RUKU

Tu Tangata, Issue 28, 1 February 1986, Page 30

RUKU

Ko nga kbrero n 8 Henare Everitt Ko ngd pikitia na Robyn Kahukiwa

He purapura series. Te Tereina, Te Tamaiti i Rere, He Kuri, Ruku.

Various authors. Government Printer, (previously Dept of Ed.] $2.95

These four children’s picture books have been re-released under the Government Printer with a further nine to be published in the next year. He Kuri was reviewed in a previous Tu Tangata. Te Tereina has text by Hirini Melbourne and pictures by Dick Frizzell. It beautifully captures in word and sound the rhythm of the train, “pako pako, patu patu”, as it steams into town. Its great strength is the crispness of the wordsong, and the warmth of the illustrations.

Te Tamaiti i Rere also by Hirini, with pictures by Christine Ross, is the dream of a young boy as he rushes over a waterfall in his waka, “here horowai, ripi wai kohurihuri, he ia teretere, kia haere tere ai”. And then taking to the sky, “piki runga, piki ake, kite rangi e“.

Ruku, by Henare Everitt, with pictures by Robyn Kahukiwa, is a diving tale of two friends, with enough reptition, “rukuhia he kina, rukuhia he paua, rukuhia he pipi, rukuhia he koura, ka pai te ruku kai-moana,” to carry the sound to the ear of the reader. And it ends with a warning to be careful whilst diving.

The books are aimed at different levels of maori language competency, with He Kuri being most simple and effective with youngsters. Te Tereina relies on the action of the train to convey its message, while Ruku uses simple action phrases in repetition to complete the picture. Te Tamaiti uses poetic licence and arrangement of words to express the action and is more advanced in word usage.

BEING PAKEHA: An Encounter With New Zealand and the Maori Renaissance

Author Michael King 256 pp, 100 h 8r w photos, cased, $24.95 ISBN 0 340 387750 trade phk. $18.95 ISBN 0 340 382112

The following text is abstracted from the introduction of the book. A View From the High Ground

To be Pakeha in the 1940 s and 1950 s was to enjoy a wmy of life that changed beyond recognition in the succeeding decades. At the outset, for almost all of us, Britain was Home, the centre of an Empire of which our country was the most far-flung Dominion. The visit of the reigning monarch was one of the highlights of our primary school years. ‘Girls were girls and men were men', in the words of the popular song, and each sex was allocated a set of pre-determined roles. Families were nuclear: mother and father (married), with three or four children. Inflation and demonstrations were things that happened abroad or in history. Criminals seemed a remote class, and neighbours were invariably of European descent and Christian.

Unless you were Maori, it was possible and forgivable in the forties to view New Zealand as a single-culture society. The country's major institutions were based on European models, the systems of government and law derived from Britain, the dominant values were postindustrial revolution, Western and Christian. Most New Zealanders accepted this package without question, and new immigrants, such as displaced Continental Europeans, were expected to conform to it. So were Maori when they moved out of their rural enclaves into the nation’s towns. Suspicion and hostility fell upon those who behaved differently or spoke any language other than English. New Zealand's xenophobia was intensified by the fact that the country lacked borders with any other.

Nobody could be said to be responsible for the social pattern: like all forceful cultures, it simply carried individuals and communities along like a river. The factors which might have disturbed its course lay upstream. The European colonists' crimes against the Maori the wars of the 1840 s and 1860 s, the major land grabs, the setting up of institutions designed to limit or annihilate the practice of Polynesian values in New Zealand most of these had occurred in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth, Maori and Pakeha had lived by and large in separate parts of

the country, segregated geographically and socially. When Maori did come to the cities they tended to behave like Pakeha. They were only embraced by Pakeha New Zealand when they became All Blacks, and (in times of crisis) soldiers.

The pattern changed drastically after World War Two, however. A trickle of Maori migrants to the towns and cities in search of work and opportunities for material betterment became a stream, and the stream a torrent. For the first time in New Zealand since the nineteenth century, the country's two major cultural traditions collided and generated the white water of confusion and hostility. Nobody was prepared for this outcome. Maori experienced discrimination in accommodation, employment and hotel bars. They were confronted by a world that was aggressively European in orientation at the very time that they had severed bonds with many of the sources of their own culture traditional marae, hapu and extended families. Many of them became marginal people, weakened both by what they had relinquished and by what confronted them. They were soon disproportionately represented in the ranks of convicted criminals, problem drinkers and (when the economy slumped) the unemployed. All this led civic planners and back-fence gossipers to eventually recognise and discuss what they regarded as ‘the Maori problem'. It must have been a Maori one, they assumed, because it had not been apparent until the Maori became urban: it was they who had altered the status quo, not the Pakeha.

Most Maori who succeeded in Pakeha-defined New Zealand in the post-war years (and there were many) were prepared to diminish or submerge their Maoriness. They learnt to play Pakeha games according to Pakeha rules. They were congratulated for so doing by Pakeha compatriots who spoke with pride about the adaptability of ‘our Maoris'. In popular idiom, it was a high compliment to speak of Maori who were good mixers among Pakeha as Teal white men'. The groundwork for such behaviour had been laid by the Maori parliamentarians, Maui Pomare (‘there is no option but to become Pakeha') and Peter Buck. Those who remained Maori in the towns and cities, and risked opprobrium for doing so, followed other early models Apirana Ngata and Tau Henare. for example, in whose company Pakeha political colleagues generally felt uncomfortable, believing those men had chips on their shoulders because they emphasised injustices and lack of Pakeha sensitivity to Maori feelings and needs. But the saddest group and the most vulnerable were the children of

Maori urban migrants who felt neither Maori nor Pakeha. and who were accepted as neither. It was members of this group who, in their insecurity, had most difficulty coping with family life, with city life, with a largely unsympathetic Pakeha bureaucracy; and it was this group that swelled the ranks of Maori school drop-outs, convicts, psychiatric patients and gangs. And in another manifestation of discontent it was other members of the same group who first led the fight to recover and revalidate Maori identity in New Zealand and to put down specifically Maori cultural roots in the Pakeha-oriented towns and cities. They did this especially by establishing supra-tribal Maori organisations and urban marae. They eventually carried the majority of Maori opinion with them to the point where, in the 1980 s. a Maori leader could say: ‘Now we are eyeballing Pakehas: we want our share of the national life and resources'.

By the mid-1980s it was again possible as it had been in the eighteenth century to be Maori anywhere in New Zealand and to be assertive about and proud of that identity. A genuine cultural renaissance was under way in the towns and in the countryside. People who had suppressed Maori backgrounds, inclinations and values, now expressed them forcefully. Parents who had been brought up to speak only English began to learn the language of their ancestors and to ensure that their preschool children did so. In addition to the mushrooming of marae in the towns, those in rural areas were renovated and revived. Spokespersons for Maori interests began to force their way into the variety of bureaucracies that controlled New Zealand life, from the Auckland Regional Authority's planning committee to the New Zealand Historic Places Trust. There was, said Ranginui Walker, a revolution facing New Zealand in the 1980 s. In any enterprise involving Maori, Maori demanded control. ‘No longer are Maori leaders content to remain as silent partners in such matters', wrote Sidney Moko Mead. ‘They expect to participate directly in the negotiations and they want to speak for themselves.... [This] is new. It is also exciting for the Maori people because it is evidence of the return and the rise of mana Maori....’

The return and rise of mana Maori had consequences for Pakeha as well as for Maori. For the first time since the mid-nineteenth century, it led to a widespread Pakeha awareness of Maori values and apsirations as being often separate and different from Pakeha ones. It impelled Pakeha to examine their consciences and their institutions to see if New Zealand was indeed, as many Maori alleged, a racist society.

And it required adjustments in New Zealand life: a restructuring of institutions to accommodate Maori needs and values, and a preparedness to share decision making with people whose criteria were not Pakeha.

If the assertion of mana Maori was an accomplished fact by 1985, the process of Pakeha adjustment to it was not. This latter process had barely begun. And it was proceeding at different rates in different areas of the national life. The guardians of the education system were among the first to begin to make changes; guardians of the law among the last to even consider them. Some individual Pakeha responded by learning the Maori language and trying to equip themselves with Maori views of New Zealand experience and knowledge of Maori protocol. Others withdrew into their professional and suburban enclaves and resisted efforts to change their personal lifestyle or the national one; an outgoing Prime Minister said it was time to speak up for the superiority of British traditions in New Zealand to recognise that Pakeha had contributed more to New Zealand life than

Maori. It will be a long time before such divergent Pakeha responses will be reconciled. Meanwhile, cracks in the edifice of Pakeha racial and cultural superiority add to the momentum of the Maori cultural revival.”

Being Pakeha does not set out to accuse or to allocate blame. It is a view from the high ground of the 1980 s. Things apparent to us now were not visible in the 1940 s and 19505, even less so in the 1920 s and 19305; people cannot be blamed for what they did not know. They can, perhaps, be blamed for what they don't know today, if their ignorance of the nature and history of New Zealand society is wilful and results in a perpetuation of inequalities and injustice. The key to redressing imbalances and reconciling past misunderstandings is knowledge; and the first step towards knowledge is self-know-ledge. No reira, kia ora tatou. Kia hora te marino, kia whaka papa pounamu te moana. kia tere te karohirohi. May calm be widespread, may the sea lie smooth as greenstone, may the warmth of summer fall upon us all.