Tim Corballis: An Un-settled Nation?

With the resignation of Don Brash and the assumption of the National leadership by John Key, it seem’s as if race issues have disappeared once and for all from New Zealand’s cultural and political landscape. Can such an question really disappear overnight?

I talk to Avril Bell, a senior lecturer at Massey University’s School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work. Bell, who researches both Maori and Pakeha identity, suggests that the sort of attitudes expressed by Brash are widespread and not likely to go away now that Brash has left the limelight.

‘Actually,’ she says, ‘what Don Brash said in his first Orewa speech is completely common. He criticised the idea of any special rights accruing to Maori, and he also raised the issue of there not being any ‘full-blooded’ Maori left. In both those ways he actually attacked Maori people: they have no biological authenticity, and they don’t have any valid political claims.’

Denying any ‘real’, biological difference between Maori and Pakeha, and also rejecting any political difference, all that this leaves to Maori is a vague idea of culture:

‘He also said Maori culture is really important. So Maori can have language and culture as long as there’s no politics associated with it. That’s a really common desire in the Pakeha world: to have poi dancers, and haka, and Maori art. Kia ora is okay. But then anything else beyond that is no good.’

A large section of Pakeha New Zealand is, she says, sick of the politics, and sick of being challenged by Maori.

‘They’ve got this whole idea of Treaty fatigue. People want it to be over, want it to be settled. And I think that’s something that we should just give up on. The idea that anything’s ever settled.’

When I ask her how often she thinks most people are confronted with the Treaty in their everyday lives, she says, ‘Not at all. But they’re sick of it all the same. It’s bizarre.’

The idea that Pakeha should give up on ‘the race issue’ being settled once-and-for-all is a common theme in Bell’s work. It has put her at odds, not only with people like Brash, but with Pakeha writers like Michael King and Brian Turner, who have claimed that Pakeha are, by now, a second indigenous group in New Zealand.

She points out that such claims fly in the face of international law, which standardly defines indigenous people as people descended from the inhabitants of a region at the time of colonisation. Such definitions are tied up with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the UN Human Rights Council this year.

‘So it’s got a very specific international legal meaning. And to me, to claim Pakeha indigeneity is to deny the difference between the Pakeha relationship to this place and the Maori relationship.’

Bell doesn’t deny that Pakeha have a relationship to New Zealand’s land. But she insists that the Maori relationship to the land – to a particular mountain and river, to a turangawaewae – is different. ‘Can’t we actually allow Maori that difference? It’s not enough just to think about our relationship to the land, to just assert that relationship as being the same as theirs, and to not think about how in fact we acquired that relationship.’

For Bell, to think about how we acquired our land is to reconnect Pakeha with their own history. She talks about popular histories of New Zealand, such as those of King or James Belich:

‘The thing about those histories is that they’re always a sort of celebration. And that’s why people like them. They’re always about the creation of the nation, so they’re always about how we come to be this unified thing. They’re always a kind of a happy story. That’s not a bad thing, but it suggests that the past is resolved. And I think that’s more of a fantasy than a reality. If you talk to Maori people who are involved in their own struggles, around getting recognition for things that have gone wrong in the past, that’s not all resolved.’

Bell claims that Pakeha are the benefactors of their history, and should acknowledge the fact rather than treating all injustice as if it belongs in a distant past. Pakeha history is partly the history of a relationship with Maori – and an ongoing one. Bell prescribes more humility on the part of Pakeha: a willingness to share, to accept some limits, and to listen to Maori concerns.

It would, she says, benefit Pakeha – it would deepen an otherwise shallow sense of Pakeha identity: ‘We’ve cut ourselves off from our most fundamental ongoing relationship, and from our history, so there’s not much left. We’ve got kiwiana and the beach. That’s about it.’

Accepting that the relationship between Maori and Pakeha is ongoing brings us back to Bell’s claim that things will never be settled:

‘It’s funny, because we like uncertainty in our lives, don’t we? We like novelty, we like change and the idea that something new might be around the corner. But for some reason, in this aspect of our lives, we want it over and settled and sorted. If we could give up on that, and actually see that having some kind of relationship to Maori is fundamental to who we are – and that that’s something that is never settled, that it’s always ongoing – we would have made a huge leap.’

ENDS

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