Living on the faultline: The tension between my Māori and Pākehā heritage

Friday, 4 February 2022

Our national story is complicated and messy. As we mark another Waitangi Day, Aaron Smale reflects on a lifetime of feeling caught between two worlds.

I watched her intently as she perused the one-page document, her hair a cloud of white, her coat a deep pink.

Then she looked up at me and shook her head gently. “Oh no dear, you’re not Māori,” she said in a tone of almost pity and bewilderment.

In that awkward and devastating moment, I was caught between my two grandmothers as one unwittingly denied the existence of the other.

That declaration was uttered by my Pākehā maternal grandmother on our first meeting when I was a confused 15-year-old. It was the first encounter I’d had with someone who was my own flesh and blood. Her revelation left me even more confused on the heels of a childhood devoid of self-knowledge thanks to the consequences of a closed adoption.

**READ MORE:

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* Dr Monty Soutar, writing about Māori for New Zealand's future

* The founding mothers: how Māori women are reclaiming their birthright this Waitangi

**

I still sharply remember her bemused expression as she added, “I’m surprised you’re so dark, dear”, looking at me as if there was some mistake; my eye and hair colour not matching her expectations.

She was wrong, I would later find out. I am Māori. But at that moment, the sketchy map of my identity was torn up and burned by the snowy-headed elderly lady sitting in front of me. The previous 15 years of my life had been an information vacuum. The piece of paper she had just repudiated was the only fragment of history that had been given to my adoptive parents by welfare, an A4 sheet with a few lines describing such basic details as my birth parents’ eye colour, occupation, and race.

The misunderstanding had a number of origins, most of which I will omit in this telling. But a major contributing factor was an element of racism, specifically on the part of my maternal grandparents.

My very existence was evidence of the crossing of a colour line that was unspoken but no less real. Even as I write this sentence I edge around secrets, half-truths and unintended lies as I try not to insult the living or trample on the dead. At the centre of this was an unstated problem – my paternal grandmother was Māori.

That moment was the start of me trying to navigate my Pākehā grandmother’s attitude towards Māori. That attitude was never directed specifically at me. I knew nothing but love from her. But if Māori came up in discussion I was immediately thrown into a state of anxiety, wondering where her off-hand comments might lead.

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, when race relations were a source of national anxiety. For decades Māori had been out of sight, out of mind, and the Treaty of Waitangi was ignored.

With urbanisation, Māori were no longer invisible and no longer willing to shut up and be quiet. I grew up in an era that was studded with events that are now recognised as turning points in challenging the status quo – the 1975 Land March, Bastion Point, the Springbok Tour. But throughout this time the media often portrayed Māori as a threat to social order and a mythical national unity.

As each year passed, I had an increasing yearning to know who I was, particularly my Māori heritage. At the same time I was getting bombarded with messages that Māori were dangerous and disruptive, that they didn’t know their place. I’d get confused and nervous when the Treaty of Waitangi came up because it seemed to provoke such hostility from Pākehā towards Māori and I didn’t know how to respond. There was a dissonance between the story I was being told and my growing childhood awareness.

Humans don’t just tell stories, we live in them. Narratives are the internal map of our place in the world, our relationships and our histories. I’d had my story stripped from me when Social Welfare signed off on my adoption and gave me a false birth certificate. I was placed in someone else’s story and my own origins were all but obliterated until I met my grandmother. But then she gave me a story that wasn’t true either. It has taken me years to reclaim my heritage and reconstruct my story, a work still in progress.

I’ve had to do that against the backdrop of a national conversation carried out in the media, a conversation that has been dominated and distorted by one side. The media industry is one that I have ended up working in for more than 20 years.

Most people have their history and stories passed on to them by those who share their DNA. But in adoption that link is ruptured. You grow up in a story that is not really yours, even though you’ve been invited and welcomed into it. Severing that connection sets a person adrift without any bearings. All the points of reference that others have, the implicit knowledge you absorb from being socialised with people who reflect you physically and temperamentally, is not part of your reality.

What I hadn’t known was that my grandmothers’ histories – and by extension mine – were literally under my feet. I was unaware that the place where I’d grown up was also connected to my Pākehā grandmother’s family.

Not 6 kilometres away from where I lived was McCracken Rd in Edgecumbe, named after my great-grandfather, William McCracken, and his siblings. His father, David, landed in New Zealand in 1865 with his family from Killyleg, County Monaghan, Ireland, when he was a boy. Like much of Ireland, County Monaghan had been hit hard by the potato famine a generation earlier. Those who didn’t perish didn’t take much convincing to leave. The Irish diaspora reached all corners of the British Empire. Our lot headed down under, boarding the ship Ganges along with 470 others.

One family story has it that David worked as a mail-boy, riding into Waikato on horseback when the Land Wars were officially over but unofficially still simmering away. The logic seemed to be that as a child he was less at risk of being perceived as a threat. I also wondered whether the fact his first language was Gaelic also helped, given many of the Crown troops were Irish.

After living near Pukekohe, the family moved to Taranaki. Again they were living on confiscated land. By the time the next generation came along they had moved to the Bay of Plenty; another confiscated area. There the McCracken brothers and their cousins were given 400-acre blocks of land along the Rangitaiki River. It must have seemed like a paradise. They’d been catapulted from tenant farmers to land-owners in one generation. It was the colonisation of New Zealand that made this possible and this transformation came at someone else’s expense. But that story was invisible to me.

It was while reading a book by Judith Binney that I came across an old map that showed the confiscation line. It shocked me. From the location of the Rangitaiki and Tarawera Rivers, I realised that the confiscation area included land I’d grown up on. I also noticed that the paths of the rivers were different to the paths I had known as a child.

Those two rivers originally had the same outfall at Matatā and were the main tributaries of a massive wetland network. My great-grandfather and his brother were given 400-acre blocks in this swamp on the bank of the Rangitaiki River but struggled to turn them into farmland suitable for cattle.

In about 1911, the Pākehā settlers, including my great-grandfather, decided to cut a channel diverting the Rangitaiki River straight out to sea. This accelerated the drainage of what was once the largest wetland in the country. What Māori had long regarded as a rich economic resource was destroyed virtually overnight to make way for farming methods from overseas.

While this story fits in with the national myth of the pioneer farmer conquering untamed nature, it obscures a more complicated narrative. What I also didn’t know about my history was that many of the significant places of my childhood were actually the sites of significant events in the Māori branches of my history too.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of school holidays spent at a caravan my grandparents had at a motorcamp near Matatā. When we moved from Maketu to just outside Edgecumbe, I recall walking along behind our herd of cows as a 6-year-old, with the pōhutukawa-clad cliffs on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. I also have a memory of sitting on the beach near Matatā looking out at the arc of the horizon. There was the volcano, Whakaari, puffing away in the distance, and the Bay of Plenty sweeping out to the East Cape. I would imagine America over that horizon and fantasise about travelling there one day.

Other holidays were spent with my grandparents in Greerton, Tauranga – just around the corner from Gate Pā along Cameron Rd, named after General Duncan Cameron who got his comeuppance in a battle on that site in 1864.

I didn’t find out until years later that the cliffs and ocean along the Matatā Straight were the scene of a fierce battle that involved my Ngāti Porou kin and a tūpuna from another branch of my family.

Matatā had been a staging post for iwi groups from the East Coast and Eastern Bay of Plenty heading to join the battle in Waikato in support of Tainui. But they were turned back and shelled by a Crown ship while troops on land killed a number of them.

They would eventually be chased up the very network of rivers that existed in the area I grew up. The road I lived on through most of my childhood was Awaiti Rd, which simply means little river.

I’d come by various bits of information from whānau and my own research over the years. One very fleeting story I ran across, but haven’t been able to verify, is that at some point in the 1860s, my great-great-great grandfather, Te Warihi Huriwai, left his home in Te Araroa on the East Cape for Waikato. He made it as far as Tauranga and died in the battle of Gate Pā.

I’ve often wondered what motivated this Ngāti Porou man to leave the relative safety of his own lands to join someone else’s fight. Was it just a naive and foolhardy desire to join in a scrap? Or was he incensed by the way Tainui were being treated? Or was he fighting for something bigger, like tino rangatiratanga?

My paternal grandfather is Pākehā, but he also has Māori ancestry via a woman called Matira, who married an American whaler. We don’t know how exactly, but she was somehow related to the Te Arawa rangatira Pokiha Taranui.

Taranui had a base in Maketu where I’d spent the first six years of my childhood. Taranui made a different decision to Huriwai and decided to align himself with the Crown; at least that was his public position. He led Te Arawa troops in the invasion of Ngāti Awa lands that culminated in a siege of a pā in Te Teko. He was later involved in the pursuit of Te Kooti through the Urewera, a campaign that was devastating for Tūhoe.

While Taranui was initially honoured by the Crown for his support, that didn’t last long. Towards the end of his life he was sent to jail for several days for not paying his dog taxes. How would it have felt to be locked up for such a trivial matter after risking his life and reputation for the Crown?

Mine is the story of Māori and Pākehā. One branch of my Pākehā family went from being illiterate, Gaelic-speaking peasants escaping the poverty and devastation of 19th century Ireland to land-owning farmers in a country on the other side of the world – a transformation that would not have been possible without iwi like Ngāti Awa being dispossessed of their wealth for no reason other than that they were Māori. One of my direct Māori ancestors opposed this theft and the betrayal of the Treaty of Waitangi, and paid with his life.

Ngāti Awa and many other iwi were wealthy before the violent confiscation of their lands. The imposition of the Native Land Court and the foreign land tenure system it represented stripped other iwi of their wealth.

The Waitangi Tribunal report on Ngāti Awa observed that, in 1849, Maori hapū between Whakatāne and Ōpōtiki owned 22 schooners that were exporting produce to Auckland. Much of this was then exported further to the Victorian and Californian goldfields. By the 1860s, they had water-driven flour mills. This was not peculiar to the Bay of Plenty. Similar accounts exist throughout the country. But many New Zealanders are oblivious to what Maori lost during the New Zealand Wars and the land loss that followed through the Native Land Court.

During an interview with celebrated author Patricia Grace some years ago, she remarked that it’s not Pākehā who have to be bicultural, it’s Māori. Māori can’t choose to opt out but instead must constantly decide whether to assert or deny their Maori identity as they navigate their relationship between the Pākehā world and themselves.

At every turn, Māori have been expected to give something up to be part of New Zealand society, including their independence, land tenure systems, and social structures. The price of resistance was violence, theft, and an alien system of land tenure that was designed for their dispossession.

Māori were asked to serve the country in war and many answered. Two of my grandmother’s brothers served in the Māori Battalion and were fortunate to survive, although they came back damaged. After paying that price, were they and their whānau treated as equal in the generations that followed? Would those lying in battlefield graves overseas consider their sacrifice worthwhile? They were willing to give up their lives, but what did their people get in return?

It was government policy that Māori had to give up the core of their identity, their language. Children who didn’t get the message were physically thrashed until they did. One of my cousins told me his mother, who is now in her 80s, is terrified even now if she hears people speaking in Māori, and our grandmother decided to stop speaking her first language to her own children to protect them from the violence of the state.

The violence of the native schools was continued in the welfare homes of the state in the second half of the 20th century. The pattern is the same with indigenous peoples throughout colonised countries – take the land, take the culture, then take the children. Sometimes all three happened simultaneously.

I was personally confronted with this pervasive racism when researching a story about adoption. I discovered that Pākehā couples applying to adopt in the 1960s and 70s were often opposed to the idea of adopting Māori or Polynesian babies, particularly boys. This infuriated me. What was wrong with Maori boys?

Which leads me back to my Pākehā grandmother. I adored her and I know that the feeling was mutual. She gave me her side of my heritage and was happy to share the family history she knew, quenching my deep thirst to understand who I was.

But she never spoke of my Māori grandmother. She had not had any meaningful relationship with Māori. And then she got a Māori grandson. She was happy to build a relationship with me as an individual, but on the subject of her paternal counterpart and the history that represented, she was silent. She was also silent on the story that preceded her family’s place in the Eastern Bay of Plenty.

In the end I never did entirely understand what her attitude towards Māori was. I do know that as a 15-year-old kid going through more than the usual teenage identity crisis, her denial of my Māori heritage was devastating – it cast a shadow over our relationship which was otherwise so special.

Although damaging, it also made me acutely aware of the subtleties of racism and how even people you love deeply can inflict wounds with careless words and attitudes. It’s easy to dislike rednecks. But when your grandmother holds racist attitudes it’s not so easy.

Within months of meeting my grandmother I had to rewrite my narrative several times over as the truth came out. I’ve had to constantly revise those versions over the years as significant revelations have blindsided me.

But is my grandmother so unusual? How many Pākehā take an interest in how the land they are living on passed out of Māori hands and became a tradeable commodity to be bought by the highest bidder? And what will their reaction be to an increasing Māori population? The last census found that 24 per cent of this nation’s children have Māori heritage. On current trends, Māori could be 30 per cent or more of the country’s population by the 200th anniversary of the Treaty of Waitangi.

The Treaty of Waitangi is about recognising that there is more than one side to the national story. The dominant version of that narrative has gone largely unchallenged until recently, and many Pākehā are baffled or angry to be told there is another version that needs to be taken seriously.

But, like any story, there is always a beginning. No story makes sense unless you understand where and who it started with, and the origins of the relationships it is based on – one reason Māori give such weight to whakapapa/genealogy.

My origin story is complicated. There is friction between the two major strands of my narrative. There are even contradictions within the Māori branches of my history. That narrative was denied to me for years, and I’ve had to try to put it back together from the fragments I’ve stumbled upon.

That negotiation has often been made more difficult by the attitudes of Pākehā, whether that’s my grandmother, a media industry dominated by the assumption that Pākehā views are neutral, or politicians who play to a white, middle-class electorate at the expense of everyone else.

Our national story is complicated and messy. I’m suspicious of any version that likes to turn that story into a promotional brochure; a cheerful myth that congratulates itself without confronting harsher truths.

Māori don’t get to opt out of grappling with the complexity of that narrative. It may be time for Pākehā to opt in.