Mana Tangatarua

Mixed heritages, ethnic identity and biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Zarine L. Rocha, Melinda Webber, Zarine L. Rocha, Melinda Webber

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315309798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume explores mixed race/mixed ethnic identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Mixed race and mixed ethnic identity are growing in popularity as research topics around the world. This edited collection looks at mixed race and mixed ethnic identity in New Zealand: a unique context, as multiple ethnic identities have been officially recognised for more than 30 years.

The book draws upon research across a range of disciplines, exploring the historical and contemporary ways in which official and social understandings of mixed race and ethnicity have changed. It focuses on the interactions between race, ethnicity, national identity, indigeneity and culture, especially in terms of visibility and self-defined identity in the New Zealand context.

Mana Tangatarua situates New Zealand in the existing international scholarship, positioning experiences from New Zealand within theoretical understandings of mixedness. The chapters develop wider theories of mixed race and mixed ethnic identity, at macro and micro levels, looking at the interconnections between the two. The volume as a whole reveals the diverse ways in which mixed race is experienced and understood, providing a key contribution to the theory and development of mixed race globally.

Section I
Mixedness and classifications across generations

1
A history of mixed race in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Zarine L. Rocha and Angela Wanhalla

Introduction

The meanings of race and ethnicity in New Zealand have undergone significant shifts over time, both in terms of administrative classifications and practical social impacts. Against a historical backdrop of colonial racial hierarchy, New Zealand maintains a contemporary narrative of a multicultural society within a bicultural national framework. Ethnicity is now highlighted over race, illustrating an important shift in both state and popular understandings of what it means to belong to an ethnic (or racial) group. However, despite this change, the largely colonial history of race and ‘mixed race’ continues to shape both social policy and wider societal ideas around belonging (Rocha, 2012). As public narratives around race and ethnicity have developed over time, the positioning of and associations around ‘mixed race’ have shifted in parallel. This chapter charts the evolution of racial and ethnic categorizations in relation to the state’s policies of racial amalgamation (1840s–1860s), assimilation (1860s–1950s), integration (1960s) and the development of biculturalism (1980s), which was created in a context of increasing ethnic diversity. It looks at how state narratives of race and ethnicity have developed and shifted in the New Zealand context, and how this has shaped ‘mixed race’ and mixed ethnic identifications for individuals and groups.

The subjects of ‘mixed race,’ mixed ethnicity and mixedness are increasingly important in academic and political discourse in many countries around the world. Much research has been undertaken in the United States and the United Kingdom (Ifekwunigwe, 2004; Parker and Song, 2001; Rockquemore et al., 2009; Root, 1996), and recently more international work has been coming to the fore (Edwards et al., 2012; King-O’Riain et al., 2014). This growing interest highlights the unique positioning of ‘mixed race’ identities, which do not fit neatly within established classification structures, and can challenge sociological understandings of the significance of race and ethnicity in society. Official recognition of mixedness is key, and is increasingly achieved through modifying national census questions on race and ethnicity. ‘Mixed race’ was officially recognized by the American and British censuses in 2000 and 2001, moving away from singular racial categories and allowing for some flexibility in identification.

New Zealand provides an important case study in this regard, having allowed for multiple ethnic classifications for over 30 years. Although multiplicity has been recognized at the state level in this way for many years, ‘mixed race’ has been both acknowledged and ignored: accorded official recognition in the census while also being practically classified under the more general ethnic/racial categories which inform institutional and everyday interactions. This chapter traces how this situation has come about, from colonial hierarchies and categories of race, to more recent state efforts to expand understandings of ethnicity.

Race and ethnicity, ‘mixed race’ and colonialism

Early instances of ‘race mixing’ in New Zealand can be traced to the late eighteenth-century male-dominated seasonal communities of sealers, flax traders and shore-based whalers who lived and worked in close proximity to Māori communities. During this period, numerous ships also visited New Zealand to make repairs, trade and get supplies, staying for days, or sometimes for several months. Cross-cultural relationships emerged out of these visits, which ranged from fleeting sexual encounters through to more permanent relationships (Salesa, 2011), and in some cases, children were born.

Of more significance to the history of ‘race mixing’ in early New Zealand are the semi-permanent settlements forged out of the flax and whaling trades. Needing the patronage of local chiefs in order to gain access to land on which to set up trading stations, it was not uncommon for these mutually strategic trading alliances to be cemented by marriage of station owners, managers and often their employees into the local community. Marriage created mutual obligations: Māori leaders gained relatives, whose access to new goods (such as muskets) and technologies enhanced chiefly mana (prestige) and consolidated their power in the region, while European traders gained land and powerful allies. Although Māori and traders often entered these relationships for strategic and political reasons, many couples developed deep attachments and would remain together for life, well after the trading era ended in the 1840s. Cross-cultural relationships were diverse, however. Some were short-term, and lasted only as long as the man was in port, and there were also many traders who abandoned their Māori partner and families (Wanhalla, 2008; Wanhalla, 2013). No matter the circumstances of their birth, ‘mixed race’ individuals and cross-cultural families emerged out of these trading communities, and their future would be the subject of debate after formal British colonization.

On the 6th of February 1840, New Zealand was formally annexed when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed between around 500 Māori chiefs and the British Crown (see Orange, 1997). Consistent with other colonial societies at the time, such as Canada, Australia and Brazil, New Zealand never legally prohibited miscegenation. Partly this was pragmatic, as New Zealand was a Māori-dominated society, with an estimated non-Māori population of 2,000 living in the colony by 1840. Whalers and traders, many married into Māori communities, constituted a large proportion of this non-Māori population. Given the importance of cross-cultural relationships to Māori leaders, legally prohibiting them would have placed the nascent colonial state into conflict with powerful Māori tribes who regarded these men as their kin.

Belief in racial hierarchies also shaped the colonial state’s approach to how it treated intermarriage. In the mid to late nineteenth century, intellectuals and politicians debated pseudo-scientific theories about the relationship between race-mixing and racial health. There were two prominent schools of thought: those who believed in fixed racial differences regarded racial degeneration as the inevitable outcome of race-mixing. Another group viewed mixing between ‘like’ races as a source of racial strength (Wanhalla, 2013, p. 126–7) although in such cases the ‘inferior race’ would always be absorbed by the ‘superior’ one. Claims that Māori shared racial origins with British peoples encouraged a view that intermarriage was a vital strategy for social and biological assimilation (and potentially appropriation of land) (Freeman, 2005; Riddell, 2000). It was expected that Māori would eventually ‘amalgamate’ into the settler population, making the category of ‘half-caste’ an important way for the state to monitor both inter-racial relationships and social change (Callister et al., 2006, p. 5; Callister and Kukutai, 2009, p. 19).

In his study of racial amalgamationist thought in mid-nineteenth century New Zealand, historian Damon Salesa has identified the centrality of intermarriage to colonial policy. Official acceptance of intermarriage did not necessarily equate to racial tolerance: rather, as Salesa has illustrated, intermarriage was regarded as one strategy for advancing colonization (Salesa, 2011). Supporting intermarriage had advantages for the colonial state, for as Wanhalla (2013) has shown, it fostered positive relationships with ‘mixed-race’ families, who were regarded as potential allies in advancing colonization. For instance, colonial officials deliberately fostered connections with those white men who forged intimate relationships with Māori women prior to 1840, because these men’s affective ties situated them as potential sources of political information. Given the link between marriage and land settlement, officials were also willing to investigate the claims of white men occupying and cultivating land obtained by intermarriage. These claims were heard and settled in the 1840s and 1850s, and many succeeded in gaining individual title to land given to their Māori partner as a marriage gift. As a result, the Māori woman and her tribe lost control over that land. Intermarriage, therefore, became a way to access land for some European men (Wanhalla, 2008; Wanhalla, 2013).

Although there was support and official encouragement for intermarriage as part of a broad goal of racial amalgamation, referring to a process by which Māori were to be slowly assimilated into British institutions and culture, their ‘half-caste’ children were perceived as directly challenging racial hierarchies (Grimshaw, 2002; Wanhalla, 2009; Salesa, 2011). From the 1840s, and throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, ‘half-castes’ would be the subject of intense official, scientific and intellectual debate within New Zealand (Salesa, 2011).

‘Half-castes’ were a growing population and there was some debate over how to effectively manage this population so that their in-between status would not act as a destabilizing force in colonial society. While biological assimilation was encouraged, this had to be accompanied by a systematic program of social and cultural assimilation into the dominant British culture. There were several ways this was to be achieved, the most important being through the education system. During the 1840s and 1850s, for instance, there were short-lived attempts to establish schools for ‘half-castes,’ often by missionaries in order to effect ‘civilization’ to British culture and inculcate loyalty to the state (Wanhalla, 2013, p. 59). In 1867, this assimilationist agenda was given official standing when the state took control of Māori education, with serious consequences for the viability of the Māori language.

Another strategy of amalgamation was ensuring the legal rights of ‘half-caste’ children. In 1860, to better manage this population, the Half Caste Disability Removal Bill was enacted. This served to ‘legitimate’ mixed children born before the marriage of their parents, and therefore allow them to inherit their father’s land. As the bill prioritized legal relationships over customary Māori marriages, it served to promote legal intermarriage by linking legitimacy and land rights to marriage. Ensuring the legal rights of ‘legitimate’ ‘mixed-race’ children also reflected changing Victorian moral sensibilities, which were hardening in the 1850s. As colonial settlement expanded during this decade, cross-cultural couples and their children were increasingly associated with racial and moral degradation. Making marriage ‘regular’ gave them and the children legitimacy, and also had the advantage of encouraging a model of morality and family based on Western ideals (Wanhalla, 2013).

Race-based ‘science’ was commonplace in Western philosophical thought at the time, and markers of physical difference and blood were key in organizing and separating populations, justifying colonial dominance (Callister, 2004; Murphy, 2009). On this basis, white settlers were ranked as superior, natural leaders for the indigenous Māori and often positioned against the racial ‘other’ of the immigrant Chinese (Murphy, 2005; Sedgwick, 1998). Racial groupings were frequently reduced to stereotype, describing lazy, warlike and primitive Māori and devious, corrupting Chinese (Larner and Spoonley, 1995; Meredith, 1998). Initial relations between groups were defined by such race-based inequalities and imbalances of power, separating white and non-white, and reinforcing colonial dominance (Grbic, 2010; see also Spoonley, 1993).

This application of race as an organizing framework allowed the colonizers to “make race” (Marx, 1998, p. 2) in the New Zealand context, and thus to measure race. Measurement and the resulting categorization were used to reinforce the system of racial hierarchy, as the colonizing power consolidated its rule (B. Anderson, 1991). The national census was a key tool in this process, simultaneously counting and creating the categories which it sought to count (Kertzer and Arel, 2002; Nobles, 2000). This provided the state with a large body of data from which to make claims about the success of assimilationist racial policies. As such, the census proves an important source for tracking official and scientific debates about race.

The first national census in New Zealand was carried out in 1851, but included only the European population. A partial census of the Māori population was taken in 1857–8, with further counts of the Māori population attempted from 1867. As Kate Riddell (2000, p. 84) points out, because the enumeration of the Māori population did not come under the 1877 Census Act, it was undertaken separately to that of the general population and with different forms. Census taking in Māori districts relied on the efforts of local officials such as native officers and resident magistrates, and they were requested to gather particular information relating to the health of the popula...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: situating mixed race in New Zealand and the world
• SECTION I Mixedness and classifications across generations
• SECTION II Mixed identifications, indigeneity and biculturalism
• SECTION III Mixing the majority/Pākehā identity
• Index