Moana Jackson — a scholar and a gentle man

Friday, 1 April 2022

Te Moananui a Kiwa Jackson, October 10, 1945 – March 31, 2022

Moana Jackson was a quietly spoken intellectual and Māori leader who challenged the Crown with his incisive writing and analysis. But he was also a kind and generous man who cared deeply for his people. Aaron Smale reflects on a life that will go on giving.

When I first got to know Moana Jackson I was drawn to his immense intellect and gentle demeanour. But what I often found strange was that he always wanted to know what I thought. He once sent me a draft of something he was writing and asked for my opinion. I felt like Eric Clapton was asking me for guitar lessons. It seemed absurd.

What was really absurd was how long it took for me to realise that Jackson’s interest in the views of others was one of the things that made him such a great man. He was so interested in everyone else and what they could teach him. It didn’t matter who you were, he valued and elevated your mana.

There are many bright minds out there but the reason Jackson and his work stand apart is that his brilliant intellect was saturated with empathy and love for his people. He was not an ivory tower intellectual.

**READ MORE:

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* Moana Jackson, a leading voice on law and Māori rights, has died

**

There will be hundreds if not thousands of stories told about the times he helped people who were facing often tragic and desperate situations. He was often asked to intervene and mediate in complex and difficult conflicts. This work was not necessarily recorded, but his published work was deeply informed by his “invisible” community and whānau involvement.

His whānau must have recognised an intellectual capacity in him that meant he was sent to law school at Victoria University in the 1960s, when Eddie Durie was the only other Māori law student.

From there he worked briefly for a corporate law firm but wasn’t enamoured of the environment, returning home to work in the freezing works. His whānau were a little perplexed at this smart kid with a flash job who ended up back in the blood and guts of the works, albeit temporarily.

He took up a teaching position at Wainuiomata College before eventually doing post-grad study at Columbia University in New York, an experience he talked about with great fondness.

His older brother, Syd Jackson, was a founding member of Nga Tamatoa, the loose group of activists whose confrontational style earned them a high profile. Moana looked up to his brother but they were quite different. Moana told a story of how he went to Raglan when the protest about the golf course was kicking off and desperately wanted to get arrested to join his older brother. When Syd was being frog-marched off by police, he cast a hard eye at his younger brother and said bluntly, “Go home.” Moana Jackson had a different path to follow.

Jackson’s life was so full and rich with stories. But there were a number of traits that were consistent across his life and work.

What became apparent early on was that he would not compromise his principles. A story he has told to others was of the ceremony when he was supposed to be admitted to the bar.

There was quite a rigmarole getting the wig and gown required for the formalities at the Napier High Court. Jackson was also given a korowai to wear by his Kahungunu people that had huge historical significance.

On arrival at the Napier court, one of the staff told him brusquely that he needed to get rid of “that fluffy thing”. Thinking they were referring to the wig, he was relieved because it was a sweltering Hawke’s Bay day. Instead the unacceptable “fluffy thing” was a beautifully woven and deeply storied cloak.

Jackson declined to participate in the ceremony and wasn’t admitted to the bar.

It seemed to be me that he understood the Crown better than the Crown understood itself, particularly when it came to the assumptions and actions of colonisation. It was a marvel to witness his clarity of thought as he would succinctly articulate how colonisation worked and why it produced the same results wherever it was applied – New Zealand, Australia, Canada or the United States – because it was built on the same foundations.

Jackson’s analysis of how we arrived at where we have was so radically and deeply accurate that it unnerved those who didn’t have the courage to look the truth in the face. But that crystal-clear analysis wasn’t arrived at serenely or in the sedate halls of academia. It was something he had to wrestle with in the furnace of the trauma of his own people.

He once told me about a particular night he was working at the office of the Maori Law Service he’d help establish in Wellington. He was on his own and it was during a time when a number of political fights were raging around Maori issues. He said he felt overwhelmed trying to understand what he was up against – so discouraged and despairing that he consoled himself with junk food.

He realised in recent years that what he was up against was the latest iteration of colonisation in the form of neoliberalism, a belief that the market is the measure of all things – a continuation of the hyper-capitalism that drove colonisation and slavery.

But there were other events battering him and his people and that forged his outlook. The closure of freezing works in Hawke’s Bay tossed most of his extended whānau out of work overnight and the consequences were devastating. This was repeated throughout the country. He didn’t just wrestle with ideologies, he saw their real world impact clearly and it pained him deeply.

In probably his best known work, He Whaipaanga Hou, published in 1988, he targeted the worst manifestation of colonisation – the criminal justice system. He interviewed thousands of people involved in that system, both working within it and incarcerated by it, and produced a report that is still rightly considered a landmark.

The report gave Māori, and anyone else who was interested, a way to look at the Crown and its institutions that had been unavailable up to that point.

Some of the response was vicious, including death threats. But if Jackson was softly spoken, he was also incredibly tough in his ability to not back down from his principles. He never vilified or attacked people who disagreed with him but he never resiled from what he said either.

What is sometimes forgotten is that the report was commissioned by the Ministry of Justice itself. But when it was delivered, the justice minister at the time, Geoffrey Palmer, simply would not sign off on it. Palmer is an expert in constitutional law and he would have rightly detected a challenge to the very legitimacy of the Crown. It landed around the same time as Te Puao Te Atatu, which challenged the racism of the Social Welfare system, so it was in good company.

While Jackson’s work is often quoted, it is also bastardised by those who tried to accommodate a semblance of what he was saying. In the revision of the criminal justice report that he was working on in recent years, he found plenty of evidence that superficial changes like the use of Maori names had taken place, but no fundamental change in the underlying assumptions.

He Whaipaanga Hou marked out Jackson’s philosophical position in terms of where he stood in relation to the Crown. He was willing to have a constructive conversation but he was unwilling to dilute his ideas to make them more palatable to the Crown, which is why his work is a constant point of reference.

Although the criminal justice system was the focus of much of Jackson’s work, he always set it within the wider context of colonisation as a whole. But in his work and kōrero, colonisation was driven by capitalism. He viewed the exploitation of resources and people as the driver behind colonisation.

Jackson was deeply aware of how that long-term structural violence plays out over generations. He never simply viewed a person in prison as an isolated individual without a history, who suddenly became a bad person. He was always interested in their whakapapa and how they came to be in the position they were in.

During the research for his first report, there were subjects that people did not raise, particularly sexual abuse. But, 30 years later, those same people were willing to disclose what had happened to them in state-run welfare homes and foster homes. The trauma that had been sitting there all along was finally being spoken. Their stories were acknowledged and validated by Jackson’s immense mana.

He knew his time was short and he wanted to distil and elevate the stories of those who had put their trust in him. Jackson also wanted justice for those who had been victimised and we had many conversations about what that might look like.

His empathy cost him. He acknowledged that he wasn’t very good at filtering out other people’s hurt. So he absorbed it. That deep well of pain informed his work but it also took its toll. Not that he ever complained, instead he regarded it as an inherent obligation in the work he did.

But for all his intellectual firepower and the often difficult nature of his work, he had a dry, deadpan wit that you could sometimes miss if you weren’t paying attention.

We shared a mutual love of blues music and I lent him a book on Jimi Hendrix. When I next saw him I gave him a ride into Wellington and he told me he’d enjoyed the book immensely. Then he casually mentioned he’d seen Hendrix perform at Woodstock. I nearly rear-ended the car in front of me.

He proceeded to tell how he’d arrived with some friends on the last day of the festival and they walked in without a ticket. “Here I was, this Māori boy from Hastings … I’d never seen so many naked white people in all my life.” I nearly ran off the road laughing.

I glimpsed another lovely side of him when he was around his mokopuna. You could see his presence bringing out the best in them, he was so attentive and loving.

If you had to name one driving motivation behind his work it was mokopuna. The wellbeing of the next and future generations underpinned all of his work. Like his Polynesian ancestors who navigated the largest ocean on the planet, his co-ordinates were taken over a longer arc.

Jackson’s work will echo for generations. He gave his people the intellectual framework to not only understand what had happened to them but to challenge the present and articulate what might be possible in the future. His work was certainly based in a Maori view of the world, but he was also deeply interested in the richness of other cultures. What he couldn’t abide was the domination of one at the expense of others.

It was an honour to know Moana Jackson and call him a friend. Many others shared that honour and will weave a rich korowai of stories about this beloved man. To Ngāti Kahungunu, Rongomaiwahine, Ngāti Porou, you have lost a mighty rangatira. To his whānau who have not only lost a mentor, a friend, a rangatira, but a pāpā and a koro – thank you for sharing him with us.

Moe mai ra e hoa, e te rangatira. Moe mai ra.