'I think I'm your sister' - the call that led me to the truth about my adoption

Friday, 22 November 2019

Aaron Smale and his sister Tanya Hiskens.

OPINION: Nearly 10 years ago on Christmas Day I received a phone call that changed my life and led to a Royal Commission.

I didn't recognise the voice of the woman on the other end of the phone. But her opening words were, 'Hi, I'm Tanya and I think I'm your sister.'

It would take thousands of words, not a few hundred, to explain how that conversation came about and the impact it had on my life.

The basic facts are that both my sister and I were adopted at the peak of the closed adoption era of the late 1960s, early 1970s. Our different mothers were white, middle-class Pākehā and we were adopted by white middle-class Pākehā. But our birth father was Māori.

* Abuse Inquiry: Claims of historical child rape at state-owned care institutions heard

* Māori inquiry into Oranga Tamariki: 'We have a right to stand up for our babies'

* More than 220 children abused in Oranga Tamariki care in 2018

* We finally know the true extent of abuse in state care. It is shocking

Children's Commissioner Andrew Becroft gives evidence before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care.

* State care abuse not just 'historical', inquiry told**

This might seem unremarkable but when I started asking questions as to why I had missed out on a sibling I adore, one of the answers was particularly hard to stomach. While different individuals made decisions in that adoption process, they made those decisions against the backdrop of racism.

I found many of the answers to my questions in Anne Else's book, A Question of Adoption. Else, who is adopted herself, laid out the different factors and attitudes that shaped adoption practice in that era. One whole chapter looks at the question of race.

One thing that hurt and infuriated me was to find out that most of the white, middle-class couples that applied to adopt did not want a Māori child. Children were ranked and even colour-coded and the category that was at the bottom of those rankings was Māori boys.

That was me. Once the visceral anger subsided slightly I started to ask why? Why were Māori boys regarded with such aversion by typical New Zealanders? We had only just been born and hadn't done anything to be judged by our actions. Did that attitude still exist?

Oliver Sutherland, who gave evidence at the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical State Care Abuse, had been investigating institutional abuse long before anyone else dared speak about it.

This sent me on a quest to figure out why Māori and particularly Māori men were so prominent in our worst social statistics – prison, educational failure, ill-health, suicide etc. It was too easy to blame the individuals alone and deny it had anything to do with society's racism. The attitude that manifested in adoption told me that New Zealand society had a problem with Māori boys and men. And it was an attitude that it was, and is, very reluctant to admit.

That led me to writing a number of stories. The culmination of that quest to find answers led to a series of stories I wrote on state welfare abuse. It was the response from survivors and those who supported them that led to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State Care.

The biggest group in that story were Māori boys.

According to research by criminologist Elizabeth Stanley, over 100,000 children went through the welfare system in the second half of the 20th century. Snapshot surveys at the time show 70 to 80 per cent of those children were Māori. That's 70-80,000. Even if you stop reading now, I'd ask you to reflect on the implications of that. Multiply that trauma by the children and grandchildren of those Māori individuals and have a guess where it might lead.

New Zealand likes to pride itself on its human rights record. There might be some merit in this. Or it might be that we're simply very adept at deluding ourselves as a country. There is a reluctance or apathy by media and society at large to confront the racism that is central to what happened in this issue.

Oranga Tamariki Minister Tracey Martin said it was wrong to draw parallels with the Stolen Generation.

During the recent hearings held by the Royal Commission many gave evidence, including myself, about the racism that underpins the subject of this inquiry. More than one, including Moana Jackson, drew direct parallels with the Stolen Generations of indigenous children in Australia and North America. I've written about those parallels and it's now the subject of PhD research I've undertaken.

The problem is, we don't want to face up to that fact. When the story blew up about the removal of a child in Hawke's Bay, I wrote a piece drawing the Stolen Generations parallel. I also wrote about the economic inequality that underpins it.

A journalist put that comparison to Oranga Tamariki Minister Tracey Martin, who dismissed it as emotive and inappropriate.

Yes, it is emotive. During the evidence given by Dr Oliver Sutherland at the Royal Commission, my friend and survivor Kath Coster had to bolt from the room. Sutherland, a Pākehā, was fighting against racism and state abuse of Māori children back in the 1970s. He gave detailed and gruelling evidence, including about the internal examinations of young girls in the girls welfare homes. That's when Kath and another woman had to leave.

I was sitting next to Jimmy McLaughlin, who I wrote my first story on, and he started fidgeting when Sutherland talked about Owairaka boys home. Tyrone Marks and another survivor I know listened intently as Sutherland described children being put in solitary confinement, including in Mt Eden prison, when they were children. Both of them had been through that.

They listened intently as Sutherland described the electrocution (including on the genitals) and torture at Lake Alice, which they had experienced and witnessed. A state abuse survivor I know once told me he'd been raped so many times as a child 'you could park a truck up there, and turn it around'. For the last 35 years he's spent more time in prison than out. Most of the men in jail with him went through the same welfare homes.

Later in the week Auckland University sociology lecturer Tracey McIntosh stated there was a clear link between the welfare homes and gangs. I would totally agree.

What was emotive for survivors was hearing their experiences validated, and being believed in a formal inquiry when they have been told for years that they're lying. They'd been silenced their whole lives and now they were beginning to be heard.

What is inappropriate, however, is a minister of the Crown denying this has anything to do with similar treatment of indigenous children in other colonised countries. The inquiry has only just started and she is pre-judging the commission's findings.

She doesn't get to invalidate or undermine evidence that she doesn't like or that the public might find uncomfortable. Given she is the minister responsible for both Oranga Tamariki and the Royal Commission she might like to listen and think before she reacts.

The Waitangi Tribunal has taken the unusual step of holding an urgent inquiry into Oranga Tamariki after the attempted removal of a Māori child in Hawke's Bay, so denial has not served her well. It also suggests we haven't learned anything from history because we have denied and ignored it.

Just comparing the numbers against the population, New Zealand is actually worse. There might not have been a specific law or policy in New Zealand as there was in Australia and North America regarding the removal of indigenous children. But this doesn't give us plausible deniability - neither was there a specific law or policy that banned the speaking of Māori in schools. Despite this lack of explicit intent by the state, my grandmother and many Māori were still whacked for speaking their first language. We as a country managed to carry out this stuff without an instruction manual.

The results of indigenous child removal are the same the world over. Indigenous people in other colonised countries also predominate in statistics like high incarceration. Simple curiosity should lead you to ask why. Removing indigenous children is often justified, here and overseas, by pointing to the dysfunction and abuse in their families (poverty is another factor, but that's another story). But if you look a little closer you often find those dysfunctional and abusive family members had the state as a parent. And that parent's track record of abuse is on an horrific scale. The worst perpetrator can't dress itself up as the saviour.

Australia and Canada have had a reckoning with this aspect of their history. New Zealand has spent decades and millions of dollars denying and trying to dodge responsibility.

In the report by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission's inquiry into indigenous residential schools, one of the adult children of a survivor had this to say: 'I think all Canadians need to stop and take a look and not look away. Yeah, it's embarrassing, yeah, it's an ugly part of our history. We don't want to know about it. What I want to see from the Commission is to rewrite the history books so that other generations will understand and not go through the same thing that we're going through now, like it never happened.'

New Zealanders might need to stop and take a similar look. And not look away like it never happened.

* Aaron Smale is a freelance journalist and PhD candidate. His research is focused on Māori children in state custody and he also has a claim before the Waitangi Tribunal on adoption.