in the Howard government’s ultimately unsuccessful operation to frame-up Indian Muslim doctor, Mohammed Haneef, on terrorism charges. Haneef was detained for nearly two weeks without trial, and then stripped of his visa to block his release. Amid lurid media claims of a “doctors’ jihad network”—obviously fed by prejudicial police and government leaks—Prime Minister Howard and leading ministers declared that his arrest was a wake-up call to Australians that terrorists could strike on home soil.
Within three weeks the case collapsed. It emerged that prosecutors, acting on AFP information, had wrongly told a court that Haneef’s former mobile phone SIM card was found in the jeep that rammed into Glasgow airport in late June. Haneef’s lawyers released the transcripts of two AFP interviews with their client, providing a devastating picture of the AFP’s modus operandi: false, unsubstantiated and highly damaging allegations had been levelled against an innocent man and peddled to the media and the courts (see “Haneef police transcript exposes Australian government’s ‘terrorist conspiracy’ claims”).
The entire witchhunt was aimed at drumming up new public fears of terrorism in advance of the federal elections, due by the end of this year. As well, its aim was to justify the battery of unprecedented powers, such as detention and interrogation without trial, wide-ranging definitions of terrorism, the executive banning of organisations, semi-secret trials and the outlawing of urging support for resistance to Australian military interventions, handed to the AFP and its intelligence partner, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), since 2002.
Taken together, the scope and scale of the AFP’s “new paradigm of policing” amounts to the erection of the scaffolding of a police-state within Australia along with the para-military enforcement of Australian strategic and corporate interests throughout the region.
Concluded
See Also:
The Howard government, RAMSI, and the April 2006 Solomon Islands’ riots
Part 1
[21 February 2007]
The Howard government, RAMSI, and the April 2006 Solomon Islands’ riots
Part 2
[22 February 2007]
6/26/07
Before Christ, Columbus, & Cook
Resist Oppression
http://www.youtube.com/v/Q2edQAGkjfw
A Woman Warrior Speaks
http://cihuayao.journalspace.com/
The original painting by Cleveley was discovered in 2004 and depicts Captain Cook as a violent man. The painting proved some artists skewed history to show Europeans in favorable light.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Cook
6/24/07
Terrorist Attack on Aborigines The Act Of Terror That Initiated The Aboriginal Holocaust
dont forget to check out Tyson Yunkaporta's excellent and elucidate site:
http://aboriginalrights.suite101.com/
© Tyson Yunkaporta
May 29, 2006
Was Australia's first Governor, by empirical definition and his own admission, a terrorist? And how does our current government compare?
Acknowledging The Thin Ice
Firstly I should say that I am not making arbitrary judgements and opinionated claims here. I am aware that painting the "early settlers" and "brave old pioneers" of colonial mythology as terrorists - the ultimate 21st century bogeyman - is tantamount to treason and strikes at the heart of dominant cultural identity. I really don't need to be lynched right now, so I will just stick to the facts, quotes and definitions. I apologise for any offense, but I am not changing history here - merely quoting it as it is recorded.
"Universal Terror" Statement
The quote (1790) from Governor Phillip that drew my attention and inspired this article is as follows:
"...strike a decisive blow, in order, at once to convince them of our superiority, and to infuse an universal terror."
Now, if I hadn't already situated this quote in an historical context, you may have imagined the words to be from some stereotypical fanatical Middle Eastern despot hiding out in a cave. You may have felt outrage, and immediately felt protective or supportive towards the intended victims of this "universal terror". But if you know that this quote is from the first British Governor of Australia, and is referring to the first planned military attack on Aboriginal people, do you still feel the same way? Surely you must.
Terrorism, By Definition
Keeping this feeling in mind, consider also that terrorism is generally accepted as the use of violence, or the threat of violence, in a civilian community to force political or religious change. Could Governor Phillip's statement and actions fit this definition? Could his orders to capture two Aborigines and decapitate ten more randomly from a targeted tribe be construed as an act of violence against a civilian community to force political change? Arguably, yes.
British Humanitarian Guidelines
But wasn't he just following orders? Not necessarily. The British Government repeatedly insisted that the colony be founded based on mutual agreement between natives and settlers as to areas of settlement, and continually stressed that force was not to be used. Even Captain Cook's first voyage included the following guidelines:
* "To have it still in view that shedding the blood of those (Aboriginal) people is a crime of the highest nature."
* "They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit."
* "No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent."
* "Conquest over such people can never give just title..."
* "They may naturally and justly attempt to repel intruders..."
If this was indeed the attitude of the British administration that sent the colonists to Australian shores, then why the subsequent genocide? Why the Governor's blatant refusal to follow policy and instead decide to "infuse an universal terror"? Well, I don't speak for these people, so it's not my place to answer these questions.
But the fact remains that, as the systematic annihilation of Indigenous peoples on this continent was not sanctioned by the invaders' Government, then by definition the colony was built on, at worst, murder, or at best, war crimes.
Australian Survival
It is possible that, at some level, everybody is aware of this. This might explain the fanatical and often violent opposition that still occurs towards any suggestion of Aboriginal Rights and Native Title. The stain of guilt is there, just below the surface, and to reveal it would be to destroy the nation's identity. Opposing Indigenous rights is therefore seen as a matter of ethnic survival for the dominant culture, and as such, violent or fanatical opposition is to be expected. But does any of this opposition these days still take the form of terrorism?
Scenarios For Discussion
We would have to examine individual cases of political actions in Indigenous communities to discover that. I will give a sample scenario below, for you to practise on. Compare the scenario to the definition of terrorism in the 5th paragraph, or even substitute an alternative definition. Please feel free to post your analysis or opinion in the discussion section below. Also feel free to post other scenarios for analysis, from anywhere around the world where suspected acts of terrorism are being committed against Indigenous people.
Scenario One
An Indigenous community is pressured by Australian government representatives to give approval for a tavern to be built in what is currently a dry town. Three referendums are held on the question, and the unanimous community response each time is "no!", despite a lot of pro-alcohol campaigning. Eventually the tavern is built anyway, against the wishes of the community. A few years later the government decides to take what it calls "tough measures" against the same community with regard to welfare and crime, in response to horrific problems caused by chronic alcoholism. Graphic reports of individual cases of child abuse by Indigenous alcoholics are presented in the media to shock the wider community into accepting the "tough measures" as the preferred solution. Could any element of this scenario be described as an act of terror?
http://aboriginalrights.suite101.com/
© Tyson Yunkaporta
May 29, 2006
Was Australia's first Governor, by empirical definition and his own admission, a terrorist? And how does our current government compare?
Acknowledging The Thin Ice
Firstly I should say that I am not making arbitrary judgements and opinionated claims here. I am aware that painting the "early settlers" and "brave old pioneers" of colonial mythology as terrorists - the ultimate 21st century bogeyman - is tantamount to treason and strikes at the heart of dominant cultural identity. I really don't need to be lynched right now, so I will just stick to the facts, quotes and definitions. I apologise for any offense, but I am not changing history here - merely quoting it as it is recorded.
"Universal Terror" Statement
The quote (1790) from Governor Phillip that drew my attention and inspired this article is as follows:
"...strike a decisive blow, in order, at once to convince them of our superiority, and to infuse an universal terror."
Now, if I hadn't already situated this quote in an historical context, you may have imagined the words to be from some stereotypical fanatical Middle Eastern despot hiding out in a cave. You may have felt outrage, and immediately felt protective or supportive towards the intended victims of this "universal terror". But if you know that this quote is from the first British Governor of Australia, and is referring to the first planned military attack on Aboriginal people, do you still feel the same way? Surely you must.
Terrorism, By Definition
Keeping this feeling in mind, consider also that terrorism is generally accepted as the use of violence, or the threat of violence, in a civilian community to force political or religious change. Could Governor Phillip's statement and actions fit this definition? Could his orders to capture two Aborigines and decapitate ten more randomly from a targeted tribe be construed as an act of violence against a civilian community to force political change? Arguably, yes.
British Humanitarian Guidelines
But wasn't he just following orders? Not necessarily. The British Government repeatedly insisted that the colony be founded based on mutual agreement between natives and settlers as to areas of settlement, and continually stressed that force was not to be used. Even Captain Cook's first voyage included the following guidelines:
* "To have it still in view that shedding the blood of those (Aboriginal) people is a crime of the highest nature."
* "They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit."
* "No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent."
* "Conquest over such people can never give just title..."
* "They may naturally and justly attempt to repel intruders..."
If this was indeed the attitude of the British administration that sent the colonists to Australian shores, then why the subsequent genocide? Why the Governor's blatant refusal to follow policy and instead decide to "infuse an universal terror"? Well, I don't speak for these people, so it's not my place to answer these questions.
But the fact remains that, as the systematic annihilation of Indigenous peoples on this continent was not sanctioned by the invaders' Government, then by definition the colony was built on, at worst, murder, or at best, war crimes.
Australian Survival
It is possible that, at some level, everybody is aware of this. This might explain the fanatical and often violent opposition that still occurs towards any suggestion of Aboriginal Rights and Native Title. The stain of guilt is there, just below the surface, and to reveal it would be to destroy the nation's identity. Opposing Indigenous rights is therefore seen as a matter of ethnic survival for the dominant culture, and as such, violent or fanatical opposition is to be expected. But does any of this opposition these days still take the form of terrorism?
Scenarios For Discussion
We would have to examine individual cases of political actions in Indigenous communities to discover that. I will give a sample scenario below, for you to practise on. Compare the scenario to the definition of terrorism in the 5th paragraph, or even substitute an alternative definition. Please feel free to post your analysis or opinion in the discussion section below. Also feel free to post other scenarios for analysis, from anywhere around the world where suspected acts of terrorism are being committed against Indigenous people.
Scenario One
An Indigenous community is pressured by Australian government representatives to give approval for a tavern to be built in what is currently a dry town. Three referendums are held on the question, and the unanimous community response each time is "no!", despite a lot of pro-alcohol campaigning. Eventually the tavern is built anyway, against the wishes of the community. A few years later the government decides to take what it calls "tough measures" against the same community with regard to welfare and crime, in response to horrific problems caused by chronic alcoholism. Graphic reports of individual cases of child abuse by Indigenous alcoholics are presented in the media to shock the wider community into accepting the "tough measures" as the preferred solution. Could any element of this scenario be described as an act of terror?
4/25/07
3/28/07
MAORI WOMEN CAUGHT IN THE CONTRADICTIONS OF A COLONISED REALITY
This is posted to honor the passing of :
Fiona Patricia (nee Clarke). Passed away at home in Dangens Road, Peria, Tuesday 27 March. Loving wife of Joe, mum of Conway and Wesley. Daughter to Rona and the late Kenny Clarke. Sister to Janice, Robert, John, Bradley, Frances, Romana and the late Samuel and MartinKei te hahae te tau o te ate, kei te hotu te whatumanawa, kei te
paatuki te taaraauma, kei te mooteatea ngaa mahara moo koutou,
moo ngaa tangata o te motu kaa huri kaaweka nei.
How the strings of our hearts are torn, how our hearts are sobbing,
how our breasts are heaving with emotion, how our minds grieve for
you,for the people of this land, as finally you turn from us.
Hei konei ra e hine.
Much love to all the whanau
"I. INTRODUCTION
It is often assumed that, according to tikanga Maori, leadership was primarily the domain of men and that men in Maori society exercised power over women. However, evidence abounds which refutes the notion that traditional Maori society attached greater significance to male roles than to female roles. This article begins with a discussion of the position of women in Maori society before colonisation. It then considers the position of women under English law, and examines the effects that law had on Maori women as a result of colonisation.
II. TIKANGA MAORI AND MANA WAHINE
The roles of men and women in traditional Maori society can be understood only in the context of the Maori world view, which acknowledged the natural order of the universe, the interrelationship or whanaungatanga of all living things to one another and to the environment, and the over-arching principle of balance. Both men and women were essential parts in the collective whole, both formed part of the whakapapa that linked Maori people back to the beginning of the world, and women in particular played a key role in linking the past with the present and the future. The very survival of the whole was absolutely dependent upon everyone who made it up, and therefore each and every person within the group had his or her own intrinsic value. They were all a part of the collective; it was therefore a collective responsibility to see that their respective roles were valued and protected.
Maori cosmology abounds with stories of powerful women, some of whom have been given a contemporary face through the work of Robyn Kahukiwa and Patricia Grace.[1] The tales of Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga are particularly instructive as to the influential roles that women held. Maui acquires fire from his kuia, Mahuika. It is with the jawbone of his kuia, Muriranga-whenua, that he fishes up Te Ika a Maui (the North Island) and makes the patu with which to subdue Ra (the sun). And it is to his ancestress, Hine-nui-te-po, that he eventually succumbs when he fails in his quest to attain immortality.
Perhaps the most powerful indication that there was no hierarchy of sexes lies in Maori language, as both the personal pronouns (ia) and the possessive personal pronouns (tana/tona) are gender-neutral. The importance of women is also symbolised by language and concepts expressed through proverbs. Rose Pere has written on the association of positive concepts with females, pointing to the description of women as whare tangata (the house of humanity), the use of the word whenua to mean both land and afterbirth, and the use of the word hapu as meaning both pregnant and large kinship group.[2] Pere has pointed out that the common saying, "He wahine, he whenua, e ngaro ai te tangata" which is often interpreted as meaning "by women and land men are lost", also refers to the essential nourishing roles that women and land fulfil, without which humanity would be lost.[3] It should be remembered too that the earth is Papatuanuku, the ancestress of all Maori, and that land is of paramount significance to Maori socially, culturally, spiritually, politically and economically. Papatuanuku also played a key role in instructing her son, Tanemahuta, where to find the human element and how to make Hine-ahu-one so that humankind could be created.
Pere describes her childhood as being full of very positive female models, and how her elders set the example of men and women respecting and supporting each other, and working alongside one another. She considers her Maori ancestresses, prior to the impact of Christianity, to have been "extremely liberated" in comparison to her English ancestresses. She points out that Maori women were not regarded as chattels or possessions, that they retained their own names upon marriage, that their children were free to identify with the kinship group of either or both parents, that they dressed in similar garments to the men, and that conception was not associated with sin or child bearing with punishment and suffering but that these were seen to be uplifting and a normal part of life.[4]
Pere also points out that assault on a woman, be it sexual or otherwise, was regarded as extremely serious and could result in death or, almost as bad, in being declared "dead" by the community and ignored from then on.[5] Instances of abuse against women and children were regarded as whanau concerns and action would inevitably be taken against the perpetrator. Stephanie Milroy has noted:
In pre-colonial Maori society a man's house was not his castle. The community intervened to prevent and punish violence against one's partner in a very straightforward way.[6]
Traditionally, therefore, the whanau was a woman's primary source of support. Her "marriage" did not entail a transferral of property from her father to her spouse. She remained a part of the whanau. Even if she went to live with her husband's whanau, she remained a part of her whanau, to whom her in-laws were responsible for her well-being. They were to ensure that she was well-treated and to support her. In cases where misconduct was shown, divorce was relatively simple so long as the correct procedures were followed. Divorce carried no stigma, and any issues as to custody and ongoing support of children were sorted out within the whanau context.
The absence of distinction between private and public domains in the context of family arrangements protected and affirmed women. Kuni Jenkins describes the interaction of a couple and their children with the rest of the whanau in the following terms:
In her cultural role the Maori woman was part of a community. The home unit was part of the whole kainga. Grandmothers, aunts and other females and male elders were responsible for rearing the children of the kainga. The natural parents were not the sole care-givers . . . The routines of the whanau were such that couples could not be isolated to lead independent lifestyles. Their communal living required constant contact and interaction with other members of the tribe in a concerted effort to keep the affairs of the group buoyant and operational.[7]
This form of social organisation ensured a degree of flexibility for women not possible within the confines of the nuclear family. The presence of so many care givers, and the expectation that they would assume much of the responsibility of child rearing, enabled women to perform a wide range of roles, including leadership roles.
Api Mahuika has written specifically on Maori women and leadership.[8] Noting the widely-held assumptions that Maori women did not fulfil leadership roles in traditional society, he goes on to show that, with regard to his iwi, such assumptions are inaccurate. His account is instructive, not just for the wealth of examples that he provides, but because of the way he gleans information about the role of women from waiata, haka, whakatauki, iwi histories and the naming of hapu and iwi. It is vital, for reasons that will be discussed later, that our attempts to build a picture of Maori society before the arrival of the first missionaries and settlers are based on Maori sources of information.
Maori culture was an oral culture. Waiata, haka, and whakatauki were therefore the primary means of transmitting knowledge, the vehicles through which ancient concepts and beliefs have been passed down to us today. That women played an important role in the maintenance and transmittal of iwi history and knowledge is clear from the numbers of waiata tawhito that have been composed by women. Nga Moteatea[9] is full of such waiata written by women, some of whom were clearly quite prolific composers. It seems entirely logical that those responsible for the physical survival and continuance of the iwi should also play a significant role in the survival of its history and therefore its identity.
The naming of hapu and whare tupuna after women is a clear indication of the significance of those women. There are many such instances across a wide range of iwi.[10] Iwi histories that have been handed down orally from generation to generation present a picture of a society where women and men featured in all aspects of life, and fulfilled all manner of roles. It is clear from such histories that Maori women occupied very important leadership positions in traditional society, positions of military, spiritual and political significance. Jenkins refers to a number of dominant Maori women whose stories have continued to influence later generations. She includes Wairaka, who is said to have saved the Mataatua canoe from floating out to sea; Hinemoa, who seized the initiative and swam across Lake Rotorua in order to be with Tutanekai; and the legendary Rongomai-wahine of the Hawkes Bay area.[11] The feats of these women are recorded vividly in oral histories; the fact that waiata continue to be composed about them today is a reflection of their enduring power and influence.
The People of Many Peaks[12] gives some examples of women of mana who lived between the years 1769 and 1869. One woman who came to the attention of the earliest settlers as a leader was Hinematioro of Ngati Porou, whose mana was recognised from Poverty Bay to Hicks Bay. Another was Rangi Topeora, of Ngati Raukawa and Ngati Toa descent. She was a signatory to the Treaty of Waitangi, a powerful landowner, and a prolific composer of waiata. Her mother, Waitohi, was Te Rauparaha's sister, a leader in her own right and a known military strategist.[13] Heni Pore of Te Arawa[14] epitomises the adaptability required of Maori leaders during the latter half of the nineteenth century. She fought against the British troops in support of the Kingitanga during the 1860s; she also fought in the battle of Gate Pa at Tauranga in 1864. Along with her husband, she managed a hotel at Maketu for a time and was later a staunch supporter and member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, becoming secretary of the Ohinemutu branch in 1896. She was also a licenced interpreter and was very involved in land and other social issues. As more is written about such women, a picture emerges of Maori women from all iwi performing leadership roles of all types, alongside the men.
III. THE STATUS OF WOMEN UNDER ENGLISH LAW
The position of women in English law was derived directly from their status in Roman law:
The term [family] was invented by the Romans to denote a new social organism, whose head ruled over wife and children and a number of slaves, and was invested under Roman paternal power with rights of life and death over them.[15]
According to the English common law, the head of the family (the husband/father) was in control of the household, "women and children were chattels to be used and abused by the paterfamilias as he chose".[16] As girls reached adulthood and married, they changed from being the property of their fathers to being the property of their husbands. Any property that a wife brought to a marriage was immediately vested in the husband, and he could do with it whatever he liked.[17] She either had no legal personality at all,[18] and simply existed to enable the legal person of the household to act effectively in the market,[19] or, at best, she was incapacitated, only a partial person.[20] Male ownership of the children meant that a mother had no rights whatsoever to her children. And a wife had virtually no legal means of ending the marriage in a way which would enable her to keep the children or to regain any former property or to get any upkeep from her ex-husband for herself or her children, no matter what the reason for the divorce.[21]
The vestiges of this common law approach have remained apparent in many aspects of New Zealand law. Until comparatively recently, the marriage ceremony concluded with the couple being pronounced "man and wife", he retaining his independent personality, she losing hers and being declared "in service" to him. The notion of illegitimacy and the law's condemnation of it were also reflective of common law principles, whereby a woman's reproductive powers could only be exercised in legal connection to a man, thereby creating property (children) for him. Until 1985, rape could not be perpetrated in New Zealand law by a husband against his wife.[22] This stemmed from the notion of the wife being his property. To the present day the frequent inequities in division of matrimonial property,[23] as well as the continued trivialisation by the law and law enforcement agencies of domestic violence,[24] reflect the extent to which common law attitudes about the role of women continue to pervade the legal system.
IV. THE IMPACT OF INTRODUCED LAW ON MAORI WOMEN
When the missionaries and early settlers arrived in Aotearoa, they brought with them their culturally specific understandings of the role and status of women. Jenkins describes the conflict in values and the British reaction as follows:
Western civilisation when it arrived on Aotearoa's shore, did not allow its womenfolk any power at all - they were merely chattels in some cases less worthy than the men's horses. What the colonizer found was a land of noble savages narrating . . . stories of the wonder of women. Their myths and beliefs had to be reshaped and retold. The missionaries were hell-bent (heaven-bent) on destroying their pagan ways. Hence, in the re-telling of our myths, by Maori male informants to Pakeha male writers who lacked the understanding and significance of Maori cultural beliefs, Maori women find their mana wahine destroyed.[25]
It is posited that this re-telling of Maori cosmology led to a shift in emphasis, away from the powerful female influence in the stories and towards the male characters. The Maui stories became focused almost solely on the exploits of this male demi-god, his kuia being made nearly invisible in the process. The account of the creation of the first woman, Hine-ahu-one, metamorphosed into a tale uncannily similar to the biblical myth of Adam creating Eve from his rib; Tanemahuta became the main figure in the story with Papatuanuku's essential role virtually silenced. Smith has referred to the Maori women within these stories having been turned into "distant and passive old crones whose presence in the 'story' was to add interest to an otherwise male adventure".[26]
The female figures in Maori cosmology were not the only target for missionary zeal and redefinition at the hands of the settlers. Their paternalism also coloured their perceptions of the Maori women they found around them. Linda Smith notes:
Maori women were perceived either in family terms as wives and children, or in sexual terms as easy partners. Women who had "chiefly" roles were considered the exception to the rule, not the norm ... Maori women were considered attractive in the absence of a pool of white women. Their autonomy was interpreted as immorality and lack of discipline. Christianity reinforced these notions by spelling out rules of decorum and defining spaces (the home) for the carrying out of appropriate female activities.[27]
Aside from being regarded as the wives and children (the property) of Maori men, or potential bedmates for white men, Maori women were also sometimes regarded by the settlers as potential sources of land and economic security.
The concept of women as leaders and spokespersons for their whanau, hapu and iwi would have been beyond the comprehension of the settlers or the Crown representatives who were sent to negotiate the Treaty of Waitangi. They could only conceive of dealing with men: "Maori men were the ones with whom the colonisers negotiated, traded and treatied".[28] The fact that the Treaty was signed predominantly by men, sometimes pointed to as a reflection of pre-colonised Maori society's attitudes towards women, is more an indication of the influence of Christianity and the fact that those seeking signatories largely ignored the possibility of women signing. This approach has been recorded as having angered Maori women, thus leading the missionaries to allow some women to sign.[29] There were also occasions where Crown representatives refused to give in to pressure for women to be allowed to sign, probably losing potential male signatories as a result.[30] Thirteen women have so far been identified as having signed the Treaty[31] whereas it was once said that only three or four had done so. There may have been many more but because Maori names, like the language, are generally gender-neutral it is difficult to tell how many more women were involved. Over time, people have come to assume that they were all men. This is one area which requires a great deal more research.
One of the most damaging effects of colonisation for Maori women was the destruction of the whanau. It was clear right from the outset that Maori collectivism was philosophically at odds with the settler ethic of individualism. As Maori had their cultural and economic base wrested from them[32] and as they were ravaged by introduced diseases[33] their social structures were inevitably undermined. The disruption of Maori social organisation was no mere by-product of colonisation, but an integral part of the process. Destroying the principle of collectivism which ran through Maori society was stated to be one of the twin aims of the Native Land Act which had set up the Native Land Court in 1865, the other aim being to access Maori land for settlement.[34] Not only was the very concept of individual title to land destructive of collectivism,[35] but the massive land loss brought about by the workings of the Native Land Court[36] meant that, as the Maori population stabilised at a low point towards the end of the century and began to grow,[37] Maori found that they had insufficient land left to support themselves. Whanau were eventually forced to break into nuclear families and move to towns and cities in search of work.[38]
The Native Land Act 1909 declared Maori customary marriages to be valid for some purposes only and required Maori to undergo legal marriage ceremonies. These provisions, coupled with the parliamentary debates of the time,[39] signalled a renewed determination on the part of the state both to redefine and intrude into the whanau. The remoulding of the whanau into a nuclear family arrangement had been on the missionary agenda since their arrival:
Maori marriage was the despair of the missionaries. They made it a high priority for elimination and they preached hell-fire and brimstone to the sinful pagans who continued to practise it. They refused to accommodate or tolerate Maori marriage as being an alternative to their idea of the nuclear family and its demands on the colonial wife to be subservient, lacking in initiative and obedient to her husband. She had to prize highly her role of housewife and mother and believe it to be God's will. . . . the Maori female had to be domiciled very quickly to the values of the new regime that had arrived to civilise her.[40]
The deliberate destruction of whanau and hapu structures and the forcing of Maori women away from their whanau and into the Pakeha model of the nuclear family left them vulnerable in a host of ways. They became dependent on their husbands as breadwinners, while they became increasingly isolated as care givers at home. Some women were expected to work both outside and in the home, as economic hardship required them to contribute financially while Christian values about what constituted a good wife and mother compelled them to maintain that role as well. Such values also meant that husbands became increasingly the head of the family, wives feeling obliged to remain with them no matter what.
The Church schools trained Maori girls to domesticity, to become good wives in the context of a nuclear family situation. Hukarere Protestant Girls' School was established in 1875 by the Bishop of Waiapu, William Williams, "with the thought of providing good Christian wives for the boys of Te Aute".[41] The denominational schools were actively discouraged from becoming too academically orientated, the Director of Education arguing in 1931 that the aim of Maori education should be to turn out boys to be good farmers and girls to be good farmers' wives.[42] In 1906 the Principal of Hukarere described the daily routine of the girls as covering all aspects of domestic work, including cooking, washing, ironing and mending clothes.[43] Judith Simon notes:
Maori girls were thus being fitted, not only for manual labour but also to fulfil the subordinate domestic roles deemed, within European culture, as appropriate for females.[44]
However, attempts to set in place colleges for the specific purpose of giving Maori girls domestic training did not eventuate. The proposed colleges met with widespread Maori opposition on the basis that Maori girls should not be trained as servants.[45] Nevertheless, autobiographical accounts of Maori women indicate that some of them did take up employment in Pakeha households[46] while others found that their being Maori disqualified them from being hired.[47] Sandra Coney notes that Maori women moved into domestic positions in hotels and institutions in large numbers in the period following the Second World War,[48] this doubtless reflecting the urban migration that was taking place at that time.
V. ADOPTION: A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
The aggressive application of adoption laws to Maori provide an insightful illustration of how the assimilationist policies of the coloniser have affected the heart of Maori society, the whanau, and of the effects on women in particular.
In New Zealand adoption grew out of the desire to encourage couples to care for destitute children by giving them the security of knowing that birth parents could not return to claim their children at a later time.[49] The process evolved to serve a range of purposes, and was based upon the following underlying common law premises concerning the family and the respective roles of men, women and children. To constitute a real family, a married couple should have children; what is more, a married couple deserved to have children. Children should not be raised outside of a "real family" situation, that is, two parents who were married. A woman's sexual activities should only be exercised with reference to a single man, within the context of marriage (and therefore owned by him). A woman's reproductive capabilities could only be legitimated if owned by a man in the context of marriage - hence the stigma of illegitimacy, from which the child had to be protected. Children were property, and could be owned by only one set of parents. It was therefore possible to substitute one set of owners (adoptive parents) for another set of owners (birth parents); so long as the issues of ownership were resolved finally, no other issues arose.[50]
Maori had no institution which paralleled adoption.[51] While it was relatively common for children to be given to someone other than their birth parents to be raised, there was no substitution of parents, no sense in which a mythical nuclear family had to be recreated. The child was born and remained a child of the whanau. The child had an absolute right to know his or her whakapapa. Reasons for giving a child to someone other than birth parents to raise included the strengthening of whanau structures through the securement of enduring bonds, benefiting couples without children, and providing relief for those under stress.[52] Most importantly, there was no expectation that such arrangements had to be permanent: "There is no property in children. Maori children know many homes, but still, one whanau".[53] And there was absolutely no stigma attached. If anything, whangai children were often considered especially fortunate. Pere, who was raised until the age of seven by her grandparents, refers to herself as "a grandchild who was truly blessed and loved".[54] Whangai children were generally regarded as special, often having been chosen by elders on the basis of their talents and their potential.[55]
Initially, Maori whangai arrangements had been recognised as valid adoptions by the law, although, from 1901, it became necessary to confirm such arrangements by order of the Native Land Court so as to enable such matters as succession to land to be recognised.[56] Confirmation of the existence of such a relationship did not create the relationship, but merely acknowledged it. This changed, however, with the enactment of the Native Land Act 1909, which provided that, in order to create the legal relationship between adoptive parents and children, an order of the Native Land Court had to be granted.[57]
The Attorney-General of the time addressed the Legislative Council at length on the 1909 Bill. He considered that, while adoption had been an important feature with Maori, it was "growing less with the advance of the race". The Act was to prevent the adoption by Maori of Pakeha children, a prohibition which remained in force until 1955.[58] This, according to the Attorney-General, was necessary in view of the numbers of "indifferent European parents" and "heartless European mothers" who were abandoning their children or imposing upon the "generosity and goodness" of "good-hearted" Maori women who possessed a great deal of "human tenderness". The prohibition was considered necessary due to the fact that "owing to the condition some of the Maori people live in" the children were not "living in a way we should consider proper for European children". So strongly did Parliament feel about the undesirability of Maori raising European children that further legislation was passed to enable such children to be forcibly removed and placed in "industrial schools".[59]
What led such children to be given to Maori families is not clear, although it is known that some settler families gave children to cement ties with their neighbours.[60] It is also easy to imagine how difficult it might have been for any single Pakeha mother to keep and raise any children she had - and how Maori may well have been only too happy to take such a child in. The characterisation of Maori women as "earth mother" types who longed to do nothing else but care for other people's children, even if the standard of care was considered to be inferior, says much for the prevalent view of Maori women. The utter condemnation of the Pakeha who were giving their children to Maori women is also interesting. Clearly the notion of simply substituting one set of parents for another did not apply to Pakeha children when the adoptive parents were Maori! There may also have been the fear that Maori had not yet fully reconciled themselves to the nuclear family model, which was considered to be the only civilised family arrangement possible. Or perhaps it was felt that single Pakeha mothers were being allowed to get off too lightly by simply giving their children to Maori, who judged neither them nor their babies as "illegitimate".
From 1915 the law began moving towards closed adoption, restricting access to adoption records and information, but Maori were exempted from these requirements. Maori Land Court hearings remained open and details of Maori adoptions were published in both the Maori Gazette and the New Zealand Gazette. There was a clear understanding on the part of the judges that openness was a vital part of the Maori concept of adoption.[61]
However, the 1955 Adoption Act brought virtually all adoptions under a uniform scheme of closed adoption, to be administered by the Magistrates Courts. The only exception was where the child and at least one applicant were Maori (which at that time included only those who were "half-caste" or more):[62] such adoption could still go through the Maori Land Court process. Many Maori simply refused to participate and continued with informal arrangements but, in doing so, risked having their children removed by the Child Welfare Officers.[63]
The 1962 Adoption Amendment Act required all adoptions to go through the Magistrates Courts process. Strong sentiments of "one law for all" were expressed by the proponents of the amendment,[64] as opposed to arguments that equality was not the same thing as uniformity.[65] The Maori MPs objected strongly to the mainstreaming of adoptions, and were particularly critical of the Magistrates Courts for their refusal to grant adoption applications to aunties, uncles or grandparents, on the basis that the child was closely related to the adopters.[66] The Attorney-General made a point of rejecting the notion that older relatives should adopt children, instead praising young Pakeha couples who were prepared to adopt Maori babies.[67]
From 1962, therefore, there were three ways in which Maori children could be adopted. First, there was adoption through informal means, without the involvement of the courts or legal recognition. This continued to constitute the vast bulk of cases. Secondly, there was legal adoption, assisted by Maori welfare officers, who would generally try to ensure openness and to keep children within their kin group. A Maori welfare officer would typically become involved where the birth and adoptive parents either knew or were related to one another and sought their assistance in order to legalise a pre-agreed arrangement.
Problems arose through the third of these means, legal adoption facilitated by child welfare officers. These welfare officers were contacted by homes and hospitals when children became available for adoption. A common situation was where a single (and usually young) woman who was living in an urban environment, cut off from whanau and too whakama to contact them, had become pregnant. The birth mother was generally "worked on"[68] by the officers who argued that her child would be better off with a stable couple who could offer financial security. The shame associated with illegitimacy was emphasised to convince the woman that her whanau should not be informed and that she would be selfish to keep her child. She should look to marrying in the future, within which context further children would be acceptable. Children, like parents, could be replaced. There were also cases where the father of a child was Maori and the child was given up for closed adoption, either without the father's whanau ever knowing about it or even against the whanau's requests to be allowed to adopt the child.[69]
The matching up of Maori babies to adoptive parents was also of extreme concern. Baby girls who did not "look Maori" were relatively easy to place, but boys were more difficult and dark babies especially so. The authorities had a system of "matching for marginality" so that Maori babies would often end up with adoptive parents who were considered marginal in some way. Alternatively, such babies could end up in a series of foster homes or be institutionalised. All of this was considered preferable to living with the stigma of illegitimacy or the less civilised option of remaining within the whanau.[70]
Closed stranger adoption has been subjected to major criticism as its long-term effects, particularly on birth mothers and their children, have been made apparent. Else has referred to it as "a social experiment with unknown and uninvestigated outcomes, conducted on a massive scale".[71] In that closed stranger adoption is based upon common law principles which relegate women and children to the status of men's property, it is hardly surprising that its consequences have been particularly devastating for women who have exercised their sexuality outside of marriage and for the products of such behaviour, their children.
But for Maori women and children, the ill-effects of closed stranger adoption are merely part of the complex web of oppression resulting from the aggressive assimilationism of the coloniser. The consequence of assimilationist policies (of which the imposition of closed stranger adoption was but one) has not simply been the perpetuation of the subordinate position of women and children, for such subordination was never a part of tikanga Maori. It has been the near-destruction of the Maori social fabric, and its replacement with a set of values and philosophies founded on white male supremacy.
For Maori, the expunging of lineage and irrevocable trading in parental rights[72] has meant even more than a lifetime of loss and grief for both birth mother and child; it has resulted in the loss of generations of irreplaceable taonga to the iwi concerned, and the stripping of cultural identity for the children involved and all their descendants. While the Adult Adoption Information Act 1985 enables contact to be made between birth mothers and their children under limited circumstances, there are nevertheless numerous Maori who will be unable to re-establish the connections under the legislation. They will remain lost to their iwi forever. And while there is now a greater degree of acceptance of openness in adoption practices, the law itself remains essentially unchanged.
Issues of openness aside, stranger adoption flouts tikanga Maori insofar as it entails a refusal to acknowledge the responsibilities and rights of whanau, hapu and iwi with respect to their children. Yet Else makes the chilling observation that stranger adoption is "back on the political agenda".[73] The law's denial of the Maori person's inextricable connections with his or her whanau, hapu and iwi has long been a matter of concern for Maori:
The prevalence of Western opinion in influential areas of law ... affirms the view that the Maori is to be treated as an individual and that the communal orientation of Maoridom is without value or relevance.[74]
The law continues to allow only the birth parents to have input into any adoption decision, unless they are unmarried, in which case the father's consent is required only if he is a guardian or if the court deems it expedient to seek it.[75] Durie-Hall and Metge point out that no other relative has a recognised right to be consulted or to make a counter claim.[76] As recently as 1989 the Family Court denied a paternal grandmother standing to apply for the revocation of an interim adoption order in respect of her grandchild, Inglis DCJ finding that she did not fairly come within the category of "any person" in section 12 of the Act. She was therefore denied even the opportunity of making the argument that her mokopuna should be raised within the whanau.[77] The following statement, made in 1986 by the Ministerial Advisory Committee on a Maori Perspective for the Department of Social Welfare, encapsulates Maori dissatisfaction with the way in which adoption orders are made:
We do not think cases involving Maori children ought to be determined solely in accordance with Western priorities, or that those who do not have a Maori experience or training, are adequate arbiters or advocates of the best interests of the Maori child. We do not think the law should be weighted to denying the facility of Maori communities to care for their own in the way they best know how.[78]
This observation applies beyond the issue of adoption, throwing down the challenge to the assimilationist policies of the past and present. Before Maori women and children can be restored to their rightful place within whanau, hapu and iwi, an essential first step is the restoration of Maori philosophies, Maori law. Control from those located outside the culture, well-intentioned or otherwise, is what has brought about the demise of the whanau and the consequent destruction of mana wahine. It is only through a transferral of power back to Maori that the difficult task of formulating strategies to deal with the destruction wrought by colonisation can begin. A vital part of that process will be the restoration of a belief system that recognises the intrinsic value of both men and women, encompassed within the framework of whanaungatanga.
VI. THE POSITION OF MAORI WOMEN TODAY
Colonisation is not a finite process; for Maori, there has been no end to it. It is not simply part of our recent past, nor does it merely inform our present. Colonisation is our present. This final section seeks to explore what it means to be a Maori woman in Aotearoa today. What is our colonised reality?
The last two decades have seen increased statutory mention of Treaty principles and Maori perspectives.[79] It might be argued therefore that, while the law has been both destructive and neglectful of Maori in the past, Maori perspectives are now being incorporated into the law and that this should surely lead to improvement. Such a view is simplistic, however, and ignores the context within which such measures were made and are implemented.
Throughout the 1970s Maori protest over Treaty grievances had been gathering momentum, as Jane Kelsey describes:
Maori grievances over the theft of land, suppression of culture, dishonouring of the Treaty of Waitangi, and denial of economic and political self-determination had become the focus of high-profile protests, frequently led by powerful and articulate Maori women.[80]
These protests[81] forced Maori grievances into the public consciousness and into the arena of national politics. In both 1972 and 1984, Labour's election platform included a promise to deal with Treaty grievances. Such undertakings led to the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975 and, during the years 1984-1987, to "the heyday of Treaty revival".[82] Kelsey notes how these years saw references to the Treaty become "commonplace in political, academic, legal, bureaucratic and, to some extent, public discourse".[83] Yet despite the proliferation of Treaty rhetoric, the legislative provisions incorporating Treaty principles were weakly drafted, and usually subject to interpretation by non-Maori decision-makers. And as the Treaty became increasingly unpopular with the electorate, it was gradually sidelined, both in legislation and in the courts.[84] Kelsey describes the dilemma of government (both Labour and, after 1990, National) as:
how to convince sufficient Maori of their goodwill to relieve the pressure from the state while reassuring an increasingly insecure Pakeha population and economic interests that their economic and political power was secure.[85]
However, just as significant as the debate on the effectiveness or otherwise of the legislative provisions incorporating the Treaty, is the fact that Maori women as an identifiable group with particularly pressing needs have remained virtually invisible to the law. One example is the Health and Disability Services Act 1993, which implements the recent health reforms. Section 8 lists as one of the Crown's objectives in the delivery of health care "[t]he special needs of Maori and other particular communities of people for those services". There is one Maori director on each of the fifteen Crown Health Enterprises; two of them are women. The health status of Maori women is acknowledged as being particularly poor,[86] and yet our needs remain legislatively invisible and we remain largely invisible in the significant bodies operating within the new structure.
Maori women remain largely absent from consultative and advisory bodies set up by the Crown to provide Maori input into decision-making processes. The continued determination to negotiate with Maori men while ignoring Maori women, 154 years after the signing of the Treaty, is the gravamen of a claim recently lodged against the Crown before the Waitangi Tribunal.[87] According to Denese Henare:
Maori women [have seen] that injustice and said to each other, "... There's something wrong with the way the Crown continues to perpetuate this attitude of no value in Maori women".[88]
Such dismissiveness on the part of the Crown does little to affirm Maori women at a time when the pace of economic change has impacted on Maori with extreme harshness.[89] Many Maori women are forced to work both outside and in the home, while others are not so fortunate as to find paid employment at all. Often isolated from the support of whanau, both physically and culturally, Maori women are particularly vulnerable to overwork, ill-health, and domestic violence. And public characterisation of these problems is frequently unhelpful, viewed through the simplistic, distorting lens of racism.
An illustration of such distortion is provided by a comparison of the popular perception of two successful films that have come out of the New Zealand film industry over the last two years. "The Piano" is the story of a mute Scottish woman with a daughter who is sent by her father to Aotearoa/New Zealand to marry an early settler. Against a backdrop of breath-taking scenery, she is subjected to mental cruelty as well as physical and sexual abuse. Her husband sells her piano, her only means of communication and the one thing aside from her daughter that she cares passionately about, to the neighbour for a piece of land. The neighbour acquires the piano in the knowledge that she wants it back desperately and informs her that she can buy it back from him with sexual favours. When he eventually decides that he can no longer require such terms, he returns the piano without full "payment" (proving that abusers are basically decent men), whereupon she begins to spend time with him of her own accord (proving, apparently, that women really do mean "yes" when they say "no"). Her husband, upon discovering this liaison, punishes her by cutting off her finger with an axe.
"Once Were Warriors" is a gritty film about an urbanised Maori nuclear family for whom unemployment, alcohol, crime, poverty, domestic violence and tragedy are features of daily life. The husband is a heavy drinker and physically violent, both in and outside the home. The eldest son joins a gang, another is taken into care after getting into trouble with the law. The eldest daughter is raped and commits suicide. There is absolutely nothing of beauty in this film, no pretty scenery, no stunning cinematography. It is harsh and brutal.
It is extraordinary that the two films have been so widely regarded as having nothing in common, other than their phenomenal success. In fact, while very differently packaged, the two films have a great deal in common. Both perpetrate stereotypical views of Maori. "The Piano" portrays Maori men as child-like but strong, useful for carrying the piano over impossible terrain and assisting with fencing, but otherwise to be merely tolerated. "Once were Warriors" also portrays Maori men as child-like, inherently violent and unable to cope with the pressures of urbanisation through any means other than their fists. Both films are about very strong women struggling to make their way within the context of the nuclear family and common law expectations about the roles of men and women within it. Both films are harrowing tales of abuse.
However, only one is a tale of hope. The woman in 'Once Were Warriors" is able to leave her abuser, reject the nuclear family model and return to the safety of her whanau; the best available option for the woman in "The Piano" is to leave the abuser who physically mutilated her for the one who subjected her to sexual abuse, to move from being the property of one to belonging to the other. Return to Scotland to the father who had clearly married her off as something of a liability is not an option. Even if it were, she would simply revert to being his property, liable at any moment to be traded to yet another man in marriage.
The vast majority of viewers and reviewers seem not to have seen these particular points of similarity and difference between the two films. "The Piano", a film reflecting the coloniser's racism and entrenched tradition of oppression of women, is transformed in the public eye into an erotic love story set in beautiful nineteenth century New Zealand. "Once Were Warriors", a film which reveals the devastating effects of colonisation on some Maori, particularly some Maori women, is primarily perceived as reinforcing the stereotypical views about the violence of Maori men.[90] That the Maori woman in "Once Were Warriors" is struggling inside the oppressive family framework that the settler woman had to deal with over a century and a half before in "The Piano", is a powerful indication of the destructive impact that common law principles of family have always had on Pakeha women and now, as a result of colonisation, on Maori women too.
In view of the fact that women, both Maori and Pakeha, must now deal with the gender inequality perpetuated under Pakeha law, it may be assumed that Maori women's interests would be best served by joining forces with Pakeha feminists. Linda Smith concedes that the feminist struggle is relevant for all women in Aotearoa/New Zealand.[91] However, she goes on to observe that "[o]ur rage as an oppressed group is directed at dominant white structures which sit over us, and so encompasses white women as much as white men".[92] And Leah Whiu expresses the dilemma of forming an alliance with Pakeha feminists with absolute clarity: "What affinity can we share with white women if they refuse to acknowledge and take responsibility for their colonialism?"[93] She points out to these women:
It seems to me that my struggle necessarily takes account of your struggle. I can't ignore patriarchy in my struggle. Yet you can and do ignore the "colour" of patriarchy, the culture-specificity of patriarchy. And in so doing you ignore me.[94]
This is not to suggest that Pakeha feminists have nothing to offer Maori women in our struggle against patriarchy and colonialism. So long as they resist the temptation to define Maori culture and practices in terms of their own culture-specific understandings, and accept their responsibilities as a relatively privileged group (relative to Maori women that is) to promote changes sought by Maori women, their insights into the workings of white patriarchy may well be of use to Maori women. This commonality of interest should not, however, disguise the differences in experience. Maori women's interests are, in the end, our own:
Our struggle as Maori women is our own struggle. To lose control of that struggle is to lose control of our lives. We are not in a position therefore to simply endorse or graft on to the projects of white women. We have to develop according to the reality and logic of our lives.[95]
Perhaps the most debilitating legacy of colonisation for Maori women is the effect it has had on our perceptions of ourselves. Earlier in this article, examples were given of the sorts of leadership roles that women had performed traditionally. It is clear that female leadership roles did not end with colonisation. Maori women were active in Te Kotahitanga and the Women's Christian Temperance Union.[96] And during this century there have been countless Maori women who have come forward to take the lead in difficult times. Henare has pointed out that
if you look at the work over the last twenty years in terms of the contention for the treaty, language and social issues, Maori women have been at the forefront.[97]
And for every woman who has become a national figure, there are countless others who are considered leaders at the iwi or hapu level.[98]
This raises a vital question: with this wealth of historical evidence showing clearly the leadership roles that Maori women have performed over time, why has it become so common for people to assume that leadership in Maori society is traditionally a male preserve and that female roles are considered to be of less value than male roles? No matter how numerous they have been, how diverse their skills and fields of leadership, and how wide-ranging their iwi affiliations, for some reason the achievements of these women have been marginalised as being "exceptions to the rule", the rule being that only men could be leaders. The facts give the lie to any such rule of male leadership, relegating it to the category of yet another stereotype. As with any stereotype, it is unfounded. And its potential to become a self-perpetuating truth makes it extremely harmful.
It is contended that these changes in perception of the role of women have come about as a direct result of colonisation. With the deliberate destruction of traditional Maori philosophies and values and the attempted replacement of them with those of the missionaries and the settlers, Maori have been "caught in the contradictions of a colonised reality".[99] We are not alone in this. Aroha Mead recently made the following observation:
[t]he sexism which has occurred in Maori society originates more from colonisation than heritage, and it is a problem as common in international indigenous societies as is alienation of lands and resources. Maori leadership has got to work this through and de-programme all that does not rightfully belong within our Iwi histories. Maori women, as we all know, are the backbone of Maori society and that isn't only because of our ability to bear children. It is unfair, soul destroying and a tragic waste of much needed skill, energy and commitment, to continue to deny Maori women their rightful place in Iwi/Maori decision-making.[100]
The challenge for Maori, women and men, is to rediscover and reassert tikanga Maori within our own whanau, and to understand that an existence where men have power and authority over women and children is not in accordance with tikanga Maori. Such an existence stems instead from an ancient common law tradition which has been imposed upon us, a tradition with which we have no affinity and which we have every reason to reject.
Glossary of Maori Terms:
haka chant, the performance of which achieves collective preparedness and unity of purpose
hapu extended kin group, consisting of many whanau
iwi people; descent group, consisting of many hapu
kainga community
kuia elderly female relative; elderly woman; ancestress
mana prestige; standing
mana wahine women's status
mokopuna grandchild; descendant
tikanga Maori Maori law; Maori custom; Maori philosophies
waiata song
waiata tawhito chants recording iwi histories and knowledge
whakama ashamed
whakapapa genealogy
whakatauki proverb
whanau kin group
whare tupuna ancestral house; focal point for hapu meetings and events
* This phrase has been taken from an article by Linda Smith, infra note 99. In the writer's view, it encapsulates the position of Maori women in a colonised Aotearoa/New Zealand. Note, readers are referred to the glossary of Maori terms at the end of this article.
** Ngati Raukawa ki te Tonga, LLB (Hons) (Victoria), Lecturer in Law, University of Waikato.
1 Kahukiwa, R & Grace, P Wahine Toa: Women of Maori Myth (1984). Important work is also being continued on the female figures in Maori cosmology by Aroha Yates-Smith of Waikato University.
2 "To us the dreamers are important" in Cox S (ed) Public and Private Worlds (1987) 59.
3 Ako: Concepts and Learning in the Maori Tradition (1982) 17-18.
4 Supra note 2, at 56-57.
5 Ibid, 57.
6 Milroy, S "Domestic Violence: Legal Representation of Maori Women" (unpublished paper, 1994) 12.
7 Jenkins, K "Reflections on the status of Maori women" (unpublished paper, 1986) 12.
8 "Leadership: Inherited and Achieved" in King, M (ed) Te Ao Hurihuri (1975) 86.
9 Ngata, A & Jones, P Nga Moteatea Part I (1928); Part II (1961); Part III (1970).
10 The hapu with which the writer is primarily affiliated, for example, bears the name of a woman, Pareraukawa.
11 Supra note 7, at 8-9.
12 Orange, C (ed) The People of Many Peaks: the Maori Biographies from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography ,Vol 1, 1769-1869 (1990).
13 Ibid, 13-14 (Hinematioro), 328-329 (Rangi Topeora), and 353-354 (Waitohi).
14 Rei, T Maori Women and the Vote (1993) 14.
15 Quoted in Scutt, J Even in the Best of Homes (1983) 9.
16 Ibid, 11.
17 Ibid, 12.
18 For an example of this view, see Blackstone, W Commentaries on the Laws of England (1809), Book 1, ch 5.
19 Naffine, N Law and the Sexes: Explorations in Feminist Jurisprudence (1990) 104.
20 Minow, M Making All the Difference (1990) 127-128.
21 Supra note 15, at 15-18.
22 As a result of the Crimes Amendment Act (No 3) 1985, it is now possible for a husband to be charged with the rape of his legal spouse (see s 128(4) of the Crimes Act 1961).
23 Walsh v Walsh (1984) 3 NZFLR 23 and Haslam v Haslam (1985) 3 NZFLR 545 are two Court of Appeal decisions which highlight the judicial undervaluing of a wife's contribution to the marriage partnership.
24 See Busch, R, Robertson, N and Lapsley, H Protection From Family Violence: A Study of Protection Orders Under the Domestic Protection Act (1992) and Busch, R and Robertson, N "I Didn't Know Just How Far You Could Fight: Contextualising the Bristol Inquiry" (1994) 2 Waikato Law Review 41.
25 Jenkins, K "Working paper on Maori women and social policy" written for the Royal Commission of Social Policy and quoted in the Report of the Royal Commission on Social Policy (1988) Vol III, 161.
26 "Maori Women: Discourse, Projects and Mana Wahine" in Middleton, S & Jones, A (eds) Women and Education in Aotearoa 2 (1992) 34. Berys Heuer provides a classic example of the damaging effects of these male-centred reinterpretations of Maori creation stories in Maori Women (1972) 55: "Culturally, the role of women was made clear in the account of their creation. The first woman was formed out of a mound of earth and impregnated by her male creator with a life spirit. From this, woman was regarded as being a passive receptacle for the dominant life spirit".
27 Ibid, 48-49.
28 Ibid, 49.
29 Orange, C The Treaty of Waitangi (1987) 90.
30 Idem, where it is noted that Major Bunbury refused to allow a Ngati Toa wahine rangatira to sign at Cloudy Bay. Her husband also refused to sign.
31 Rei, supra note 14, at 8-9.
32 First the land was taken through confiscations carried out pursuant to the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863 and later via the operations of the Native Land Court, established by the Native Land Act 1865. Later, seas and waterways were taken through legislation beginning with the Oyster Fisheries Act 1867.
33 Pool, I Te Iwi Maori: A New Zealand Population Past, Present and Projected (1991) chapter 5.
34 These twin aims were spoken of by the Hon H Sewell, NZPD Vol 9, 1870: 361.
35 For an account of how the principle of collectivism was undermined by the law, see the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Native Land Laws (1891) AJHR, G-1, xi.
36 Simpson, T Te Riri Pakeha: White Man's Anger (1986) 168-173.
37 Supra note 33, at 101.
38 Ibid, 153-154. Pool refers to the migration of Maori workers, from rural areas to smaller centres such as Pukekohe, as having taken place throughout the first half of the twentieth century. However, the most significant urban migration took place in the decades immediately following the Second World War, being described as "perhaps the most rapid urbanward movement of a national population anywhere, at least until the end of the sixties" (ibid, 154).
39 The adoption provisions and parliamentary debates concerning them, discussed below, are further evidence of this desire to remould the whanau.
40 Supra note 7, at 12.
41 Barrington, JM Maori Schools in a Changing Society (1974) 164.
42 Strong, TB "The Problem of Educating the Maori" in Jackson, PM Maori and Education: Or the Education of Natives in New Zealand and its Dependencies (1931) 192. For a general discussion of how the schools were discouraged from focusing too much on academic subjects, see Barrington, ibid, chapter 7 and Simon, J "The Place of Schooling in Maori-Pakeha Relations" (Ph D Thesis, University of Auckland, 1990) chapter 4.
43 Supra note 40, at 176-177.
44 Supra note 42, at 100.
45 Coney, S "Maori women shun domestic service" in Coney, S Standing in the Sunshine (1993) 225.
46 Stirling, A and Salmond, A Amiria (1976) 32-3.
47 Edwards, M Mihipeka: Early Years (1990) 131.
48 Supra note 45.
49 Rockel, J and Ryburn, M Adoption Today: Change and Choice in New Zealand (1988) 7.
50 See especially Sweeney, M "Between Sorrow and Happy Endings: A New Paradigm of Adoption" (1990) (2) Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 329; Shawyer, J Death by Adoption (1979); and Else, A A Question of Adoption (1991).
51 While it is common for the Maori concept of whangai to be paralleled with adoption, it is argued that the two concepts are so fundamentally different that they cannot and should not be spoken of as being similar in any way.
52 Ministerial Advisory Committee on a Maori Perspective for the Department of Social Welfare, Puao-te-ata-tu (1988), Appendix 22-23.
53 Ibid, 23.
54 Supra note 2, at 57.
55 For an illustration of such an arrangement, see Stirling, E and Salmond, A Eruera: The Teachings of a Maori Elder (1980) 88-93; see also Pere, supra note 3, at 46.
56 Native Land Claims Adjustment and Laws Amendment Act 1901, s 50.
57 S 161.
58 The ban was imposed by s 164 of the Act, a section that was not reenacted in the 1955 Act.
59 All of the phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken from Dr Findlay's address on the Bill, NZPD Vol 148, 1909: 1275.
60 Supra note 52, at 23.
61 Else, supra note 50, at 179.
62 Maori Affairs Act 1953, s 2.
63 Else, supra note 50, at 181.
64 One who took this view was the Attorney-General, Mr Hanan, who insisted that "... in this country we are two races but we are one people ... Despite the differences of our cultural heritage, for the future the rights of the children and the obligations of the parents should be identical" (Else, ibid, 183).
65 Eg Mr H Mason (Else, idem).
66 Ibid, 182.
67 Ibid, 183.
68 For some powerful examples of the pressure put on birth mothers generally to give up their babies for adoption, see Shawyer, supra note 50.
69 Else, supra note 50, at 188-189.
70 Ibid, 80, 190.
71 Ibid, 197. Damning criticism has also come from Shawyer, supra note 50, and from Sweeney, supra note 50.
72 Supra note 52, at 23.
73 Supra note 50, at 201. Else also has this to say: "Because adoption is seen as an almost free substitute for state assistance of all kinds, it tends to be promoted when New Right philosophies of maximum self-reliance and minimal aid to families prevail" (at 202).
74 Supra note 52, at 22.
75 Adoption Act 1955, s 7.
76 Durie-Hall, D and Metge, J "Kua Tutu te Puehu, Kia Mau" in Henaghan, M & Atkin, B (eds) Family Law Policy in New Zealand (1992) 54, 71.
77 Re Adoption 17/88 5 FRNZ 360, 371.
78 Supra note 52, at 24.
79 Eg Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, where the Treaty is referred to throughout the Act; State Owned Enterprises Act 1986, s 9; Long title to the Environment Act 1986; Conservation Act 1987, s 4; Maori Language Act 1987, Preamble; Resource Management Act 1991, s 8; Te Ture Whenua Maori (Maori Land) Act 1993, Preamble.
80 Kelsey, J Rolling Back the State: Privatisation of Power in Aotearoa/New Zealand (1993) 233.
81 For further discussion of the particular groups and events of the times, see Walker, R Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (1990) 209-236.
82 Supra note 80, at 235.
83 Idem.
84 For a careful analysis of the way in which the Labour government dealt with the incorporation of Treaty principles in a range of policy areas, and of the way the courts handled such provisions, see Kelsey, J A Question of Honour: Labour and the Treaty 1984-1989 (1990); and Kelsey, supra note 80, chapter 21.
85 Supra note 80, at 243.
86 Health statistics in respect of Maori women have been gathered, published and commented on in Pomare, E and de Boer, G Hauora - Maori Standards of Health: A Study of the Years 1970-84 (1988); Ministry of Maori Development, Ka Awatea (1991) 36-41; Maori Women's Welfare League, Rapuora: Health and Maori Women (1984); Spoonley, P Racism and Ethnicity (1988) 26-27; Broughton, J and Lawrence, M Nga Wahine Maori me te Kai Paipa (1993). Some of the negative indicators referred to by Broughton and Lawrence include the lung cancer death rate (3.6 times higher for Maori women than for non-Maori women), the likelihood of death from coronary heart disease (3.5 times higher for Maori women in the 25-44 year age group than for non-Maori women in that age group) and the likelihood of death from respiratory disease (4.6 times higher for Maori women in the 25-44 year age group than for non-Maori women) (ibid, 11).
87 Lodged in July 1993, the Particulars of Urgent Claim allege that "[t]he Crown's actions and policies have been inconsistent with its obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi to protect and ensure the rangatiratanga of Maori women as individuals and members and leaders of tribes and families. These actions and policies have resulted in an undermining of Maori women so that their status as rangatira has been expropriated due to the Crown's failure to accord Maori women status and power within the political, social and economic structures it has created" (para (h)).
88 Henare, D "Carrying the Burden of Arguing the Treaty" in Ihimaera, W (ed) Vision Aotearoa: Kaupapa New Zealand (1994) 126.
89 Kelsey, supra note 80, at 339-343.
90 Irihapeti Ramsden has this to say about such stereotypes: "What does the warrior imagery achieve for us? It does validate the colonial takeover and sustains it. It also reinforces the symbolism of Maori as an aggressive people, randomly violent and savage and fulfils the expectation of those behaviours in television programmes such as Crimewatch. It has the converse effect of making non-Maori appear rational, dispassionate and civilised" ("Maori Policy, Maori and Government Objectives", address to the Hui Whakapumau: Maori Development Conference (August 1994) 9). She also observes that: "An analysis of the normal annual activities of any precontact Maori communities would probably reveal that people were more heavily involved in gardening, food preservation, the production of complex technical and art forms, and making and rearing babies, than in conflict ... It would not have fitted the Victorian world view to report that they had invaded a country of artists, agriculturalists, astronomers, lovers and parents who had fought to retain their precious things" (at 10-11).
91 Supra note 26, at 47.
92 Ibid, 48.
93 Whiu, L "A Maori Woman's Experience of Feminist Legal Education in Aotearoa" (1994) 2 Waikato Law Review 161, 164.
94 Ibid, 168.
95 Smith, supra note 26, at 48.
96 Rei, supra note 14. Te Kotahitanga was the Maori Parliament established in 1892.
97 Henare, supra note 88, at 126. Examples include such women as Te Puea Herangi, Whina Cooper, Tuaiwa Rickard, Nganeko Minhinnick and Mira Szaszy.
98 In 1993, Nga Kaiwhakamarama I Nga Ture conducted a poll amongst Maori to find out who they considered to be Maori leaders. The responses indicated that, for most Maori, leadership is located firmly at the hapu and whanau level (62% of those named were leaders at hapu/marae level or hapu spokespersons at iwi level), with only three commonly recognised national Maori leaders gaining a significant degree of recognition (over 10%) outside their iwi borders. They were Professor Mason Durie, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu, and Dame Mira Szaszy.
99 Smith, supra note 26, at 48.
100 "Maori Leadership", address to the Hui Whakapumau: Maori Development Conference (August 1994) 3-4."
by Ani Mikaire
http://www2.waikato.ac.nz/law/wlr/1994/article6-mikaere.html
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