$600 million would kill Maori culture

Tu Tangata, Issue 35, 1 April 1987, Page 6

S6OO million would kill Maori culture

PITOPITO K O R E R O

If the Maori loan of 600 million dollars had gone ahead, it would have swamped the Maori culture. So says Manuka Henare, one of two Maori on the Government Advisory Committee on External Aid and Development. The other is Robert Mahuta. Manuka says it’s his experience from work in the Pacific, that once dollars become the central goal, the culture suffers. He says that’s what happened in Nauru, where the royalties from the phosphate mined there have made the Nauruans some of the richest people in the world. But he says their health has suffered as has their culture. They then became a consumer society with all the pitfalls.

That development is what Maori people should be wary of says Manuka. The work of the Advisory Committee of twelve people is not just to advise Government of where and how it should give external aid, but one of educating this country to the ‘why’ of development aid. Manuka says Bob Mahuta and he want Maori people to make the connections between their own underdevelopment and the third world peoples. “My developmental principle is to see how other countries develop whilst keeping their culture. To kill a culture you just flood it with money.” He says at present Maori people have grown introspective with a seige mentality protecting them from very real

opposition. But he says that’s not how their tupuna looked at things. “They took on the new world, making themselves familiar with the people and lands of Te Moananui a Kiwa. With the arrival of the Pakeha, they had no hesitation about taking on that culture and then applied it to their people, and it’s history that other Maori travelled to Australia to bring Christianity back home.” Manuka says cultural and entrepreneurial expertise so gathered was not stored up by individuals but instead used for the benefit of the iwi. He’d like to see a renaissance amongst Maori people today to that effect.