‘Improving’ the Māori: Counting the Ideology of Intermarriage

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Census/Demographics, History, Media Archive, Oceania, Politics/Public Policy on 2013-04-23 04:32Z by Steven

‘Improving’ the Māori: Counting the Ideology of Intermarriage

New Zealand Journal of History
Volume 34, Number 1 (2000)
pages 80-97

Kate Riddell
Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington

IN 1996 THE CENSUS gave a total of 3,681,546 New Zealanders, of whom 524,031 were self-described as Māori or of Māori descent — thus, around 14%. The 1896 census gave 743,214 New Zealanders, and of that figure only 39,854 were described by the enumerators as Māori — around 5%. The closest thing to the category ‘of Māori descent’ in that census was the 5,762 ‘half-castes‘ described either as living as Pākehā or Māori. The New Zealand population in 1769 has been estimated as perhaps 100,000, and was 100% Māori.

These figures expose vast changes in the Māori population in size and compilation, from 100% of the population to a nadir of 5%, and back to an increasingly significant percentage of the overall New Zealand population at the close of the twentieth century. But the figures alone tell a small part of the revival of a supposedly ‘dying race’. This article explores the ideology of the censuses and the enumerators who contributed to them. At the core of this investigation is a belief that the prevalence of intermarriage between Māori and Pākehā directly affected popular views of whether or not the Māori population would survive the experiment of contact.

In 1896, with the Māori population at around 5% of the total population (and thought to be dropping), many did not believe that Māori would survive. That belief, however, flew directly in the face of much contemporary evidence to the contrary. Perhaps in one aspect, however, it was not so very wrong. Even some of the most ardent ‘fatal impact’ protagonists allowed that intermarriage with Pākehā would slow the extinction of the Māori. Others, perhaps best characterized as ‘assimilationists’, promoted intermarriage as the tool to save the Māori from themselves. To such people, the ‘half-caste’ product of intermarriage would improve the Māori ‘race’, both in terms of their statistical significance and as a people — rather like European husbandry would improve the land.

‘Half-caste’ is a problematic term. In New Zealand it has been used to describe both cultural and physical forms of the fruits of intermarriage. But it has almost never been used in a strictly biological sense. Once contact between Māori and Pākehā became widespread, ‘half-caste’ was never either a legal definition or a precise term for measuring blood-mixture. This is in direct contrast with strict legal and biological definitions in other New World colonies. In the censuses, the term came to be closely linked with the idea of ‘improving’ the Māori, like the land, by degrees. Intermarriage and the production of half-castes became synonymous with clearing away the native and planting the introduced…

…The Māori censuses to 1921 will be explored through three related myths. The myths are not easily separated, but each has some distinctive features. The first is an ambiguous one: the idea that Māori were better off either in close contact with or in isolation from Europeans. This myth expressed the belief that Māori were dying whether in close contact with Europeans or not, but that some factors could temporarily ameliorate or limit the effects of that contact. The second myth was that Māori were not worthy possessors of their own land. If they did not use it as Pākehā believed land was ordained to be used, then Māori would lose it. In this view, ‘improving’ the land and ‘improving’ the Māori went hand in hand. The third myth was that ‘half-castes’, the physical product of Māori and Pākehā intermarriage, were the only possible future for Māori (if Māori were to have a future at all). This explanation will be followed by a discussion of how the myths remained intact, despite the numerical evidence of the censuses to the contrary, and despite Māori opposition to the ideology of assimilation through intermarriage…

Read the entire article here.

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Half-castes between the Wars: Colonial Categories in New Zealand and Samoa

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Oceania on 2013-04-21 23:48Z by Steven

Half-castes between the Wars: Colonial Categories in New Zealand and Samoa

New Zealand Journal of History
Volume 34, Number 1 (2000)
pages 98-116

Tocolcsulusulu D. Salesa
Oriel College, University of Oxford

BY THE 1930s ‘half-castes‘ seemed a near-universal product of colonialism. They were a natural outcome of the human activity of procreation, and not a colony in the world was without them. In New Zealand and Samoa, half-castes had risen to prominence, not always with admiration, and occupied a territory somehow between natives and Europeans. They were a kind of human borderland, markers of the differences between the two populations. Half-castes were born of a ‘queer magic’, as Noel Coward called it, children of natural human desires, yet often treated as unnatural; left in a position which could attract both envy and disdain. In the years between the World Wars, the well- known figure of the half-caste gained a new kind of relevance as, among others, eugenicists, racial biologists, colonial experts and governments found newer ways of considering them. The prevailing contemporary view did not seem a kind one. The anti-racist scientist Cedric Dover lamented in 1937 that the half-caste was depicted as ‘an undersized, scheming and entirely degenerate bastard. His father is a blackguard, his mother a whore. His sister and daughter . . . follow the maternal vocation.’

Colonial authority was built on the assumptions that European society in the colonies was an obvious and discrete social and biological whole—a ‘natural’ community—and that the boundaries which separated colonizer from the colonized were easily drawn and unmistakable. Half-castes were living proof that these assumptions were false, and daily they had to deal with the trauma their existence exposed. Unintentionally they had the capacity to traverse categories, or be cast from one to another, and this often attracted distrust and suspicion. Their variability meant that although the term ‘half-caste’ was in use from the mid-nineteenth century in both New Zealand and Samoa, the substance it enclosed continually changed. Moreover, each reconfiguration of what half-caste meant potentially reconfigured the limits of ‘Native’ or ‘European’, and how distant or different these categories were. This changing nature of the half-caste reveals the creative and plastic nature of colonialism and its terms of government. But it does much more than this, as such terms were part of a vocabulary commonly used by colonizers, and government was implicated in a broader discussion where varied definitions and understandings of half-castes might inform each other, and where definitions remained mercurial and contested. In Samoa and New Zealand half-castes attracted not only political and social interest, but also scientific and scholarly concern. The years on which this article focuses, the 1920s and 1930s, were a highpoint for this.

At this time both New Zealand and Samoa were under the same colonial power—New Zealand—yet in the two countries the half-caste category was not the same. The many differences make comparison intriguing. Samoa was a tropical, plantation colony, with a small population of Europeans; New Zealand was a temperate, settler colony, with an increasing white population. Their histories, however, are entangled, and in several ways the fortunes of half-castes in Samoa and New Zealand shaped each other. Margery Perham, a colonial ‘expert’ and Oxford don, passed through both New Zealand and Samoa in 1929 on a worldwide tour of British colonies. She realized the degree of entanglement between New Zealand and Samoa when she observed that ‘every event in the [Samoan] islands found immediate echo in New Zealand, and New Zealand’s response re-echoed back in the islands’ .Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler have written that ‘metropole and colony, colonizer and colonized, need to be brought into one analytic field’. Half-castes in Samoa and New Zealand offer an opportunity to do just that…

Read the entire article here.

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