A state of denial and the ongoing impact of generations of damage

Friday, 4 March 2022

Minister for the Public Service Chris Hipkins has described the decades of failures of redress for abuse in care survivors as 'a national disgrace'. (Video first published in December 2021)

On Monday the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry begins a two-week hearing into the experiences of Māori. Aaron Smale reflects on the damage done to generations of Māori who went through state institutions as children.

There were looks of baffled horror on the faces of people listening. And it wasn’t just my Kiwi accent.

I was at Columbia University’s journalism school in New York, speaking to a bunch of hard-bitten journalists from around the world.

There was a journalist from CNN who’d covered police shootings of African Americans. A Syrian-American journalist from the Wall Street Journal who covered the Middle East for more than a decade. A Serbian photographer from Reuters who covered war zones. A Dutch journalist working to expose child pornography rings. A Kashmiri journalist who had covered the ongoing civil war in his own country.

Then there was me, a freelancer without a real job, from Levin. Somehow I’d managed to get into the Ochberg Fellowship, a week of intense training and discussion about reporting on trauma.

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Out of more than 300 applicants, I was one of 14 chosen. Most of them had only a vague idea where New Zealand was and likely thought of it as some antipodean paradise populated by Hobbits and gorgeous scenery. And here I was, telling them that our country tortured and abused indigenous children.

I told them about children taken not only for abuse or neglect, but for wagging school or getting into a schoolyard fight, or because their families were poor.

Unresolved trauma can twist and distort a person’s whole life.

I told them about the solitary confinement of children in cells, sometimes for months on end. I told them about the violence. About the systemic sexual abuse. About the use of electric shocks, including on the genitals, to punish children for things like not eating their vegetables. And I told them about the traumatised adults these children grew into and how that trauma polluted every aspect of their lives.

At one point I made reference to the Stolen Generations in Australia and there were nods of recognition.

In such illustrious company in such an historic institution, I’d felt like an imposter all week. That was dispelled when I finished talking and an indigenous Canadian journalist got up after me. “Thank you, Aaron,” she said. “I don’t need to explain what I’m doing because you’ve already said it.”

People she knew had been through Canada’s now infamous indigenous residential schools. She understood only too well the trauma those institutions had inflicted on generations of indigenous Canadians.

But the residential schools were also an international story that had been covered extensively by media. Likewise the Stolen Generations in Australia. Both countries – and to a lesser extent the United States – had delved into this ugly side of their histories in both media coverage and academic research. Those histories, once buried or neglected, are now deeply embedded in the public consciousness to become part of those countries’ understandings of their national stories.

So why hasn’t New Zealand had the same hard reckoning?

Te Pītau Whakarei grace the stage at the Te Tauihu ki te Hoe kapa haka event in Nelson The most recent census revealed that 24 per cent of children in New Zealand have Māori ancestry (file photo).

The short answer is that over the period that Canada and Australia were coming to terms with their crimes against indigenous children, New Zealand was going to extraordinary lengths to deny and minimise its abuse of Māori children. We silenced those survivors.

Even when it settles a legal claim filed against it, the New Zealand Crown doesn’t simply pay out compensation. Instead payments are often called ex gratia, or a gift, with a letter of apology that tells the victim the apology is not an admission of liability.

While the Canadian and Australian public have grappled with what their countries did to their first peoples, and in many cases demanded an apology, the New Zealand public has remained ignorant and indifferent.

It’s part of New Zealand’s self-mythology that our version of colonisation wasn’t as bad as other countries. This belief is hard to sustain when considering the removal and abuse of Māori children. In many respects we are worse.

Canada put 150,000 indigenous children through the residential schools, over a period of around 100 years. That number was drawn from an indigenous population that now stands at 1.67 million.

Best estimates from Australia – and the data is patchy – have come up with figures of at least 50,000 Aboriginal children taken from their families. But again, this was over approximately 80 years. The current Aboriginal population stands at around 860,000.

When the Government’s “pepper potting” policy collapsed, large numbers of Māori were shifted to Ōtara and Māngere in South Auckland, creating de facto segregation.

In New Zealand one estimate concluded that approximately 100,000 children were removed by the state (the royal commission has come up with higher numbers). There’s anecdotal evidence strongly indicating that around 70 to 80 per cent were Māori. However, those 70,000-odd Māori children were taken in the post-war period between the 1960s and the early 1990s. That’s roughly 30 years.

The current Maori population is around 850,000, which is approximately 16 per cent of the total population and the latest census showed that 24 per cent of children in Aotearoa have Māori whakapapa. Canada and Australia’s indigenous peoples make up 4.5 and 3.3 per cent of their total populations respectively.

In other words, New Zealand took more indigenous kids from their families in a shorter space of time than Canada and Australia. That comparison is amplified when taking into consideration that New Zealand has a smaller population and Māori make up a larger percentage of that total.

But the removal of indigenous children cannot be viewed in isolation from the larger context of colonisation. As Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe has observed, colonialism is not an event, it’s a structure.

Like other indigenous populations, Māori have often been perceived and portrayed as a problem. And if you define something as a problem then there are always going to be those who offer a solution that serves their purposes.

Māori were portrayed as problem when they were in the way of Pākehā settlers who wanted their land. So war ensued and the Native Land Court was established to solve that problem. Māori needed to be assimilated into European society (ie: erased), so native schools were set up to strip Māori children of their language and prepare them for the lowest rung on the economic ladder.

At one point it was believed that Māori were a dying race, which kind of solved all sorts of problems – they’ll disappear soon so there’s no point making much effort to work out what their place is in New Zealand society. Māori were out in the sticks and fading away.

Derelict buildings at Kohitere Boys Home in Levin. Kohitere was part of a network of welfare homes throughout the country that thousands of children went through in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

That belief turned out to be not only misguided but dangerous. When the Māori population recovered, it did so in spectacular fashion. Between 1936 and 1961 the Māori population doubled from 80,000 to more than 160,000. Because the Māori economic land base had virtually disappeared, from the 1950s to the 1970s, that population went from being predominantly rural to overwhelmingly urban. Neither the government nor Pākehā society were prepared for that change. So Māori became a problem again.

It’s often argued that Māori struggled to adapt to urbanisation because they were somehow a simple country folk who were befuddled by the big city lights. But perhaps it was Pākehā who couldn’t cope with the sudden and large presence of Māori in their neighbourhoods.

There are hundreds of pages of documents in Archives that demonstrate explicitly that government departments were worried about how white New Zealanders would react to the increased presence of brown New Zealanders living next to them. There are also multiple examples of Pākehā individuals and organisations like real estate agents objecting to the presence of Māori. Government departments were slow and sometimes reluctant to address the many challenges facing such a demographic upheaval.

One early response was to try to dilute the Maori presence by “pepper potting”, that is, scattering Māori throughout Pākehā neighbourhoods. It was also designed to avoid the kinds of slums that had emerged in the US in the wake of African Americans leaving the Jim Crow South for the industrial cities of the north. But Pākehā residents constantly raised objections to having Māori living next to them.

The pepper-potting policy collapsed in the face racial prejudice but also the sheer scale of the numbers. Māori ended up in slum housing in places like Freeman’s Bay. Eventually the council and the government drew a line around the area and instigated a slum clearance that not only knocked over the sub-standard housing but shifted large numbers of Māori out. Many of them were shifted to suburbs in south Auckland like Ōtara and Māngere.

What this effectively did was create de facto segregation. This happened on various scales throughout the country. Furthermore, most of those in these suburbs were in low-income employment because of an education system that had deliberately prepared them for that position.

It wasn’t long before police and welfare officers, most of whom were Pākehā, were patrolling these areas. These patrols were formalised with what were called J Teams. One kuia I’ve spoken to from Māngere said they set up community patrols to keep an eye out for the J Teams. She was working for Māori Affairs at the time and recalled bailing up a cop who was harassing a young Māori boy. She told the cop to piss off.

Tyrone Marks was one of thousands of children who spent their childhoods in state welfare institutions.

But others weren’t so lucky. I’ve spoken to a number of men and women who are now getting into their 60s who were picked up like this for such trivial offences as wagging school. One told me his father asked the police to speak to him after he wagged school for one day as a 10-year-old. The father assumed the police would bring his son home after a chat down at the station. They didn’t. They sent him to a welfare home and he spent the next four years doing the circuit of welfare institutions.

The violence and abuse he and others experienced in those homes prepared many of them for a life of incarceration. The common trauma and childhood bonds that were formed in those institutions also laid the foundation for gangs like the Mongrel Mob, Black Power and Nomads that flourished in the 1970s and 80s.

A significant number of gang leaders and members went through welfare homes like Epuni, Hokio Beach School, Kohitere and Owairaka. They were hardened by the violence they’d experienced in those homes and hostile to authority. For many the police were the enemy. On numerous occasions it was the police who put them in those places, often after they’d run away from abuse. Why would you respect the law when it only punished you and not the criminals who abused you as a child?

This isn’t just a hindsight view. It was well established and recognised at the time that many of the children going through state welfare institutions ended up in jail and gangs. I’ve seen reports written by government officials in different departments recognising those links in the 1970s and 80s. In one report about Paremoremo Prison in the 1980s, it stated baldly that most of the men in our maximum security had come through places like Kohitere.

This is not just men either. Girls who went through welfare homes, although smaller in numbers, followed a similar trajectory.

The New Zealand Crown’s legalistic response has been motivated by the imperative to avoid legal liability and, by extension, the costs of proper compensation.

The problem with that approach is that we’ve been paying the costs for decades in all sorts of ways, including financial.

The costs to the individual alone are catastrophic. One of the most perverse outcomes of our national denial is that victims often think it was somehow their fault. Perpetrators, including the state, are experts at silencing victims. But the silencing of victims of state abuse has led to them internalising the blame for what happened to them as children. This is especially true for Māori children who were regularly denigrated by staff because they were Māori.

Recently I found a document that verified an account by Rangi Wickliffe that he’d been gang-raped as a child when he was at Lake Alice. When given the document he was silent for a moment before responding: “This exonerates me.” I found this heart-breakingand pointed out that he wasn’t the criminal. “Yeah, but they always told me I was lying.”

Unresolved trauma like that twists and distorts a person’s whole life. But the impact doesn’t stop with the individual. It rips through generations and impacts on whānau in ways they can’t even see or comprehend themselves because their parents have never been given the chance or resources to deal with what happened to them.

In many cases the impact doesn’t fade over time and generations, it escalates. More often than not, Māori who are caught up in the criminal justice system or come to the attention of Oranga Tamariki have this history in their background. Instead of recognising this, the state inflicts further trauma. How is prison going to help a person come to terms with this kind of childhood trauma? How is taking their children going to bring about healing?

The survivors I’ve met and got to know are some of the most intelligent, articulate and insightful people I’ve encountered in more than two decades of journalism. I often wonder – as do they – how their lives would have turned out if they didn’t go through abuse in state custody. I also wonder how much human potential has been wasted, something you simply can’t put a price on. What have Maori hapū and iwi missed out on because some of their best people have been irrevocably damaged by the state? And what have those iwi and hapū done to stand up for their own?

If you take even a conservative figure of 70,000 Māori children going through the state welfare system in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and multiply that by their children and grandchildren, you would come up with a group of Māori that is bigger than any iwi. My guess is they represent a group that is larger by number than the biggest two or three iwi combined. So why doesn’t the Crown want to sit down at the table with them?

Their trauma has been ignored and downplayed for their whole lives. In many cases they have even been shunned by their own people.

Send your tips, story ideas and comments to poutiaki@stuff.co.nz

The royal commission will hear from a small group of Māori survivors of state abuse in the next two weeks. It is a recognition that the impacts of state abuse fell most heavily on Māori as a group. This is not to rank people’s trauma or diminish the experience of those who aren’t Māori. Pākehā who went through those institutions and those who were abused in church settings deserve to be heard like everyone else.

But the sheer number of Māori who went through the state welfare system is not some kind of anomaly. It is a crime this country has inflicted on Māori that is deeply linked to colonisation.

In New Zealand that has never been properly acknowledged. It is a narrative that has never taken hold in our national consciousness in the same way it has in Canada and Australia.

That needs to change. A crime is made worse by denial. The royal commission's investigation is a very small step in the right direction. But it will mean nothing until the New Zealand Government – and New Zealand society at large – face up to the harm done to generations of Māori children at the hands of the state.