In the middle of Maori and Pakeha worlds

New Zealanders often feel obliged to identify themselves solely as Maori or Pakeha. SIMON COLLINS talks to people who are challenging this assumption.

When Paul Meredith was 7, he asked his mother what he was.

He accepted her answer: "She told me we were half-caste." He got on well with his Maori and his Pakeha grandparents and cousins in Kihikihi, where he grew up. "Half-caste" or not, he felt secure.

Now a researcher at Waikato University, Meredith is stirring up the politically correct by reasserting his right to define himself as "half-caste."

Not a born-again "Maori" supporting tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty). Not blending into the woodwork as a "Pakeha" either.

"I'm half-caste. Say it loud. Say it proud," he told a hui of about 50 people of mixed Maori/Pakeha descent at Wellington's Tapu Te Ranga Marae this month.

Explains Tess Moeke Maxwell, a Tauranga healer who chaired the hui: "What we were trying to do was to reclaim a word that has been used to label us. It's like gay people calling themselves 'faggots' and 'queers."'

Or, as Meredith puts it in an academic paper: "I am simply a half-caste, I am both Maori and Pakeha ... I have adopted this label quite consciously as part of a project of defiance and resistance to those who would seek to reduce me to one or the other."

But Wellington lawyer Moana Jackson, who also spoke at the hui, says the very notion of being half-caste "was invented to provide a base on which we could be dispossessed of our land."

"The question is: Do we have a Maori way of defining who we are, or do we buy into the Pakeha colonial way of defining who we are?" he says.

The issue affects thousands of New Zealanders.

In the 1996 census, 579,714 people - 16 per cent of the population - listed some Maori ancestry. Of those, 523,374 said they were ethnically Maori, of whom 171,000 - 4.7 per cent of the total population - said they were also ethnically Pakeha.

The notion of being in two ethnic groups confuses people. Meredith says that when he was tutoring in law at Waikato, a student told him, laughing, that the student sitting next to her thought he was a Pakeha.

"I am a Pakeha," he replied.

"But I thought you were a Maori," she said.

"I am a Maori," he said.

"I could actually see that they were a bit dumbfounded."

Heeni Collins, a Wellington journalist who is writing a book on people of mixed Maori/Pakeha descent, Nga Tangata Awarua, says the children of mixed marriages have often been forced by circumstances to identify with either one race or the other.

Early explorers, whalers, sealers and traders who took Maori wives often settled in Maori communities. Their children grew up identifying as Maori.

More recently, since the bulk of the Maori population moved to the cities, many children of mixed marriages have grown up in largely Pakeha suburbs with little contact with their Maori relatives.

Those who try to keep a foot in both groups often find it a struggle. Paekakariki writer Jacquie Baxter told Collins: "If you find yourself continually or frequently in a situation where you're trying to please or placate two parties, two almost conflicting groups, in the end you get sick and tired of it."

Meredith wasn't sure which side to join when his schoolmates lined up under the trees at Kihikihi to re-enact "the great Pakeha-Maori wars."

"The only reason I went on the Maori side was because I had no Pakeha cousins at that school, so my Maori cousins said, 'You're with us, bro."'

Tess Moeke Maxwell cites a fair-skinned 8-year-old of mixed descent who was beaten by four boys who saw him playing on their marae and called, "Get out of our playground, Pakeha!"

The boy's mother, also fair-skinned, was assaulted by a male member of her own iwi when she visited his home during her work for the iwi as a kai awhina (social worker). "He became enraged at this 'Pakeha' interfering with his family."

Collins quotes a bisexual woman of mixed descent who told her she felt "too white for the Maoris, too Maori for the whites, too gay for the straights, too straight for the queers."

So is it possible to be both Maori and Pakeha? Meredith certainly thinks so. In fact, he's part of Waikato University's Te Matahauariki Institute, headed by Judge Mick Brown, which aims to find common ground between Maori and Pakeha on which New Zealand laws and institutions can be based.

In an article submitted to the Herald's debate on New Zealand common core values, he writes: "Neither Maori nor Pakeha are going away, we are all here to stay. The half-caste embodies this. We are therefore confronted with the reality that we must get on with forging a future together, allowing for difference but also not being afraid to seek out what we have and might like to have in common."

The half-caste, he suggests, could "mediate and translate" in this search.

"I find myself doing this with some of my Pakeha relations with what's happening in Tainui," he told the hui.

"I'm both Maori and Pakeha. I'm not 'part-Maori' and 'part-Pakeha."'

Moana Jackson uses similar language when he says that everyone descended from a Maori ancestor is a mokopuna (descendant) of the ancestor's iwi (tribe).

"You can't be half a mokopuna, you can't be 1/58th of a mokopuna," he says.

"The defining thing that makes you able to stand in this place is that you are a whole and complete mokopuna."

Moana Jackson acknowledges that he is also a "whole" descendant of his Pakeha ancestors, such as "a rugby player called Fred Jackson [who] came to this country."

Irihapeti Ramsden, who developed the "cultural safety" programme for trainee nurses, told the hui about her brother in Sydney, who has no Maori "blood" at all because their father was Pakeha and they have different mothers.

Despite that, she insisted: "He's my brother, he's my whole brother."

There was a surprising unanimity at the hui that everyone of Maori descent has the right to choose their own lifestyle, without having to conform to any outside definition of Maori tikanga (customs).

Meredith talked about a friend who was horrified that he didn't like kina (shellfish), and said: "Don't you like kina? Eh, you're not a Maori!"

"I said, 'Do you like kanga pirau [rotten sweetcorn], bro?' When he said, 'No,' I said, 'You're not a Maori!"'

Ramsden said it was now regarded as a traditional tikanga that every Maori meeting should start with a prayer. Yet prayers were clearly introduced by European missionaries.

Pakeha teachers now controlled Maori students' understanding of their own culture. A young relative, for example, had recently come home from school saying women did not take part in taiaha (war club) exercises, despite clear photographic evidence that they did.

"We have been managed, we have been manipulated," she said.

She insists on her right to adopt elements from any culture in the world - including Christian Dior jewellery - without losing the whakapapa (genealogy) that makes her a Maori. "We have a right to anything that is good and beautiful."

Meredith would agree.

Where they disagree is on politics. On such a highly charged issue as how people of mixed descent should define themselves, it's not surprising that politics intrudes.

Meredith believes it is time for Maori to abandon the "victim mentality" that goes with dwelling on past injustice.

"You can moan about it for the rest of your life, or just get over it and accept it as a fact of life," he says. "This whole tino rangatiratanga thing I don't really buy into. It's not like in North America where we have these people [Native Americans] sandwiched into separate jurisdictions.

"I have asked people: 'Who is your next-door neighbour? Who is your workmate?' You can't disentangle us."

In such an integrated society, Meredith says in a draft paper on his institute's website, our identity can be defined only in relation to others.

"We are Maori in relation to those who are Pakeha, who are Asian and so forth."

"Biculturalism is fundamentally problematic and therefore inappropriate for our framework for revisioning New Zealandness," he writes.

"Our framework must recognise and accommodate the plurality of differences and visions that are evident. That includes not just Maori and Pakeha but all ethnic [groups] within NZ."

Meredith suggests that this framework should recognise "special rights and duties" for Maori people as the "first citizens" of the country.

But he says: "A relational approach will demand negotiation, collaboration, compromise and much sacrifice." It is about "the participation and contribution of all groups as first-class citizens."

Moana Jackson says Meredith's whole approach is taken from "post-modernist theorists from overseas."

In contrast, Jackson takes his Ngati Kahungunu iwi identity from his whakapapa, regardless of whom he interacts with.

"I don't walk down the street and suddenly say, 'Now I'll switch to being Pakeha,' or 'Now I'll switch to being Maori,"' he says.

He argues for deciding issues such as "Who is a Maori?" within a Maori intellectual tradition, which he began to sketch in a Ngati Kahungunu presentation to the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification at Hastings' Omahu Marae on February 10.

"These issues are binary issues," he says. "People from somewhere else have come to this land to dispossess the people living here, and until we resolve that binary conflict we are not going to be in a position to actually strongly and independently define who we are."

Resolving that conflict, he says, requires "Maori sovereignty - sovereignty as established by our people prior to 1840."

He says this could mean the kind of model proposed by Professor Whatarangi Winiata of Te Wananga O Raukawa, with a Maori House of Parliament alongside the present House and an upper house to resolve differences between them.

Jackson's view implies that all those with a Maori whakapapa could vote as "Maori" under such a system. He says the present requirement for Maori to choose between the Maori and general electoral rolls is "a Pakeha-defined choice."

"They define us as Maori when we enter the criminal statistics, but they give us a choice when we enter into the political system because they know that if they did not give us a choice and we were all put on the Maori rolls, we would hold the balance of power in their political system."

In these political terms, the gulf between pluralists such as Meredith and tino rangatiratanga advocates like Jackson seems so wide that even would-be "half-caste" mediators may find it hard to bridge.

Yet, as Collins says, political change may be easier if we can first get used to the idea of people actively maintaining two or more ethnic identities.

"We argue for acceptance of diversity," she says. "Personally, I identify myself as Maori first, with a commitment to biculturalism second, because we do care about retaining the strength of our cultural identity as Maori.

"I believe we can do that and still promote understanding in the nation as a whole."

* Simon Collins, a Herald journalist, is Heeni Collins' brother.

Te Matahauariki Institute

Te Wananga O Raukawa

Ngati Kahungunu presentation to GM Commission