RACE RELATIONS IN NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 823, 6 May 1955, Page 5

RACE RELATIONS IN NEW ZEALAND

Sir-I regret that Mr. Ritchie’s reasonably toned comments have been answered by Dr, Winiata and friends with ad hominem argument.. If Dr. Winiata, for instance, is true in his cheap sneer at "... Mr. Ritchie, whose work, if any, in the Maori field is not known to me .. ." he confesses his own lamentable failure to keep abreast of current work. For the other abuse, let Mr. Ritchie’s Maori friends testify to his real humility and knowledge. Mr. Ritchie, after all, isn’t advocating integration; he’s facing facts. Even if the symbiosis of Dt. Winiata and his mentor wefe theoretically desirable, is it practicable, or without dangers? They know that cultures afe inextricably shaped by the mode of their socio-~econ-omic functioning. Consider South Africa. When common economic patterns (e.g., urban’ industrial life) tend to unify society, apartheid becomes dangerous and impracticable. The same factor is the bogy in a deliberate policy of symbiosis. Deliberate attempts to strengthen separate institutions will then result in mutual rejection, while economic patterns enforce proximity and similarity. Inter-group tensions, and profound conflicts for the marginal man, are inevitable. Or the attempts may relatively fail, but merely perpetuate institutions which are empty shells, bereft of their functional purpose. Mr. Ritchie would regret the demise of those rea] satisfactions which he personally knows Maori culture (in the technical sense, not the popular sense of art or craft forms) to offer, and he knows that our society offers little to replace them. But economic forces are against its continued significant functioning, and it isn’t ethno-centric for a pakeha to say so. Some institutions may survive; but their power to adapt, not any deliberate "strengthening," will in the long run determine their survival. Buck was sound in suggesting the tangi to be the chief of these. But the divergence between Auckland and Wellington (leaving aside Dr. Winiata’s surprising failure to follow Mr. Ritchie’s use of "culture") isn’t on the significance of these institutions. It is whether they will survive within a separate culture, and should in contemporary society be deliberately and permanently continued Dr, Winiata is rightly aware of the tragic loss if Maori culture ceases to have functional significance: Mr. Ritchie draws attention to the difficulties, the danger, perhaps the impracticability of trying to,counter this loss with a shot of benzedrine into a system of institutions in order to pep up 4 culture. The loss, the relative emptiness of what our society offers, are not in dispute; but I fear that they will not be stopped by a Canute-like policy of symbiosis.

DENIS

GARRETT

(Wellington)