Tapu Misa: Maori remain unknown in their own country

COMMENT

Fatigued yet by the race debate? I sure am.

Maybe it's the sense that we've been here before, that the battles we're waging now were thought to have been won some 20 years ago. Battles over such issues as: who is a Maori, what to call Pakeha, whether the Treaty of Waitangi is still relevant today, the need for Maori seats in Parliament, the need for affirmative action in education.

As a few friends have bitterly remarked, it's as if the past 20 years had never happened.

Still, we shouldn't be surprised.

When most of us assert that we support the redress of past wrongs but think things have gone too far, that Maori are unfairly privileged but struggle to detail how - you know there's been a gap between our good intentions and our knowledge.

We're reaping, as one treaty educator has said, our abysmal failure to educate successive generations of New Zealanders (including many Maori) in the colonial history of this country - something that Trevor Mallard would do well to investigate if he's serious about setting our race relations on the right path.

What's compounded this blissful state of ignorance - shared in large measure by the people who lead the country - is the very limited meaningful engagement between many of us. Never mind the oft-repeated protestations from those who claim that "some of my best friends are Maori, but ... " Or that close second, "I'm part-Maori myself, but ... "

The fact is that most of us don't have a clue. We seldom venture from our cultural comfort zones, certainly not if we can help it. Helen Clark's parents may have been in their 70s when they first set foot on a marae, but they're still ahead of the majority. And when Doug Graham, the former National MP who ushered in the first treaty settlements, talks about the discomfort of business associates who'd attended a powhiri as though it was their host's fault for foisting their culture upon them, it's not hard to see why we're struggling to find common ground.

And yet it's clear there are many Pakeha who've made the trip across that cultural divide - and who haven't suffered irreparable damage to their psyche as a result.

As far as I can tell those Pakeha seem neither disadvantaged nor threatened, nor particularly in need of assuaging - which I'm sure has nothing to do with their being subverted by brown folk, and everything to do with their own solid sense of identity and belonging.

They're the Pakeha who I gather aren't insecure or "glistening and frothing at the mouth with racial invective", as one Bay of Plenty reader puts it; who are as dismayed by the tenor of the current debate as many Maori; and as sobered by the realisation that they're in the minority camp.

It's easy to forget, given the outpourings in the letters page and the splutterings on talkback radio, that many of those who took the trouble to register their strong opposition to the Government's foreshore and seabed proposals last year were Pakeha, as worried about the trampling of Maori rights as most tangata whenua.

Pakeha like Pat Snedden, an Auckland District Health Board member who recently gave an impassioned speech in which he appealed to the "integrity, honour and respect" that had seen Pakeha New Zealand make the "breathtaking decision" as the dominant group to start redressing past wrongs through the Waitangi Tribunal.

"Their example points us to the wider picture, to pursue the greater good in our dealings with each other," he said. "Today this largely silent consensus is under threat ... We are suddenly nervous about what we might lose, forgetting for the moment the enormous lift to our Pakeha mana secured by our actions as a just and open people."

Snedden argues that what stops Pakeha from recognising that Maori might have a different worldview, and taking the trouble to learn the skills of negotiating these dual views with each other, is a massive Pakeha disadvantage born of having had little exposure to things Maori.

That's meant that while most Maori in New Zealand are totally conversant with the Pakeha view, the average Pakeha "can live a full life in New Zealand and have never encountered Maori in their own milieu, be it at hui, tangi or the marae. Therefore, when it comes to negotiating treaty-related matters such as resource consents where different views of an issue are legitimised by statute, they are often at sea and forced to seek and pay for Maori advice to make meaningful discussion possible".

And yet for those Pakeha who've made the leap - often derided as politically correct bleeding hearts - the rewards are great. I know Pakeha who've learned Maori, who've steeped themselves in tikanga to the point where they know as much if not more than many Maori. For many, it seems that their engagement with Maori is what defines them more clearly as Pakeha.

I've seen this at work in an organisation where tikanga is acknowledged and accorded its place, even though the boss and half the staff are Pakeha. When the occasion demands a karakia, even the heathens bend their heads. They're not ceding their right to religious freedom, merely showing respect.

Last week, in the afterglow of the Oscars, I was reminded of an interview I did a while back with Niki Caro, the director of Whale Rider. The film's producers had gone out of their way not to portray it as a Maori film, but Caro, who also wrote the screenplay, had no such problem. The story was Maori, she said, based on Witi Ihimaera's novel of the same name, and the cast were all Maori.

Caro knew that there'd been some resistance to the idea of a Pakeha director telling the story, and admitted that she was terrified at the prospect of failing to do justice to the tikanga Maori that the film was representing. But she silenced her critics. She learned te reo in preparation for making Whale Rider and sought help from Maori - including the Ngati Kanohi people of Whangara.

Caro approached the job with the respect and sensitivity of an outsider - but found herself much more in tune than she'd imagined.

When I asked her who'd been responsible for the film's very Maori humour, she told me that she'd penned that, too.

"The simple fact is, it's just what I thought was funny when I was writing. And then when it got to rehearsal and it cracked the cast up, I knew it wasn't just me."