How colonization created the circuit of state assistance to prisons

By Dr. Rawiri Waretini-Karena*

On July 24, the government will publish the final report of the Royal Commission into Child Abuse. Ahead of the report’s publication, survivors are sharing their hopes for the healing process that lies ahead.

First person – Abuse in care homes is a colonial story. When I first walked into the prison yard as a teenager, having never been there before, I already knew 80 percent of the men there. We had spent the previous 11 years growing up together in state-run care homes.

It was then that I learned there was a pipeline to prison; a pipeline that has spent decades trapping and funnelling Māori children from state care into prison.

We talk about broken homes, broken families and broken communities, but what is the secret of how they became broken?

Look at it this way: If I sell you a car and I slash the brakes, and you go out and drive it and have an accident, who is responsible? You for driving or me for slashing the brakes?

This recognizes that while we are responsible for our actions, we are not responsible for the hidden mechanisms that operate within the environment we are born into, privileging one faction at the expense of the other.

For me, it is clear: the problem goes directly back to the legislative policies of successive governments. You cannot separate abuse in state care from our history of colonisation and indigenous oppression. The stories of survivors of state care are all part of colonial history.

Domestic violence, sexual violence and child abuse were not a traditional part of Māori culture before colonisation. This is reflected in a proverb which says: “He Mareikura, he taonga tuku iho ki waenganui ko Ranginui rāua ko Papatūānuku. He tapu te wharetangata” – our women are a sacred conduit between heaven and earth, for they house the sacred house of childbirth.

Māori families traditionally lived in communities where the child was loved and cared for, so harming a child was tapu, because when one harms a child, one also harms its whakapapa, which carries serious consequences as the whakapapa was also considered sacred.

But when the British came, they brought with them the colonial tool of assimilation, targeting indigenous children, because they were the most likely to assimilate into Western visions and ways of seeing things, by being forced to adopt Western pedagogies.

In Aotearoa, the British created stolen generations Māori experiences by doling out assimilation policies through legislation, establishing the Native Department in 1861. In 1867, they implemented the Abandoned and Delinquent Children Act, which the Oranga Tamariki could draw on, as well as the Native Schools Act 1867, which established an education system designed to assimilate Māori into Pākehā society by requiring that only the English language could be written or spoken in schools. This was enforced through severe corporal punishment.

As an analogy, if you take a stone and throw it into a pond, it creates ripples. The Native Schools Act 1867 represents that stone. The first wave made the Maori language illegal. The second wave saw the state ban te reo Maori. The third wave saw legal justification for beating and abusing tama-ariki for speaking their native language.

The fourth shock wave saw the status of tama-ariki shift from taonga to lower-class commodities. This led to the fifth shock wave, where tama-ariki, over generations, began to suffer abuse, neglect and death at the hands of their caregivers, who suffered harsh corporal punishment in schools as children and then in turn applied the same form of discipline to their tama-ariki, leading to the children becoming wards of the state.

Between 1950 and 1999, more than 200,000 children were abused in state care, perpetuating an endless systemic cycle of broken homes, broken families, and broken communities, without any intergenerational understanding of the insidious systemic mechanisms that created the problem in the first place.

When this report comes out, I really want to see the government be brave and explore this cause and effect.

So far, the coalition has been very good at criticizing crime rates, setting up training camps and calling out gangs, but it has been very slow in identifying the contributing factors and root causes that led to these outcomes.

The Royal Commission has been running since 2018. It has gathered the lived experiences of thousands of survivors and compelling evidence to support both the survivors’ stories and the recommendations made. They have all the information they need to make informed, evidence-based decisions.

We have been here before: the Waitangi Tribunal and remuneration process came about because there was finally a recognition that the inalienable, inherited rights Māori held prior to Te Tiriti o Waitangi (and recognised under Te Tiriti o Waitangi) were violated over numerous generations, leading to intergenerational poverty, loss of cultural heritage and the near-extinction of te reo Māori, and that these violations led to the privileging of Pākehā at the expense of Māori.

But this has been accompanied by a certain political intent that has allowed what I call “historical amnesia” to pervade the country, perpetuating ideas about Maori as being rich rather than acknowledging a history of invasion, war, genocide and confiscation/theft of trillions of dollars’ worth of land, resources and assets.

We cannot allow that to happen again. We must unravel this story about state care and how it came about, and that is what the government is afraid to do.

I want to encourage them to be brave and open, so that we never have to repeat it. But they don’t know how. But the Maori do. ​​Because we’ve done it before.

In 1906, 95 percent of Maori could speak their mother tongue. Eighty years later, only 5 percent did. We have gone from generations who lost their reo to future generations of fluent speakers.

When I see the harm that Māori children in care suffer, assimilation seeks to disconnect them from their native voice and cultural heritage, controlling the way Māori children perceive themselves. Because a people cut off from their cultural heritage is like a tree without roots, moving back and forth, because they are not rooted and anchored in their whakapapa, their customs and their language, and they become vulnerable to the manipulations of those who do not have their best interests at heart.

Part of the healing journey is enabling Maori children in state care to reconnect with their cultural heritage, whilst our country, as a catalyst for change, embraces working together as partners in Te Tiriti honouring our history whilst securing our future, from a place of aroha, humility and compassion to build the kind of respectful race relations that would be the envy of the rest of the world.

* Dr Rawiri Waretini-Karena is from Ngāti Māhanga, Ngāti Māhuta, as well as Ngāti Kaahu and Ngāti Hine. He spent more than a decade in state care before being convicted of murder and spending more than a decade in prison. Since his release, Waretini-Karena has become an expert on intergenerational trauma and alternatives to violence.

He graduated with a PhD in Philosophy in Indigenous Studies in 2014 and was a lecturer on the Masters and Professional Doctorate Programme at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi. He is a nationally and internationally published editor and author who teaches at Wintec and specialises in counselling social work and mental health. He has most recently been Head of Research at Tuu Oho Mai Services, where he delivers workshops in the field of family violence and sexual violence. And until recently he was the Executive Director of Tu Tonu Health & Rehabilitation Wellbeing Centre in Hamilton.

He is currently Executive Sales Representative for Te Mana Energy, a globally operating Maori solar and desalination renewable energy company.

This combination of knowledge and experience puts Rawiri Waretini-Karena in a unique position to make recommendations for change.

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