Race: The way ahead: A house with many rooms

Separatism or celebration of diversity? SIMON COLLINS looks at models to preserve indigenous cultures

Ilasa Galuvao feels at home at Te Wananga o Aotearoa in a way that she never felt at Auckland University.

Galuvao, 22, is from a Samoan family but has lived all her life in New Zealand. When she finished school, she went to university to study film, TV and media.

But she wanted something more performance-based, so last year she became one of the first students in Te Wananga o Aotearoa's stunning new, $6.5 million campus at the Mangere Town Centre, studded with carvings and art work by staff and students.

The course, with tutors such as television lotto presenter Russell Harrison, was the kind of practical one she wanted. And, "they made me feel at home".

"As soon as I came here, people just welcomed me," she says. "You immediately get a strong sense of whanau here, and a strong sense of belonging. They don't just leave you to stand on your own feet.

"You get to go to a place every day where you see familiar faces, faces that look like you - as opposed to going to a place where it can be a bit intimidating when you are the only brown face around."

Te Wananga o Aotearoa is a social phenomenon. Founded as a small second-chance education outpost in Te Awamutu, it has ballooned in the past five years into a national institute with 63,000 students last year - more than any other in the country.

Admittedly, many of those students were in part-time or short courses, so there were only 34,000 fulltime-equivalent students over the year.

Moreover, 12,260 of those were in home-based "mahi ora" (work skills) courses. Mahi ora tutors visit the students and send out audio and videotapes teaching literacy, computer skills, self-confidence and self-esteem. Students get free cellphones to keep in touch with their tutors.

But the wananga's philosophy of taking education to the people in towns as small as Huntly, Tokoroa and Te Kuiti has opened knowledge up to people who would never have dreamt of going to a mainstream university.

Tania Black, 30, a fine arts student from Clendon in South Auckland, says she struggled at school, but feels "at ease" at the wananga.

"There is no pressure on you," she says. "You don't have to worry about what you look like. There is a lot of awhi, support, from everyone."

Nadya Rapata, 33, is studying traditional raranga (weaving) and says the wananga "showed me how to really express myself through my art".

Almost single-handedly, the wananga has lifted Maori participation in tertiary education from below average to an extraordinary 23 per cent of the Maori population aged 15 and over, nearly double the Pakeha rate of 13 per cent.

In 2002, 41 per cent of those Maori tertiary students and 12 per cent of Pacific students were at Te Wananga o Aotearoa or one of the two other much smaller wananga.

The Manukau campus has trebled its enrolments this year to nearly 6500 students or 4000-4500 fulltime equivalents.

Campus director Bruce Birnie, the only Pakeha among the wananga's 10 campus directors, says Manukau is the only one where Maori students are in a minority - comprising about 30 per cent. Sixty per cent are Pacific people and the rest Asian and Pakeha.

But even there, all classes open and close their days with karakia (prayers), and most classes include te reo (Maori language) and kapa haka.

"We are addressing a huge need that has been there for some time," he says. "And it's still only the tip of the iceberg - there is heaps more to do in the Pacific area."

Flawed though it sometimes is, as in the police training course last year that did not deliver what it promised, the wananga is significantly extending the diversity - or what some would call the "separatism" - of New Zealand education.

In his Orewa speech on January 27, National leader Don Brash promised to keep funding the wananga and other Maori education and health providers "because National believes that all New Zealanders have a right to choice in education and health".

Yet in the same speech, he condemned "the dangerous drift towards racial separatism" and declared: "There is no homogeneous, distinct Maori population - we have been a melting pot since the 19th century."

But the wananga phenomenon suggests that, far from melting imperceptibly into the majority culture, many Maori and Pacific New Zealanders are seeking a distinct kind of service that, in the words of another raranga student, Dana Rapata, teaches "what it is to be Maori".

In Herald-DigiPolls for this series, 78 and 79 per cent of Maori approved of separate Maori education and health services respectively, while 55 and 62 per cent of Pakeha disapproved of them. The weight of Pakeha views is forcing society to ask whether we should keep going down this road without at least considering the consequences, and perhaps setting limits.

There are natural limits anyway. Despite the wananga's popularity, 59 per cent of Maori tertiary students still choose to study in mainstream institutions.

There will always be many for whom, as Brash observed, "aspects other than their ethnicity matter much more to them - their religion, their profession, their sports club, their gender, their political allegiance".

But in every country, people still choose to assert ethnic identities even where populations have interacted and interbred for thousands of years.

More than 1000 years after the Celts were subdued by the Angles and Saxons, some Britons still celebrate their Celtic origins. More than 2000 years after the Burmese people moved into the country now called Burma, the Karen, Mon and other ethnic groups that are mixed in with them geographically still retain distinct languages, cultures and identities.

The Jews have kept their separate identity even though they were largely cast out of their original homeland and scattered around the globe.

In many countries, the state deliberately protects this diversity. Retired Victoria University political scientist Raj Vasil believes we could learn from Singapore, which funds schools and media in four official languages: Chinese, Malay, Tamil and English.

Despite their numbers, the Chinese majority adopted Malay symbols for various state icons, chose a Malay head of state and created a president's advisory council to ensure that new laws did not harm the minority cultures.

Although they were purely symbolic, these gestures "gave the Malays a good feeling".

Officially Singapore has no "affirmative action". But in practice it ensures that its civil servants, cabinet ministers and judges reflect the country's ethnic makeup, simply to ensure Malays and Tamils accept the state's legitimacy.

Waikato University anthropologist Mike Goldsmith says that in Third World countries, where there can be a different language in the neighbouring valley, people often identify with several groups.

"People are routinely able to speak the language of their father's group and the language of their mother's group and the languages of a good many others who marry into the group," he says.

At the other end of the industrial scale in Belgium, the Dutch-speaking Flemish and French-speaking Walloons each have their own parliaments, governing both separate regions and, in cultural matters, all people of their communities wherever they live in the country.

The two groups are represented separately in the federal Parliament, where a small minority of German speakers has also recently been guaranteed two seats.

In recent settler societies where an earlier indigenous group has been swamped by newcomers, some experts argue that the state should go even further to protect the original culture, even if it requires a subsidy from the incoming majority.

"States have an obligation not simply to let indigenous people live and participate in broader society, but to ensure that indigenous people's world can be retained. That is the nature of indigeneity," says Professor Mason Durie, of Massey University.

Durie believes this principle justifies laws requiring consultation with Maori groups - as groups, not simply as individuals like any others.

It justifies taxpayer spending on Maori schools, television and other cultural expression because it is indigenous, not simply on the same basis as general educational and cultural spending.

And it justifies some kind of Maori congress and Maori seats in Parliament to give a political expression to the collective Maori identity.

The problem is, of course, that in a democracy none of this is possible without the consent of the majority.

Political commentator Chris Trotter believes that the biggest factor in the enormous Pakeha response to Brash's speech is uneasiness that politicians may be ceding power to Maori without that consent.

He advocates a new treaty - a written constitution which includes an acknowledgement of the status of tangata whenua in relation to the Pakeha and other immigrant groups.

"But I think it's also important from the Maori side that there be acknowledgment that the Pakeha are the people who have come after them to New Zealand, are here now and have nowhere else to go and are indisputably and irrevocably citizens of this country."

Once that is clear, he believes the Pakeha majority may well be as generous in protecting Maori culture and political expression as it has recently been in protecting women, gays and others who once faced discrimination.

Across the cultural divide, Dr Pita Sharples echoes that sentiment. The founder and director of Henderson's Hoani Waititi Marae, founder of the first kura kaupapa Maori (Maori-language school) and now planning a new wananga on his marae, no one has stronger credentials to speak for Maori culture.

"My vision is a New Zealand that has an act [of Parliament] to affirm racial equality. It would be an act to affirm New Zealand nationhood," he says.

"Section 1 could be to affirm Maori and their settlement history; section 2 moving into Maori and Pakeha and the treaty and how we built this nation; and the more recent section could acknowledge the issue of immigration, particularly from the Pacific and from Asia, and a bit of stuff about our beliefs.

"It could be like Magna Carta. It would remove the need for the treaty. It would remove the need to enshrine stuff into acts of Parliament, because this act would say it all."

A law, of course, could not by itself settle the whole issue of "separatism". Inevitably, arguments will continue over the actual extent to which the majority culture should support minorities, and particularly the indigenous minority.

But in a climate of uncertainty, even institutions such as the wananga, which would probably win widespread Pakeha support, feel insecure.

Brash has put cultural "separatism" on the political agenda. He may have given us an opportunity to reduce that insecurity, one way or another.