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Friday, November 02, 2012
Break from blogging
I'm taking a break from writing for the next couple of months. My daughter was born nearly a month ago, and that's where all my attention will be for quite some time.
Monday, October 01, 2012
Superstition, spiritualism, religion, philosophy
A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay about reaction to a pānui from Te Papa about visiting the taonga Māori collection that they host (The tapu of taonga and wāhine in a colonised land). I finished by saying:
When Europeans arrived here, they unselfconsciously slotted tangata whenua into the same orientalist framework they put all indigenous peoples—primitive, barbaric, native (meaning aligned with nature rather than culture), and superstitious. I say unselfconsciously, because Europeans took no time to consider how many of their practices would look to an outsider— unawareness of their place in nature, unthinking cruelty to children and women, inflexible codes of law, an obsession with covering (but not cleaning) the body, uncritical Eurocentric cultural imperialism (the expectation that the European way of thinking and doing is always right, even taken completely away from a European context where other people might know better). Any differences between tangata whenua understandings and actions, and Western understandings and actions, were seen as simply the result of the primitive, superstitious nature of the natives. Europeans certainly did not consider themselves superstitious—although they often did things for religious or cultural reasons that made little sense to anyone not raised within that religious or cultural framework, they were always rational.
As many have observed and written, the West tends to frame things in dichotomies, where Othering is used to strengthen one’s own righteous identity. One of the biggest contrasts at the time of European arrival here, was between European religion (inherently righteous) and Others’ superstitions or spirituality (irrational and childish at best). (It’s interesting to think about the work of Elsdon Best and Percy Smith in this context. They were fascinated by and sympathetic to Māori philosophies and beliefs, and when they wanted to show that tangata whenua were not as primitive as many of their peers thought, they tirelessly sought evidence for Māori belief in a single, supreme god. When they eventually found an informant who spoke of such a god, they then argued that this meant Māori were well on their way to developing a proper religion.)
As the values of the Enlightenment (which elevated intellect and reason above religious adherence) became more widespread, secularism became the righteous stronghold. This meant that our understandings and actions were only valid if they were based on rational (scientific) reasoning—although what is considered rational and relevant would continue to be defined by Western values. This is pretty much where the dominant culture in New Zealand is at now. For whatever reason (I blame cultural imperialism), it is not widely understood that any reasoning is based on values and a cultural framework (as Skyler, from Reading the maps discusses).
Because Western values and cultural frameworks are so pervasive, it is easy to dismiss anything outside those frameworks as not reasonable in some way. It is now common to hear Māori frameworks being dismissed as ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’—when they are actually legitimate philosophies. They have a basis in a belief system and morality, just as Western philosophical frameworks do (much as many now try to deny it). They also have a basis in a very long association with this land, which Western frameworks do not.
The sort of understanding that comes from a long association with a place is so often dismissed as spiritual, and therefore unreasonable. For example, understanding that a river is a living entity, that it has a life-force that must be sustained, and that the wellbeing of my community is intertwined with the wellbeing of that life-force. This can be, and for a long time has been, written off as spiritual, animistic nonsense. But of course, it is true, and Western science (in this case ecology) has been playing catch-up for decades, when we could have just paid attention to tangata whenua (I say ‘we’ because I trained and briefly practised as an ecologist, and never learnt anything of indigenous understandings of relationships with the environment). The knowledge that comes from generations of interdependence with an environment is more legitimate than imported ideas about the way the world works.
The point of this post is that those of us who have been raised within exclusively Western philosophical frameworks need to be open to the limitations of those frameworks. Others understand the world differently, they may understand the world better. They may express that understanding in ways that sound irrational or strange to us. If we dismiss it as nonsense, or incorporate it into our superior frameworks and explain it back to them, then we are behaving as cultural supremacists. We will continue to creep infinitesimally towards understandings that others have known for generations and have freely offered us. Which might be fine, if we weren’t destroying ourselves and our planet as we do so.
To learn more about cultural imperialism and the importance of mātauranga, I highly recommend getting hold of Te Wānanga o Raukawa: Restoring mātauranga to restore ecosystems (produced by Te Whare Whakatupu Mātauranga, published by Te Tākupu and written by Āneta Hinemihi Rāwiri).
“. . . but of course none of this can really be understood without already understanding a Māori worldview. And this is the real issue, while Māori must understand a European worldview and law to survive in this land, colonisation has meant that very few people have any understanding of mātauranga Māori, or, in fact, of colonisation. Whenever an issue requires some understanding, whether it be the significance of te reo Māori, or kaitiakitanga, or whatever, the ignorance of most New Zealanders makes dialogue impossible. And thanks again to colonisation, this creates a problem not for those who are ignorant, but for Māori. Māori must repeatedly start from the beginning and attempt to explain their whole culture—this occurs in conversations, the media, court hearings, tribunal hearings. At some point, tauiwi need to take some responsibility for understanding the indigenous culture, and for understanding how their ignorance contributes to cultural imperialism, to Māori perspectives being marginalised and foreign in their own land.”I want to come back to this to talk about the way Māori realities are often sidelined by people who have made little effort to understand anything beyond Western philosophical frameworks. I encounter this often, (and disappointingly for me) especially in socialist/ libertarian/ anarchist circles, where an analysis of power and imperialism seems especially crucial. I’ve written a lot about this in other posts (eg, Defining Māori), so this is only a summary.
When Europeans arrived here, they unselfconsciously slotted tangata whenua into the same orientalist framework they put all indigenous peoples—primitive, barbaric, native (meaning aligned with nature rather than culture), and superstitious. I say unselfconsciously, because Europeans took no time to consider how many of their practices would look to an outsider— unawareness of their place in nature, unthinking cruelty to children and women, inflexible codes of law, an obsession with covering (but not cleaning) the body, uncritical Eurocentric cultural imperialism (the expectation that the European way of thinking and doing is always right, even taken completely away from a European context where other people might know better). Any differences between tangata whenua understandings and actions, and Western understandings and actions, were seen as simply the result of the primitive, superstitious nature of the natives. Europeans certainly did not consider themselves superstitious—although they often did things for religious or cultural reasons that made little sense to anyone not raised within that religious or cultural framework, they were always rational.
As many have observed and written, the West tends to frame things in dichotomies, where Othering is used to strengthen one’s own righteous identity. One of the biggest contrasts at the time of European arrival here, was between European religion (inherently righteous) and Others’ superstitions or spirituality (irrational and childish at best). (It’s interesting to think about the work of Elsdon Best and Percy Smith in this context. They were fascinated by and sympathetic to Māori philosophies and beliefs, and when they wanted to show that tangata whenua were not as primitive as many of their peers thought, they tirelessly sought evidence for Māori belief in a single, supreme god. When they eventually found an informant who spoke of such a god, they then argued that this meant Māori were well on their way to developing a proper religion.)
As the values of the Enlightenment (which elevated intellect and reason above religious adherence) became more widespread, secularism became the righteous stronghold. This meant that our understandings and actions were only valid if they were based on rational (scientific) reasoning—although what is considered rational and relevant would continue to be defined by Western values. This is pretty much where the dominant culture in New Zealand is at now. For whatever reason (I blame cultural imperialism), it is not widely understood that any reasoning is based on values and a cultural framework (as Skyler, from Reading the maps discusses).
Because Western values and cultural frameworks are so pervasive, it is easy to dismiss anything outside those frameworks as not reasonable in some way. It is now common to hear Māori frameworks being dismissed as ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’—when they are actually legitimate philosophies. They have a basis in a belief system and morality, just as Western philosophical frameworks do (much as many now try to deny it). They also have a basis in a very long association with this land, which Western frameworks do not.
The sort of understanding that comes from a long association with a place is so often dismissed as spiritual, and therefore unreasonable. For example, understanding that a river is a living entity, that it has a life-force that must be sustained, and that the wellbeing of my community is intertwined with the wellbeing of that life-force. This can be, and for a long time has been, written off as spiritual, animistic nonsense. But of course, it is true, and Western science (in this case ecology) has been playing catch-up for decades, when we could have just paid attention to tangata whenua (I say ‘we’ because I trained and briefly practised as an ecologist, and never learnt anything of indigenous understandings of relationships with the environment). The knowledge that comes from generations of interdependence with an environment is more legitimate than imported ideas about the way the world works.
The point of this post is that those of us who have been raised within exclusively Western philosophical frameworks need to be open to the limitations of those frameworks. Others understand the world differently, they may understand the world better. They may express that understanding in ways that sound irrational or strange to us. If we dismiss it as nonsense, or incorporate it into our superior frameworks and explain it back to them, then we are behaving as cultural supremacists. We will continue to creep infinitesimally towards understandings that others have known for generations and have freely offered us. Which might be fine, if we weren’t destroying ourselves and our planet as we do so.
To learn more about cultural imperialism and the importance of mātauranga, I highly recommend getting hold of Te Wānanga o Raukawa: Restoring mātauranga to restore ecosystems (produced by Te Whare Whakatupu Mātauranga, published by Te Tākupu and written by Āneta Hinemihi Rāwiri).
Thursday, September 20, 2012
It’s about whānau—oppression, sexuality and mana
(my talk from the Kei Tua o te Pae conference 2012)
I was adopted at birth by my Pākehā parents, who were guaranteed by the social worker that I was a Pākehā baby, so I grew up entirely in te ao Pākehā. People often asked if I’m Māori, and all I could say was, I don’t know. When I was 20, I got my original birth certificate with my mother’s name on it, and I tracked her down and met her. She is Pākehā, her and my birth father were kids and didn’t know each other for long, and he was gone by the time I was born. She gave me his name and a decade old address in Australia for him. It took me another 10 or so years before I committed to finding him, because I wanted to have children, and I want my children to know their whakapapa, whatever it may turn out to be. I eventually found him, and on his side, I’m from Ngāi Tahu.
I’d already been a bit involved in rōpū Māori when I was at uni, but I’d been uncommitted, because I couldn’t know for sure whether I had whakapapa Māori. Finding out that I do meant an obligation to find out more, to find my place, if any future children of mine were going to be comfortable. I committed to meet my father’s whānau, and find out as much as I could about us and Ngāi Tahu, and where I fit in. That went well, but some other stuff was going on that I couldn’t ignore.
At the time I was doing Te Ataarangi, and it was obvious that my girlfriend and I made a couple of people uncomfortable just by being in class. Student whakaari were at times openly mocking of gay or camp behaviour. When I came to Te Wānanga o Raukawa a year later, again, I saw what I would say was open hostility to sexualities other than heterosexual. For whatever reason, some people must have assumed I was heterosexual, and talked to me about how disgusting homosexuality is, and a kaiako talked in class about homosexuality as if it was worse than incest. It was only a minority of people, but it got my attention.
I’m not suggesting homophobia is unique to Māori. My Pākehā parents were openly homophobic until a year or so after I came out to them. Walking down the street I’ve been abused, had eggs thrown at me, and been chased by cars for holding hands with my girlfriend. At university it wasn’t uncommon to read fantasies about killing gays or lesbians in the letters to the editor of the student newspaper. Homophobia was not a new experience to me, but it got me wondering—I’d had years to find a place for myself in te ao Pākehā, would there be a place for me in te ao Māori? Would that be somewhere I could feel comfortable—as someone who was raised Pākehā, for whom mātauranga Māori is really new, and who is queer. Is it worth trying to find a place here? In the same way that many of us have to act Pākehā to fit into the colonising culture, am I going to have to act straight to fit into te ao Māori? Will there be somewhere that can accept all of me?
This was a question in the back of my mind when I was a student in Ahunga Tikanga classes, listening to Ani Mikaere, Moana Jackson and Leah Whiu talking lovely stuff about whakapapa, ngā kaupapa, inclusion and balance. Everything they said made sense and sounded great, but at the same time I was getting other messages from other places, about excluding people who are different, about disgust and fear of sexual difference in particular, which sounded pretty similar to my experience in Pākehā culture. What was pono? Is there space for me in te ao Māori?
That is where the question started for me, and answering it has taken me in a few different directions. My understanding of this hui is that it is about making sure our tikanga are true to ngā kaupapa mai rā anō, keeping them relevant and adaptive. Hopefully, by the end of this talk, you’ll have some ideas about sexuality and tikanga that adequately reflect our kaupapa.
Before I go on, I want to define two words that I will use in this talk.
Queer (not kuia): a label for those of us who don’t think well-defined boxes are a helpful way to think about gender or sexuality. My partner pointed out to me that it’s hard to hear the difference between queer and kuia. In this talk, I might describe myself as queer, I am not claiming to be a kuia.
Homophobia: the belief that heterosexuality is normal and healthy, and that anything else is wrong, depraved, unhealthy or dangerous.
We can agree on it, because we live with the ongoing effects of colonisation. We know that colonisation is oppression, and we know the trauma of that oppression in our communities and in our lives. Part of the oppression is the acts of the colonisers—taking our land, spreading diseases, imprisoning us, outlawing our ways of being. The oppression is also the messages that they say about us to justify and minimise their crimes against us.
Many of us internalised the messages we heard, and we know many of our young people will internalise the messages they hear—that Māori are physical and emotional, meaning we aren’t smart enough to look after ourselves or our whenua; that we aren’t moral like the colonisers; that we are violent and overly sexual. Politicians and the media go out of their way to find stories of Māori failure, especially those that show us as naive, immoral and out of control.
We know the effects of this oppression: there is massive pressure to conform to the dominant, colonising values. Some of us do eventually conform, while others can’t or won’t. For all of us, whether we conform or not, oppression tears at our wairua, the sense of self that should make us strong.
Like all indigenous peoples who are living through colonisation, Māori now have high rates of suicide as well as high-risk and anti-social behaviours. This is the effect of the trauma caused by the oppression of colonisation, it is an attack on our wairua. It leads to a whole bunch of outcomes that we all know and I’m not going to go into—I think we can accept that colonisation is oppression, which is trauma. And just as colonisation is very clearly oppression so too is the repression of sexual diversity.
When I was a child, we used words like faggot and lesbian before we had a clue what they meant other than they were something really bad. I don’t know where we got these words from, but I don’t remember anyone ever being told off for using them. Boys were mocked for being girly by adults and by other kids—there are so many words for boys who aren’t appropriately masculine. Sexual or gender difference, being gay or camp, is still the punchline of so many jokes. And most of us will internalise those messages. Whoever we grow up to be, these are really damaging and limiting messages. The effect is similar to colonial oppression—there is massive pressure on all of us to conform to the dominant heterosexual standard. Most of us try to, and for those of us who can’t, if we internalise these messages, we will learn to hate ourselves.
I’m going to talk about shame, because I think it’s important to understand what it’s like to grow up in a culture that is terrified of sexual difference, and I want you to think about a response to that culture which expresses our kaupapa. Should we buy into homophobia, should we allow ourselves to be silenced and timid, or should we protect our tamariki mokopuna?
When I think of my experience as a child, I don’t remember any particular homophobic incidents, but just growing up in Pākehā culture in the 1970s and 80s was like soaking in homophobia. Everything told me that heterosexuality was normal and healthy, and anything else was sick. I remember when homosexual law reform was going through parliament, there was lots of talk about how homosexuals are paedophiles and law reform was opening the door to bestiality. There was all sorts of hateful fear mongering. My parents were saying this stuff too. I knew that homosexuality terrified people because something about it was so sick and disgusting.
Exactly the same hate came out 20 years later when parliament started talking about the Civil Unions bill, and we’re seeing it again now with the Marriage Equality bill. Almost exactly the same words. Whenever anyone tries to remove some anti-homosexual discrimination, we all get a massive dose of hate speech, which is particularly dangerous for children.
I heard all that in the mid 1980s when I was 11 or so, well before I was thinking about what sexuality meant to me. I already knew that something about me was different from other girls. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew there was something wrong with the way I was with my friends and with boys. I was 14 when I started going out with girls, and then everything became much clearer, but also worse, because I knew what people thought of people like me. No-one could know, so I became secretive. I became physically self-conscious and reserved. I didn’t touch anyone, especially not other girls, unless I absolutely had to. I wouldn’t go near children. I had this facade of who I was, and it was completely unrelated to me and what I was feeling. For years, everything about me was fake and was about hiding this awful secret. I still carry some of that self-hatred, that expectation that people will be disgusted or scared to let me be around their children. A lot of people I’ve talked to who aren’t heterosexual relate to this, and some wrote about it in Sexuality and the stories of indigenous people (Hutchings & Aspin, 2007).
I know for most children, first crushes are both exciting and terrifying, and coming into your sexuality is also exciting and terrifying. Ideally, children can talk to their friends about it, or better still their parents. People are excited when children start showing those signs. For lots of young queer people, it is just terrifying. It feels life threatening, and it actually is.
By the age of 21, about a third of young people who are attracted to their own gender will have tried to kill themselves (Suicide Prevention Resource Centre, 2008; in New Zealand, Fergusson, Horwood & Beautrais, 1999). The messages they hear about homosexuals are so clear and hateful that the thought of being one, or trying to live as one, is just too awful.
Why am I talking about this? My point isn’t to bring you down—my point is that how we talk about sexuality or respond to homophobia isn’t abstract or an academic interest. This isn’t a philosophical debate about rights or political views. This is about the survival of our children, just like fighting the racist environments in some of our schools is about survival. To bring it back to the kaupapa of this hui, our tikanga should be helping us to survive as Māori, not killing us.
We give children messages about sexuality and gender in many ways. Teaching them to be ashamed, controlling how we behave as girls and boys, talking about heterosexuality as if it is the only normal option as opposed to just a common way of being, laughing at people who are different—none of this will make us heterosexual. All it does is make us scared of who we might be. It makes us all police our own behaviour. For those of us who can’t be straight, it may teach us to hate ourselves, and make us scared to show ourselves to you. We may become secretive and isolated. It is an attack on our mana, and our wairua. At best, it makes it harder for each of us to reach our potential, at worst, it is so effective that it kills us.
These messages are a form of cultural imperialism, just like colonisation. Those with more power are using it to suppress those with less. Those who are heterosexual are trying to impose their way of being over everyone else, sometimes with the power of the state, sometimes with the authority given to them by a religious text, sometimes with nothing more than numerical dominance and the same self-righteousness that the colonisers wear. It’s all the same.
When I was putting this together, I kept being reminded of Whatarangi Winiata’s paper Treaty of Waitangi: towards 2000, and his analysis of why Māori do poorly now compared to Pākehā:
The racist practices that Whatarangi describes privilege a Pākehā way of being as normal and right, while pathologising Māori ways of being, and lead to the horrible statistics and health outcomes we all know. To me, this seems parallel to how heterosexual ways of being have been privileged by the Crown, by churches and eventually by our communities and whānau, while at the same time, other ways of being have been suppressed. This has meant that many young queer people struggle with who they will be and what their future will look like, for exactly the same reasons that young Māori often struggle with these questions (and it is likely that this is particularly true of young people who are both queer and Māori). Because almost everywhere we turn, it is being drummed into us that we are different, and lesser, and wrong—and we are then blamed for the inevitable outcomes.
As I’ve said, this is all true of Pākehā culture, but from my limited experience, and from talking to and reading about the experiences of other Māori, I think there are the same destructive attitudes and behaviours in many Māori communities. I would argue, there is a lack of leadership and willingness to talk about why. I’ll talk about our leaders in a moment, but first I want to talk about our children.
In a survey of New Zealand high school students, compared to students who identified as exclusively heterosexual, twice as many same-sex attracted students were afraid that someone would hurt or bother them at school, three times as many had stayed away from school because they were afraid someone would hurt or bother them, three times as many were bullied weekly at school, and 54% had been physically assaulted in the last 12 months (compared with 42% of exclusively heterosexual students); of the same-sex attracted students who were bullied, one third were bullied because they were perceived to be gay (Rossen, Lucassen, Denny & Robinson, 2009, p 26). A US study suggests that not only is homophobic violence commonly experienced, a surprising number of people are perpetrating it—one in ten university students admit physical violence or threats against people they suspect of being homosexual, and one in four admit verbally abusing them (Franklin, 2000).
It is common for students to see their schools as poor at responding to any form of bullying (Carroll-Lind, 2009, pp 41-47, 77; Painter, 2009, p 11). Many schools aren’t proactive about dealing with homophobic abuse, they don’t talk positively about sexual diversity, they don’t challenge ideas that heterosexuality is normal and everything else is deviant and wrong, or that people who are different deserve abuse and ridicule (Carroll-Lind, 2009, p 61; Painter, 2009, pp 22, 25). Often when homophobic abuse is happening, schools still won’t address the real problem (Carroll-Lind, 2009, pp 46-47). Schools might deal with the physical violence, but not the underlying attitude; they might deal with the perpetrator, but not the culture that allows bullying (Carroll-Lind, 2009, pp 134-135). It’s not uncommon for victims of homophobic abuse to be blamed for provoking the abuse by being homosexual (Painter, 2009, p 12). Even in the face of ongoing physical violence to children because they are perceived to be homosexual, some schools will continue to claim that they provide a safe environment for their students (Kendall & Sidebotham, 2004, pp 71-72). Some principals and boards refuse to see homophobic attitudes as something they should be addressing in school (Painter, 2009, pp 12, 20-21).
Whether we’re talking about race or perceived sexuality or gender, when schools fail to challenge hatred of any sort, they give a clear message that it is okay, and that there is something wrong with the victims. Studies consistently show that these messages are associated with the physical, emotional and social harm that I’ve been talking about, the self hatred, the isolation and the suicide (eg, Suicide Prevention Resource Centre, 2008, pp 19-28 and references therein; Ryan, Huebner, Diaz & Sanchez, 2009, pp 346, 350-351, and references therein).
I hope we can all agree that this is something we should be protecting our children from.
Participants were assigned to groups based on whether they experienced few (0-11), some (more than 11 and up to half), or more than half of these behaviours. These groups turned out to be a good predictor of negative health outcomes, particularly for attempted suicide, where over two thirds of those in the group who had experienced more than half the rejecting behaviours had attempted suicide, compared to one in five in the group with the least rejection.
This study only included young people who had come out to a parent during adolescence—you’d expect participants to come from less homophobic homes than those of us who waited until we’d left home to tell our parents. So these results may be underestimating the effect of homophobic experiences at home. Reading this study really drove home to me how dangerous homophobic attitudes and behaviour can be.
I know I’ve been saying all through this talk how marginalising sexual or gender differences is similar to the way we are marginalised as Māori, but in the home there is a really big distinction. Most Māori children are raised by at least one Māori parent, and the family knows that their children are Māori. Māori parents know what it’s like to be raised in a racist society, and may have some idea of how to protect their children from the stuff they will encounter. Most Māori children probably feel pretty safe talking to their parents about racism that they see or hear, and asking for help understanding or dealing with it. Whereas almost all queer children are born to heterosexual parents, who have no idea what it’s like to grow up queer in a homophobic society, and who don’t know that their children will be queer. The parents of queer children may have no idea how to protect them from the messages they will get, or even that they need to. The parents may themselves be homophobic.
Many of our whānau are not safe places for queer children, and I’d argue that if they aren’t safe for queer children, they aren’t safe for any children. Not just because we can’t know who our children will grow up to be, but also because hatred isn’t safe for children—white children are endangered by growing up with racists, boys are endangered by growing up with misogynists, and heterosexual children are endangered by growing up with homophobes.
In class recently, Moana Jackson was talking to Ahunga Tikanga students about relationships of any sort, whether a parent child relationship, a relationship between workmates, or between institutions, or sexual partners, and how you know whether those relationships are tika. It seems obvious that the gender or sexuality of the people in those relationships is pretty much irrelevant to that question. If the relationships are based on mutual respect, manaakitanga, aroha, then they are tika, irrespective of anything else.
The question of whether heterosexuality is more tika than other ways of loving or relating or having sex with each other seems ridiculous to me. I can’t imagine a kaupapa-based argument that justifies marginalising people based on who they are attracted to. I can’t think of anything resembling kaupapa that would judge me as more or less depending on the gender of the people I love. Any attempt to reduce my mana based on who I sleep with is an insult to my whānau, my whakapapa and all my tūpuna. I cannot accept that as kaupapa or tika.
One of the comparisons that is often made between western culture and most indigenous cultures is that indigenous peoples know we are all different, and that those differences are not just valid, but potentially valuable. We don’t need to feel better about ourselves by trying to dictate anyone else’s tikanga—we just have to get our own stuff right for us. I think this is relevant to how we think about other people’s relationships.
I expect we all know when our wairua is healthy. We feel good, grounded, sure in who we are, safe. When I start focusing on what other people are doing wrong, I know I need to sort myself out. So I don’t see how it can be tika to insult and demean people in healthy relationships because the set up of those relationships is different from what I would choose. If I’m judging other people like that, it’s a pretty good sign that there’s something going on with my own wairua that I need to address.
So if policing people’s sexualities in this way isn’t tikanga, where did it come from?
When Europeans arrived here, they brought with them their fear and hatred of homosexuality. In English law at that time, homosexuality could be punished by hard labour or even death. It’s only been 25 years since the New Zealand state got rid of the law that could imprison men for consensual sex with other men.
When we look to our parents and grandparents for guidance on how to think about different sexualities, we need to remember that for generations we have lived under that strange legal system. Our parents and grandparents, and their grandparents, have been educated in schools and churches based on western values. There are very few places to avoid the awful messages of that culture—remember that it called our tikanga primitive and violent, then told us that we needed to beat our children, our men needed to dominate women and we all needed to hate homosexuality.
Our parents or kaumātua may genuinely believe that there is something wrong with homosexuality. They may genuinely believe that it is traditional to stifle some people’s ways of being. After a couple of hundred years of colonisers trying to shame us into rejecting our values and adopting theirs, that’s hardly surprising. That’s the reason it is so important that we have hui like these to talk about tikanga and kaupapa.
African American activist and academic Angela Davis is clear about where she thinks homophobia comes from:
For example, at the time the English decided they wanted to colonise these motu, their ideal man was the Victorian gentleman. The men that England sent to control us were pretty much in that mould. They weren’t aristocracy, and they hadn’t gone to the flash schools, they were earning their place as gentlemen through their occupations—the military, the church, and the government. Like all social climbers, they brought with them an unwavering belief in that society’s rules. They taught us what it was to be a leader, and how to get those attributes—through private schools, manly sports and Christianity. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say some of us are leaning this way now. If we add business people to the list of career pathways, and replace aristocracy with whakapapa, we are starting to describe a path that many of us would see as ideal for developing our young men into iwi leaders.
One of the things that is interesting about this, is that in general, men, people educated in private schools, people who play dominant sports (in this country, rugby, soccer, cricket and softball), and people with Christian beliefs have each been shown to be associated with more homophobic attitudes (Osborne & Wagner, 2007, pp 599, 601, 607-609, and references therein). If we do follow this pattern for developing leadership, we are pretty much guaranteeing that we will develop sexual repression, and that our children will be subjected to that sexual repression, which will limit the development and potential of most of them, and will endanger the lives of some of them.
If we want our children to be safe and happy and meet their potential, then we have to be prepared to accept them, and love them whoever they turn out to be. We have to make sure they know that.
In the top left, intolerance is anything that tells our children it’s not acceptable to be different—abuse or statements like there’s no gayness in tikanga Māori, or anything that condones abuse or mocking of difference. Treating gay men as if they’re women, which reveals disrespect for both women and gay men. Anything like that is intolerant, and we want to avoid it.
Tolerance is a bit better than intolerance, it means not actively excluding or insulting people that we know to be different from ourselves, but at the same time, it assumes that heterosexuality is so normal and healthy, that we can ignore the reality that not everyone is heterosexual. For example, I might assume that every child, and everyone I know is heterosexual unless they tell me otherwise, which means I don’t have to be careful about what I or anyone else does that would insult people who aren’t heterosexual. It’s much like the Crown acts around ethnicity, it treats us as if we are all white. Māori are not actually excluded from Pākehā society, we’re just expected to change to fit in. Because we assume that every child will grow up to be heterosexual, we don’t bother to protect them from hate or carelessness. We let them see sexual and gender diversity being mocked, or compared to paedophilia, or hear their queer whanaunga described as disgusting, as if this has no effect. Tolerance actually allows intolerance to flourish.
Acceptance is just that, anything that lets our children know that they are awesome and loved whoever they are. It is their whakapapa that gives them a place in their whānau, and everything else is just detail. It also means challenging any homophobic behaviour to protect them from those messages.
Celebration means going out of our way to give positive messages about otherwise marginalised genders or sexualities, as a way of fighting the messages that our children will get outside of our control. For example, loving acceptance probably isn’t a sufficient response if a child has just heard that a prominent Māori leader dreams of a world without gays, or one of their friends has been beaten up for looking queer, or they’re being called faggot or dyke. If a child tells us that they are queer, we should be stoked that they trust us, that they are sharing themselves with us, and we should show them that. If a child is brave enough to express themselves in a way that others are reading as queer, we should celebrate their uniqueness and bravery. Celebration might mean talking to our children about all the different crushes we’ve had, or acknowledging all the crushes they have had, not acting like there is something different about their friendships depending on the gender of their friend. Celebration is anything that lets our children know that whoever they are will be awesome.
If tikanga are the behaviours that express our values, I thought I could use Whatarangi Winiata’s kaupapa matrix model to work backwards (Winiata, 2012). If we think of each of the points on the continuum as a set of behaviours, if they are tika, we should be able to say which kaupapa they are expressing.
Starting with intolerance, which kaupapa am I expressing if I am excluding or attacking my whanaunga based on who they sleep with? It might be a reflection of how little I know, but I couldn’t think of any. Looking at tolerance, which kaupapa am I expressing when I am polite to my whanaunga, while judging them as inferior? Or including them, but expecting them to hide who they are? Again, I couldn’t think of any kaupapa that fit this tikanga. The kaupapa become apparent when we look at the behaviours that show acceptance. Acceptance is an expression of a whole bunch of kaupapa—whanaungatanga, aroha, manaakitanga, rangatiratanga, whakapapa. Finally, looking at celebration, it expresses many of the same kaupapa as acceptance.
Some people will feel that celebration is a step too far—that acceptance is enough. In an ideal world, I would say acceptance is the most tika behaviour. But we live with a dominant culture that condones homophobia. To come back to the analogy with Pākehā culture oppressing tikanga, one response to a culture that makes it hard to live as Māori, is that we celebrate what it means to be Māori, we positively promote Māori ways of being. Many Pākehā are resistant to this, they see affirmative action and celebrations of our ‘Māoriness’ as reverse racism. We know they are wrong, and we can extend that analysis to repression of sexual diversity, even if it initially makes us a bit uncomfortable.
The point of this continuum isn’t to judge where we each are as parents or friends. We will probably all struggle to overcome the culture that we have been raised in, I certainly do. This is where we need to think about whose kaupapa we are expressing. Western culture has been all about controlling and limiting us, tikanga should be about all of us reaching our potential. My challenge to you, is to make sure you are reflecting the values you want to. Be more awesome, so those around you can feel safe enough to be who they are meant to be. Be brave enough to be uncomfortable. Be brave enough to fight for sexual and gender diversity education in your children’s and grandchildren’s schools. Be brave enough to love your whole child, and your whole self. We know we aren’t going to fully realise tino rangatiratanga unless Pākehā get a bit uncomfortable and give up some power. It’s the same with sexual diversity.
Like I said earlier, no amount of hatred, bullying or abuse is going to make anyone heterosexual, it will only make people hide themselves from you. Don’t be that person. If you don’t know anyone who isn’t heterosexual, if you think everyone in your whānau is heterosexual, then that is a reflection on the impression you have made. You can change that impression.
We need to be clear that homophobia does not come from tikanga. It comes from the colonisers. Whakapapa is about inclusion—there needs to be a really good reason to exclude or demean someone in any way. Who they sleep with is not a good reason. Our children grow up in an environment where they will see, hear and experience hatred of different sexualities. Whoever they grow up to be, these messages are dangerous. These messages will limit how our children see themselves and who they can imagine being.
At the moment, we have so much unhelpful hatred and intolerance passing as debate about marriage and adoption equality, and if there’s one thing I want you to get from this talk, it’s that we need to change that conversation. Our children don’t need to be protected from homosexuality, they need to be protected from hate. People loving each other will never endanger children, homophobia will.
REFERENCES
Akili, Yolo ‘The immediate need for emotional justice’ http://crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/the-immediate-need-for-emotional-justice/ (accessed 12/09/2012)
Carroll-Lind, J 2009 School Safety: An Inquiry into the Safety of Students at School (Office of the Children’s Commissioner, Wellington)
Davis, A 1989 Women, Culture, & Politics (Random House, New York)
Fergusson, D, L Horwood and A Beautrais 1999 ‘Is sexual orientation related to mental health problems and suicidality in young people?’ Archives of General Psychiatry 56: 876-880
Franklin, K 2000 ‘Antigay Behaviors Among Young Adults: Prevalence, Patterns and Motivators in a Noncriminal Population’ Journal of Interpersonal Violence 15: 339-362
Hutchings, J and C Aspin (eds) 2007 Sexuality and the Stories of Indigenous (Huia Publishers, Wellington)
Kendall, C and N Sidebotham 2004 ‘Homophobic Bullying in Schools: Is there a Duty of Care?’ Australia & New Zealand Journal of Law and Education 9, pp 71-72
Osborne, D and W Wagner 2007 ‘Exploring the Relationship Between Homophobia and Participation in Core Sports among High School Students’ Sociological Perspectives 50: 597-613
Painter, H 2009 How Safe? How Safe and Inclusive are Otago Secondary Schools (OUSA, Dunedin)
Rossen, F, M Lucassen, S Denny and E Robinson 2009 Youth ’07 The Health and Wellbeing of Secondary School Students in New Zealand: Results for Young People Attracted to the Same or Both Sexes (Auckland University, Auckland)
Ryan, C, D Huebner, R Diaz and J Sanchez 2009 ‘Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes in White and Latino Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young Adults’ Pediatrics 123: 346-352
Suicide Prevention Resource Centre 2008 Suicide Risk and Prevention for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth (Education Development Center, Newton MA, USA)
Winiata, W ‘Building Māori futures on kaupapa tuku iho’ Paper given at Kei Tua o te Pae conference, 4-5 September, 2012
Winiata, W ‘Treaty of Waitangi: Towards 2000: Economic Progression and the Interconnection between Maori and Tauiwi Development’ (unpublished paper, 28 June 1995)
Introduction
I need to start by talking about who I am, and why this is important to me.I was adopted at birth by my Pākehā parents, who were guaranteed by the social worker that I was a Pākehā baby, so I grew up entirely in te ao Pākehā. People often asked if I’m Māori, and all I could say was, I don’t know. When I was 20, I got my original birth certificate with my mother’s name on it, and I tracked her down and met her. She is Pākehā, her and my birth father were kids and didn’t know each other for long, and he was gone by the time I was born. She gave me his name and a decade old address in Australia for him. It took me another 10 or so years before I committed to finding him, because I wanted to have children, and I want my children to know their whakapapa, whatever it may turn out to be. I eventually found him, and on his side, I’m from Ngāi Tahu.
I’d already been a bit involved in rōpū Māori when I was at uni, but I’d been uncommitted, because I couldn’t know for sure whether I had whakapapa Māori. Finding out that I do meant an obligation to find out more, to find my place, if any future children of mine were going to be comfortable. I committed to meet my father’s whānau, and find out as much as I could about us and Ngāi Tahu, and where I fit in. That went well, but some other stuff was going on that I couldn’t ignore.
At the time I was doing Te Ataarangi, and it was obvious that my girlfriend and I made a couple of people uncomfortable just by being in class. Student whakaari were at times openly mocking of gay or camp behaviour. When I came to Te Wānanga o Raukawa a year later, again, I saw what I would say was open hostility to sexualities other than heterosexual. For whatever reason, some people must have assumed I was heterosexual, and talked to me about how disgusting homosexuality is, and a kaiako talked in class about homosexuality as if it was worse than incest. It was only a minority of people, but it got my attention.
I’m not suggesting homophobia is unique to Māori. My Pākehā parents were openly homophobic until a year or so after I came out to them. Walking down the street I’ve been abused, had eggs thrown at me, and been chased by cars for holding hands with my girlfriend. At university it wasn’t uncommon to read fantasies about killing gays or lesbians in the letters to the editor of the student newspaper. Homophobia was not a new experience to me, but it got me wondering—I’d had years to find a place for myself in te ao Pākehā, would there be a place for me in te ao Māori? Would that be somewhere I could feel comfortable—as someone who was raised Pākehā, for whom mātauranga Māori is really new, and who is queer. Is it worth trying to find a place here? In the same way that many of us have to act Pākehā to fit into the colonising culture, am I going to have to act straight to fit into te ao Māori? Will there be somewhere that can accept all of me?
This was a question in the back of my mind when I was a student in Ahunga Tikanga classes, listening to Ani Mikaere, Moana Jackson and Leah Whiu talking lovely stuff about whakapapa, ngā kaupapa, inclusion and balance. Everything they said made sense and sounded great, but at the same time I was getting other messages from other places, about excluding people who are different, about disgust and fear of sexual difference in particular, which sounded pretty similar to my experience in Pākehā culture. What was pono? Is there space for me in te ao Māori?
That is where the question started for me, and answering it has taken me in a few different directions. My understanding of this hui is that it is about making sure our tikanga are true to ngā kaupapa mai rā anō, keeping them relevant and adaptive. Hopefully, by the end of this talk, you’ll have some ideas about sexuality and tikanga that adequately reflect our kaupapa.
Before I go on, I want to define two words that I will use in this talk.
Queer (not kuia): a label for those of us who don’t think well-defined boxes are a helpful way to think about gender or sexuality. My partner pointed out to me that it’s hard to hear the difference between queer and kuia. In this talk, I might describe myself as queer, I am not claiming to be a kuia.
Homophobia: the belief that heterosexuality is normal and healthy, and that anything else is wrong, depraved, unhealthy or dangerous.
Colonisation = oppression = trauma
“Oppression is trauma. Every form of inequity has a traumatic impact on the psychology, emotionality and spirituality of the oppressed.” (Akili, 2012)When Yolo Akili says oppression is trauma, he is not saying anything we don’t already know about the effect of oppression on our wairua, but I thought this was a good place to start, because we can agree on it.
We can agree on it, because we live with the ongoing effects of colonisation. We know that colonisation is oppression, and we know the trauma of that oppression in our communities and in our lives. Part of the oppression is the acts of the colonisers—taking our land, spreading diseases, imprisoning us, outlawing our ways of being. The oppression is also the messages that they say about us to justify and minimise their crimes against us.
Many of us internalised the messages we heard, and we know many of our young people will internalise the messages they hear—that Māori are physical and emotional, meaning we aren’t smart enough to look after ourselves or our whenua; that we aren’t moral like the colonisers; that we are violent and overly sexual. Politicians and the media go out of their way to find stories of Māori failure, especially those that show us as naive, immoral and out of control.
We know the effects of this oppression: there is massive pressure to conform to the dominant, colonising values. Some of us do eventually conform, while others can’t or won’t. For all of us, whether we conform or not, oppression tears at our wairua, the sense of self that should make us strong.
Like all indigenous peoples who are living through colonisation, Māori now have high rates of suicide as well as high-risk and anti-social behaviours. This is the effect of the trauma caused by the oppression of colonisation, it is an attack on our wairua. It leads to a whole bunch of outcomes that we all know and I’m not going to go into—I think we can accept that colonisation is oppression, which is trauma. And just as colonisation is very clearly oppression so too is the repression of sexual diversity.
Sexual repression = oppression = trauma
What I’m calling sexual repression are the acts and messages that say that sexual diversity is wrong—that anyone who isn’t heterosexual is abnormal, or deviant or immoral, and is somehow a threat to society, or tikanga or family values, whatever those are. Clearly, that is about oppressing people, and it must therefore be an attack on their wairua.When I was a child, we used words like faggot and lesbian before we had a clue what they meant other than they were something really bad. I don’t know where we got these words from, but I don’t remember anyone ever being told off for using them. Boys were mocked for being girly by adults and by other kids—there are so many words for boys who aren’t appropriately masculine. Sexual or gender difference, being gay or camp, is still the punchline of so many jokes. And most of us will internalise those messages. Whoever we grow up to be, these are really damaging and limiting messages. The effect is similar to colonial oppression—there is massive pressure on all of us to conform to the dominant heterosexual standard. Most of us try to, and for those of us who can’t, if we internalise these messages, we will learn to hate ourselves.
I’m going to talk about shame, because I think it’s important to understand what it’s like to grow up in a culture that is terrified of sexual difference, and I want you to think about a response to that culture which expresses our kaupapa. Should we buy into homophobia, should we allow ourselves to be silenced and timid, or should we protect our tamariki mokopuna?
When I think of my experience as a child, I don’t remember any particular homophobic incidents, but just growing up in Pākehā culture in the 1970s and 80s was like soaking in homophobia. Everything told me that heterosexuality was normal and healthy, and anything else was sick. I remember when homosexual law reform was going through parliament, there was lots of talk about how homosexuals are paedophiles and law reform was opening the door to bestiality. There was all sorts of hateful fear mongering. My parents were saying this stuff too. I knew that homosexuality terrified people because something about it was so sick and disgusting.
Exactly the same hate came out 20 years later when parliament started talking about the Civil Unions bill, and we’re seeing it again now with the Marriage Equality bill. Almost exactly the same words. Whenever anyone tries to remove some anti-homosexual discrimination, we all get a massive dose of hate speech, which is particularly dangerous for children.
I heard all that in the mid 1980s when I was 11 or so, well before I was thinking about what sexuality meant to me. I already knew that something about me was different from other girls. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew there was something wrong with the way I was with my friends and with boys. I was 14 when I started going out with girls, and then everything became much clearer, but also worse, because I knew what people thought of people like me. No-one could know, so I became secretive. I became physically self-conscious and reserved. I didn’t touch anyone, especially not other girls, unless I absolutely had to. I wouldn’t go near children. I had this facade of who I was, and it was completely unrelated to me and what I was feeling. For years, everything about me was fake and was about hiding this awful secret. I still carry some of that self-hatred, that expectation that people will be disgusted or scared to let me be around their children. A lot of people I’ve talked to who aren’t heterosexual relate to this, and some wrote about it in Sexuality and the stories of indigenous people (Hutchings & Aspin, 2007).
I know for most children, first crushes are both exciting and terrifying, and coming into your sexuality is also exciting and terrifying. Ideally, children can talk to their friends about it, or better still their parents. People are excited when children start showing those signs. For lots of young queer people, it is just terrifying. It feels life threatening, and it actually is.
By the age of 21, about a third of young people who are attracted to their own gender will have tried to kill themselves (Suicide Prevention Resource Centre, 2008; in New Zealand, Fergusson, Horwood & Beautrais, 1999). The messages they hear about homosexuals are so clear and hateful that the thought of being one, or trying to live as one, is just too awful.
Why am I talking about this? My point isn’t to bring you down—my point is that how we talk about sexuality or respond to homophobia isn’t abstract or an academic interest. This isn’t a philosophical debate about rights or political views. This is about the survival of our children, just like fighting the racist environments in some of our schools is about survival. To bring it back to the kaupapa of this hui, our tikanga should be helping us to survive as Māori, not killing us.
We give children messages about sexuality and gender in many ways. Teaching them to be ashamed, controlling how we behave as girls and boys, talking about heterosexuality as if it is the only normal option as opposed to just a common way of being, laughing at people who are different—none of this will make us heterosexual. All it does is make us scared of who we might be. It makes us all police our own behaviour. For those of us who can’t be straight, it may teach us to hate ourselves, and make us scared to show ourselves to you. We may become secretive and isolated. It is an attack on our mana, and our wairua. At best, it makes it harder for each of us to reach our potential, at worst, it is so effective that it kills us.
These messages are a form of cultural imperialism, just like colonisation. Those with more power are using it to suppress those with less. Those who are heterosexual are trying to impose their way of being over everyone else, sometimes with the power of the state, sometimes with the authority given to them by a religious text, sometimes with nothing more than numerical dominance and the same self-righteousness that the colonisers wear. It’s all the same.
When I was putting this together, I kept being reminded of Whatarangi Winiata’s paper Treaty of Waitangi: towards 2000, and his analysis of why Māori do poorly now compared to Pākehā:
It is difficult to find a field of human endeavour and development where policies of the Crown have not been prejudicial to Māori. It is probably the single most important factor explaining Māori experience in the last century and a half.(Winiata, unpublished, p 6). He talks about all the ways that the Crown have on the one hand supported Pākehā ways of being, and on the other hand suppressed Māori ways of being, and the effect that this has had on the success, or otherwise, of Pākehā and Māori. He discusses the effects on how we each see each other, how we see ourselves, and the futures we are able to imagine for ourselves.
The racist practices that Whatarangi describes privilege a Pākehā way of being as normal and right, while pathologising Māori ways of being, and lead to the horrible statistics and health outcomes we all know. To me, this seems parallel to how heterosexual ways of being have been privileged by the Crown, by churches and eventually by our communities and whānau, while at the same time, other ways of being have been suppressed. This has meant that many young queer people struggle with who they will be and what their future will look like, for exactly the same reasons that young Māori often struggle with these questions (and it is likely that this is particularly true of young people who are both queer and Māori). Because almost everywhere we turn, it is being drummed into us that we are different, and lesser, and wrong—and we are then blamed for the inevitable outcomes.
As I’ve said, this is all true of Pākehā culture, but from my limited experience, and from talking to and reading about the experiences of other Māori, I think there are the same destructive attitudes and behaviours in many Māori communities. I would argue, there is a lack of leadership and willingness to talk about why. I’ll talk about our leaders in a moment, but first I want to talk about our children.
Homophobia at school
There are at least two places where our children should expect to feel safe—at home and at school. There is very little research that has been done on sexuality and health, and of the studies looking at youth, they almost all focus on school.In a survey of New Zealand high school students, compared to students who identified as exclusively heterosexual, twice as many same-sex attracted students were afraid that someone would hurt or bother them at school, three times as many had stayed away from school because they were afraid someone would hurt or bother them, three times as many were bullied weekly at school, and 54% had been physically assaulted in the last 12 months (compared with 42% of exclusively heterosexual students); of the same-sex attracted students who were bullied, one third were bullied because they were perceived to be gay (Rossen, Lucassen, Denny & Robinson, 2009, p 26). A US study suggests that not only is homophobic violence commonly experienced, a surprising number of people are perpetrating it—one in ten university students admit physical violence or threats against people they suspect of being homosexual, and one in four admit verbally abusing them (Franklin, 2000).
It is common for students to see their schools as poor at responding to any form of bullying (Carroll-Lind, 2009, pp 41-47, 77; Painter, 2009, p 11). Many schools aren’t proactive about dealing with homophobic abuse, they don’t talk positively about sexual diversity, they don’t challenge ideas that heterosexuality is normal and everything else is deviant and wrong, or that people who are different deserve abuse and ridicule (Carroll-Lind, 2009, p 61; Painter, 2009, pp 22, 25). Often when homophobic abuse is happening, schools still won’t address the real problem (Carroll-Lind, 2009, pp 46-47). Schools might deal with the physical violence, but not the underlying attitude; they might deal with the perpetrator, but not the culture that allows bullying (Carroll-Lind, 2009, pp 134-135). It’s not uncommon for victims of homophobic abuse to be blamed for provoking the abuse by being homosexual (Painter, 2009, p 12). Even in the face of ongoing physical violence to children because they are perceived to be homosexual, some schools will continue to claim that they provide a safe environment for their students (Kendall & Sidebotham, 2004, pp 71-72). Some principals and boards refuse to see homophobic attitudes as something they should be addressing in school (Painter, 2009, pp 12, 20-21).
Whether we’re talking about race or perceived sexuality or gender, when schools fail to challenge hatred of any sort, they give a clear message that it is okay, and that there is something wrong with the victims. Studies consistently show that these messages are associated with the physical, emotional and social harm that I’ve been talking about, the self hatred, the isolation and the suicide (eg, Suicide Prevention Resource Centre, 2008, pp 19-28 and references therein; Ryan, Huebner, Diaz & Sanchez, 2009, pp 346, 350-351, and references therein).
I hope we can all agree that this is something we should be protecting our children from.
Homophobia at home
Much less is known about the effect of attitudes at home. The first study came out in 2009 (Ryan, Huebner, Diaz & Sanchez, 2009), and it gives clear indications of how whānau rejection, even in relatively subtle forms, can have a huge impact on the health of queer youth. The researchers interviewed a bunch of young adults who had come out to at least one of their parents as an adolescent. From those interviews, they made a list of 51 rejecting behaviours—things like, if their parents ever blamed them for anti-gay mistreatment, if they were ever excluded from whānau activity because of sexuality, if family members ever made disparaging comments about queer people in front of them, or verbally or physically abused them because of their sexuality.Participants were assigned to groups based on whether they experienced few (0-11), some (more than 11 and up to half), or more than half of these behaviours. These groups turned out to be a good predictor of negative health outcomes, particularly for attempted suicide, where over two thirds of those in the group who had experienced more than half the rejecting behaviours had attempted suicide, compared to one in five in the group with the least rejection.
This study only included young people who had come out to a parent during adolescence—you’d expect participants to come from less homophobic homes than those of us who waited until we’d left home to tell our parents. So these results may be underestimating the effect of homophobic experiences at home. Reading this study really drove home to me how dangerous homophobic attitudes and behaviour can be.
I know I’ve been saying all through this talk how marginalising sexual or gender differences is similar to the way we are marginalised as Māori, but in the home there is a really big distinction. Most Māori children are raised by at least one Māori parent, and the family knows that their children are Māori. Māori parents know what it’s like to be raised in a racist society, and may have some idea of how to protect their children from the stuff they will encounter. Most Māori children probably feel pretty safe talking to their parents about racism that they see or hear, and asking for help understanding or dealing with it. Whereas almost all queer children are born to heterosexual parents, who have no idea what it’s like to grow up queer in a homophobic society, and who don’t know that their children will be queer. The parents of queer children may have no idea how to protect them from the messages they will get, or even that they need to. The parents may themselves be homophobic.
Many of our whānau are not safe places for queer children, and I’d argue that if they aren’t safe for queer children, they aren’t safe for any children. Not just because we can’t know who our children will grow up to be, but also because hatred isn’t safe for children—white children are endangered by growing up with racists, boys are endangered by growing up with misogynists, and heterosexual children are endangered by growing up with homophobes.
Is repression of sexual diversity tika?
I want to start with the question of whether or not sexual diversity is traditional. This is an impossible question, because the answer will depend on how far back we go, and who we ask. One of the themes through this hui has been the ways that our tikanga may become distorted or co-opted, so some of us get the idea that something is traditional when it is clearly a relatively new development. The more useful question is whether or not something is consistent with what we know to be tika—based on kaupapa mai rā anō (or ngā matapono).In class recently, Moana Jackson was talking to Ahunga Tikanga students about relationships of any sort, whether a parent child relationship, a relationship between workmates, or between institutions, or sexual partners, and how you know whether those relationships are tika. It seems obvious that the gender or sexuality of the people in those relationships is pretty much irrelevant to that question. If the relationships are based on mutual respect, manaakitanga, aroha, then they are tika, irrespective of anything else.
The question of whether heterosexuality is more tika than other ways of loving or relating or having sex with each other seems ridiculous to me. I can’t imagine a kaupapa-based argument that justifies marginalising people based on who they are attracted to. I can’t think of anything resembling kaupapa that would judge me as more or less depending on the gender of the people I love. Any attempt to reduce my mana based on who I sleep with is an insult to my whānau, my whakapapa and all my tūpuna. I cannot accept that as kaupapa or tika.
One of the comparisons that is often made between western culture and most indigenous cultures is that indigenous peoples know we are all different, and that those differences are not just valid, but potentially valuable. We don’t need to feel better about ourselves by trying to dictate anyone else’s tikanga—we just have to get our own stuff right for us. I think this is relevant to how we think about other people’s relationships.
I expect we all know when our wairua is healthy. We feel good, grounded, sure in who we are, safe. When I start focusing on what other people are doing wrong, I know I need to sort myself out. So I don’t see how it can be tika to insult and demean people in healthy relationships because the set up of those relationships is different from what I would choose. If I’m judging other people like that, it’s a pretty good sign that there’s something going on with my own wairua that I need to address.
So if policing people’s sexualities in this way isn’t tikanga, where did it come from?
Colonisation and sexual repression
We know the West is a seriously unhealthy culture. It forces itself on everyone else. It tries to stamp out difference. I don’t know why it is so obsessed with who sleeps with whom, but it is, to a really bizarre extent.When Europeans arrived here, they brought with them their fear and hatred of homosexuality. In English law at that time, homosexuality could be punished by hard labour or even death. It’s only been 25 years since the New Zealand state got rid of the law that could imprison men for consensual sex with other men.
When we look to our parents and grandparents for guidance on how to think about different sexualities, we need to remember that for generations we have lived under that strange legal system. Our parents and grandparents, and their grandparents, have been educated in schools and churches based on western values. There are very few places to avoid the awful messages of that culture—remember that it called our tikanga primitive and violent, then told us that we needed to beat our children, our men needed to dominate women and we all needed to hate homosexuality.
Our parents or kaumātua may genuinely believe that there is something wrong with homosexuality. They may genuinely believe that it is traditional to stifle some people’s ways of being. After a couple of hundred years of colonisers trying to shame us into rejecting our values and adopting theirs, that’s hardly surprising. That’s the reason it is so important that we have hui like these to talk about tikanga and kaupapa.
African American activist and academic Angela Davis is clear about where she thinks homophobia comes from:
The roots of sexism and homophobia are found in the same economic and political institutions that serve as the foundation of racism in this country.(Davis, 1989, p 12). She is talking about the US, but it’s equally true here—it’s the desire to force what makes sense to me onto everyone else. As I said earlier, whether we are talking about homophobia, sexism, or racism, it’s all about cultural imperialism.
Heteropatriarchy and homophobia
I want to talk specifically about how we’ve come to buy into this western preoccupation about how and with whom we have sex. I know we’re all familiar with the way patriarchy has been creeping into interpretations of tikanga and kōrero tawhito, but I think it’s helpful to think about the way that patriarchy privileges certain men more than others, and the effect of that.For example, at the time the English decided they wanted to colonise these motu, their ideal man was the Victorian gentleman. The men that England sent to control us were pretty much in that mould. They weren’t aristocracy, and they hadn’t gone to the flash schools, they were earning their place as gentlemen through their occupations—the military, the church, and the government. Like all social climbers, they brought with them an unwavering belief in that society’s rules. They taught us what it was to be a leader, and how to get those attributes—through private schools, manly sports and Christianity. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say some of us are leaning this way now. If we add business people to the list of career pathways, and replace aristocracy with whakapapa, we are starting to describe a path that many of us would see as ideal for developing our young men into iwi leaders.
One of the things that is interesting about this, is that in general, men, people educated in private schools, people who play dominant sports (in this country, rugby, soccer, cricket and softball), and people with Christian beliefs have each been shown to be associated with more homophobic attitudes (Osborne & Wagner, 2007, pp 599, 601, 607-609, and references therein). If we do follow this pattern for developing leadership, we are pretty much guaranteeing that we will develop sexual repression, and that our children will be subjected to that sexual repression, which will limit the development and potential of most of them, and will endanger the lives of some of them.
What can we do?
Re-broaden our concept of leadership
One thing that I think would make a big difference is if our leadership (whatever we mean by that) reflected the diversity of our communities. I’m not knocking any of the contributions anyone has made, but I think we should be asking why the people who make up groups like the Iwi Chairs forum or the Māori Council seem so similar. What messages does it give our young people if they can’t see anyone like them being recognised as having mana?Make our schools safer
We need to make sure our schools are safe for all our children. This means being proactive. Schools need to talk to children about sexual and gender diversity in a safe and accepting way. This must happen before the negative messages sink in—starting when children are 10 or 11, not leaving it until they’re already sexually active, or avoiding it altogether. It means tackling any homophobic attitudes or behaviour that the children bring to school with them. Staff need to be educated and trained so they don’t bring damaging attitudes with them. Schools need to be a safe place for staff to be open about their sexuality and gender. Finally, it means educating parents so that they are onboard.Make our whānau safer
Most importantly, we have to decide whether it is more important to us that our children meet our expectations, or that they are safe to be whoever they may be. Is it more important that we shame our children into acting like we want? That we pretend they’re someone who they’re not? Or that we have a real relationship with them? What is more tika? What is most in line with our kaupapa?If we want our children to be safe and happy and meet their potential, then we have to be prepared to accept them, and love them whoever they turn out to be. We have to make sure they know that.
The Continuum of Awesomeness
I like to think of our goal in terms of an awesome continuum, on which I’d like to see us all pushing ourselves towards the more awesome end of the spectrum.
In the top left, intolerance is anything that tells our children it’s not acceptable to be different—abuse or statements like there’s no gayness in tikanga Māori, or anything that condones abuse or mocking of difference. Treating gay men as if they’re women, which reveals disrespect for both women and gay men. Anything like that is intolerant, and we want to avoid it.
Tolerance is a bit better than intolerance, it means not actively excluding or insulting people that we know to be different from ourselves, but at the same time, it assumes that heterosexuality is so normal and healthy, that we can ignore the reality that not everyone is heterosexual. For example, I might assume that every child, and everyone I know is heterosexual unless they tell me otherwise, which means I don’t have to be careful about what I or anyone else does that would insult people who aren’t heterosexual. It’s much like the Crown acts around ethnicity, it treats us as if we are all white. Māori are not actually excluded from Pākehā society, we’re just expected to change to fit in. Because we assume that every child will grow up to be heterosexual, we don’t bother to protect them from hate or carelessness. We let them see sexual and gender diversity being mocked, or compared to paedophilia, or hear their queer whanaunga described as disgusting, as if this has no effect. Tolerance actually allows intolerance to flourish.
Acceptance is just that, anything that lets our children know that they are awesome and loved whoever they are. It is their whakapapa that gives them a place in their whānau, and everything else is just detail. It also means challenging any homophobic behaviour to protect them from those messages.
Celebration means going out of our way to give positive messages about otherwise marginalised genders or sexualities, as a way of fighting the messages that our children will get outside of our control. For example, loving acceptance probably isn’t a sufficient response if a child has just heard that a prominent Māori leader dreams of a world without gays, or one of their friends has been beaten up for looking queer, or they’re being called faggot or dyke. If a child tells us that they are queer, we should be stoked that they trust us, that they are sharing themselves with us, and we should show them that. If a child is brave enough to express themselves in a way that others are reading as queer, we should celebrate their uniqueness and bravery. Celebration might mean talking to our children about all the different crushes we’ve had, or acknowledging all the crushes they have had, not acting like there is something different about their friendships depending on the gender of their friend. Celebration is anything that lets our children know that whoever they are will be awesome.
If tikanga are the behaviours that express our values, I thought I could use Whatarangi Winiata’s kaupapa matrix model to work backwards (Winiata, 2012). If we think of each of the points on the continuum as a set of behaviours, if they are tika, we should be able to say which kaupapa they are expressing.
Starting with intolerance, which kaupapa am I expressing if I am excluding or attacking my whanaunga based on who they sleep with? It might be a reflection of how little I know, but I couldn’t think of any. Looking at tolerance, which kaupapa am I expressing when I am polite to my whanaunga, while judging them as inferior? Or including them, but expecting them to hide who they are? Again, I couldn’t think of any kaupapa that fit this tikanga. The kaupapa become apparent when we look at the behaviours that show acceptance. Acceptance is an expression of a whole bunch of kaupapa—whanaungatanga, aroha, manaakitanga, rangatiratanga, whakapapa. Finally, looking at celebration, it expresses many of the same kaupapa as acceptance.
Some people will feel that celebration is a step too far—that acceptance is enough. In an ideal world, I would say acceptance is the most tika behaviour. But we live with a dominant culture that condones homophobia. To come back to the analogy with Pākehā culture oppressing tikanga, one response to a culture that makes it hard to live as Māori, is that we celebrate what it means to be Māori, we positively promote Māori ways of being. Many Pākehā are resistant to this, they see affirmative action and celebrations of our ‘Māoriness’ as reverse racism. We know they are wrong, and we can extend that analysis to repression of sexual diversity, even if it initially makes us a bit uncomfortable.
The point of this continuum isn’t to judge where we each are as parents or friends. We will probably all struggle to overcome the culture that we have been raised in, I certainly do. This is where we need to think about whose kaupapa we are expressing. Western culture has been all about controlling and limiting us, tikanga should be about all of us reaching our potential. My challenge to you, is to make sure you are reflecting the values you want to. Be more awesome, so those around you can feel safe enough to be who they are meant to be. Be brave enough to be uncomfortable. Be brave enough to fight for sexual and gender diversity education in your children’s and grandchildren’s schools. Be brave enough to love your whole child, and your whole self. We know we aren’t going to fully realise tino rangatiratanga unless Pākehā get a bit uncomfortable and give up some power. It’s the same with sexual diversity.
Like I said earlier, no amount of hatred, bullying or abuse is going to make anyone heterosexual, it will only make people hide themselves from you. Don’t be that person. If you don’t know anyone who isn’t heterosexual, if you think everyone in your whānau is heterosexual, then that is a reflection on the impression you have made. You can change that impression.
We need to be clear that homophobia does not come from tikanga. It comes from the colonisers. Whakapapa is about inclusion—there needs to be a really good reason to exclude or demean someone in any way. Who they sleep with is not a good reason. Our children grow up in an environment where they will see, hear and experience hatred of different sexualities. Whoever they grow up to be, these messages are dangerous. These messages will limit how our children see themselves and who they can imagine being.
At the moment, we have so much unhelpful hatred and intolerance passing as debate about marriage and adoption equality, and if there’s one thing I want you to get from this talk, it’s that we need to change that conversation. Our children don’t need to be protected from homosexuality, they need to be protected from hate. People loving each other will never endanger children, homophobia will.
REFERENCES
Akili, Yolo ‘The immediate need for emotional justice’ http://crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/the-immediate-need-for-emotional-justice/ (accessed 12/09/2012)
Carroll-Lind, J 2009 School Safety: An Inquiry into the Safety of Students at School (Office of the Children’s Commissioner, Wellington)
Davis, A 1989 Women, Culture, & Politics (Random House, New York)
Fergusson, D, L Horwood and A Beautrais 1999 ‘Is sexual orientation related to mental health problems and suicidality in young people?’ Archives of General Psychiatry 56: 876-880
Franklin, K 2000 ‘Antigay Behaviors Among Young Adults: Prevalence, Patterns and Motivators in a Noncriminal Population’ Journal of Interpersonal Violence 15: 339-362
Hutchings, J and C Aspin (eds) 2007 Sexuality and the Stories of Indigenous (Huia Publishers, Wellington)
Kendall, C and N Sidebotham 2004 ‘Homophobic Bullying in Schools: Is there a Duty of Care?’ Australia & New Zealand Journal of Law and Education 9, pp 71-72
Osborne, D and W Wagner 2007 ‘Exploring the Relationship Between Homophobia and Participation in Core Sports among High School Students’ Sociological Perspectives 50: 597-613
Painter, H 2009 How Safe? How Safe and Inclusive are Otago Secondary Schools (OUSA, Dunedin)
Rossen, F, M Lucassen, S Denny and E Robinson 2009 Youth ’07 The Health and Wellbeing of Secondary School Students in New Zealand: Results for Young People Attracted to the Same or Both Sexes (Auckland University, Auckland)
Ryan, C, D Huebner, R Diaz and J Sanchez 2009 ‘Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes in White and Latino Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young Adults’ Pediatrics 123: 346-352
Suicide Prevention Resource Centre 2008 Suicide Risk and Prevention for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth (Education Development Center, Newton MA, USA)
Winiata, W ‘Building Māori futures on kaupapa tuku iho’ Paper given at Kei Tua o te Pae conference, 4-5 September, 2012
Winiata, W ‘Treaty of Waitangi: Towards 2000: Economic Progression and the Interconnection between Maori and Tauiwi Development’ (unpublished paper, 28 June 1995)
Saturday, September 01, 2012
Two publications launched at Kei Tua o te Pae
Two Te Wānanga o Raukawa publications will be launched next week at Kei Tua o te Pae.
5:45 pm Tuesday 4th September
Te Wānanga o Raukawa
This report explores Te Wānanga o Raukawa’s experience of a collaborative project with Ecological Economics Research NZ, Landcare Research and Te Rūnanga o Raukawa.
Despite a commitment to the rhetoric of partnership, the project generated predominantly tikanga Pākehā research outputs focused on biophysical restoration. The lead researchers generally approached ecosystems restoration as an unproblematic exercise of ‘adding-on’ mātauranga to Pākehā economics- and science-based research activity. The report provides a detailed critique of this approach, and argues for iwi and hapū mātauranga to be recognised as vital to ecosystem health.
Indigenous languages and cultures need to be respected as fundamental to ecosystems health—to be carefully preserved and maintained alongside their embedded biophysical context. To achieve this, ecosystems restoration theory and practice need to shift away from ‘participatory’ approaches, where Māori participate in Pākehā-defined processes and frameworks, and move instead towards pluralistic processes.
This approach embraces a broader outcome of preserving bio-linguistic diversity. The focus shifts to restoring ecological and cultural integrity and stability, recognising that where there is a loss of biodiversity and community, mātauranga disappears, and that the decline of iwi and hapū mātauranga is intrinsic to ecosystem decline. The two are closely interrelated; the loss of one critically affects the other. This approach is consistent with the goal of Te Wānanga o Raukawa, to contribute to the survival of Māori as a people, by restoring and revitalising te reo me ōna mātauranga.
This is the inaugural journal of the Ahunga Tikanga programme at Te Wānanga o Raukawa. The journal contains articles by Moana Jackson, Glen P Te Awaawa Firmin, Elizabeth Cook, Ngāhuia Murphy, Matiu Dickson, Debbie Broughton, Kim McBreen and Ani Mikaere. The articles are diverse in subject-matter, ranging from the story of one man’s close relationship with the Whanganui river to an investigation into the way that we perceive and portray our relationships with atua; from the inspiring personal account of attending a mau rākau wānanga for women to a detailed analysis of the link between Māui and menstruation; from a discussion of the history recounted in a waiata tawhito of Ngāti Hangarau to an examination of the Waitangi Tribunal report Ko Aotearoa Tēnei (Wai 262); from an exploration of a tikanga-based approach to sexual diversity to an explanation of the theory underpinning Ahunga Tikanga studies at Te Wānanga o Raukawa. All of the writers have a close association with the Ahunga Tikanga programme, serving as past and present kaiāwhina or staff members.
Currently offering qualifications from the Heke (undergraduate diploma) to the Tāhuhu (masters degree), Ahunga Tikanga studies have been taught at the Wānanga for nearly twenty five years. The programme is founded on the incontrovertibility of tikanga as the first and only legitimate law of Aotearoa, and encourages students to explore the practice of tikanga, as well as the philosophical foundation that underpins it. The content of Ahunga Tikanga courses reflects the conviction that the reclamation, maintenance and thoughtful development of tikanga are both achievable and crucial to our future survival.
5:45 pm Tuesday 4th September
Te Wānanga o Raukawa
Te Wānanga o Raukawa: Restoring mātauranga to restore ecosystems
(produced by Te Whare Whakatupu Mātauranga, published by Te Tākupu and written by Āneta Hinemihi Rāwiri)
Despite a commitment to the rhetoric of partnership, the project generated predominantly tikanga Pākehā research outputs focused on biophysical restoration. The lead researchers generally approached ecosystems restoration as an unproblematic exercise of ‘adding-on’ mātauranga to Pākehā economics- and science-based research activity. The report provides a detailed critique of this approach, and argues for iwi and hapū mātauranga to be recognised as vital to ecosystem health.
Indigenous languages and cultures need to be respected as fundamental to ecosystems health—to be carefully preserved and maintained alongside their embedded biophysical context. To achieve this, ecosystems restoration theory and practice need to shift away from ‘participatory’ approaches, where Māori participate in Pākehā-defined processes and frameworks, and move instead towards pluralistic processes.
This approach embraces a broader outcome of preserving bio-linguistic diversity. The focus shifts to restoring ecological and cultural integrity and stability, recognising that where there is a loss of biodiversity and community, mātauranga disappears, and that the decline of iwi and hapū mātauranga is intrinsic to ecosystem decline. The two are closely interrelated; the loss of one critically affects the other. This approach is consistent with the goal of Te Wānanga o Raukawa, to contribute to the survival of Māori as a people, by restoring and revitalising te reo me ōna mātauranga.
Ahunga Tikanga
(published by Te Tākupu)
Currently offering qualifications from the Heke (undergraduate diploma) to the Tāhuhu (masters degree), Ahunga Tikanga studies have been taught at the Wānanga for nearly twenty five years. The programme is founded on the incontrovertibility of tikanga as the first and only legitimate law of Aotearoa, and encourages students to explore the practice of tikanga, as well as the philosophical foundation that underpins it. The content of Ahunga Tikanga courses reflects the conviction that the reclamation, maintenance and thoughtful development of tikanga are both achievable and crucial to our future survival.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Kei Tua o te Pae hui update
More information about the hui has gone up on their website, including video of a couple of the organisers talking about the hui, a programme, and information about all of the speakers. Registrations close this Friday (24 August), so spread the word if you know anyone who might be interested in exploring the challenges of kaupapa Māori in te ao hurihuri . Also, there’s a number of student places at a reduced price of $250 (includes all food and accommodation at Te Wānanga o Raukawa).
The programme includes:- Whatarangi Winiata—
Building Māori futures on kaupapa tuku iho
- Ngāhuia Murphy—
Te Awa Atua: The river of life: menstruation in the precolonial Māori world
- Mereana Pitman—
Violence and the distortion of tikanga
- Leonie Pihama—
Te Ao Hurihuri
- Kim McBreen—
It’s about whānau: oppression, sexuality and mana
- Meihana Durie—
He Kawa Oranga: Enhancing Māori achievement in the 21st century through the application of tikanga and kawa
- Moana Jackson—hui reflections
- Panel discussions:
- Hemi Toia, Ani Mikaere, and Jessica Hutchings on Changing worlds, changing tikanga
- Naomi Simmonds, Caleb Royal, and Mera Penehira on Tikanga as liberation
There's also workshop time, so we can all talk with each other. I'm really excited by the conversations that will happen.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Muddying the waters
I haven’t written anything much about the Māori Council’s Waitangi Tribunal hearing on water rights, because I haven’t had the time to follow the argument, and because I expect the arguments are very similar to many other inquiries. For example, the radio spectrum claims (summary here, and which I might write more about shortly), or the Ngāti Apa case that led to the foreshore and seabed debacle (see Myths of the foreshore and seabed for a history to the Marine and Coastal Areas Act).
In short, most of the land and resource claims are pretty similar. Prior to European arrival, tangata whenua had mana for their rohe and everything within it. If tangata whenua have not given that mana to someone else, then they must retain responsibility (mana/ rangatiratanga). It doesn’t matter how many times the Crown says “but you can’t own [whatever they are currently trying to take control of]”. It doesn’t matter how much the Crown wants to take control or has always assumed that it has control of something, be it the coastline, radio spectrum, fresh water or anything else. If tangata whenua haven’t given it away, then responsibility must remain with them. Really simple stuff.
So why does it always seem so complicated?—Because it is in the interests of the Crown to make it complicated. It takes a really complicated argument to make anything resembling a case for Crown sovereignty (Moana Jackson calls these arguments legal magic), whereas tangata whenua arguments are straightforward. —Because many tau iwi want to believe that New Zealand has an honourable history and their culture is legitimately dominant, so they are invested in ignoring all the simple truths that tell a different story. Again, they must rely on magic to believe in Crown sovereignty.
Time after time, politicians show they care less about justice than they do about getting elected. Popular opinion is more important than justice, so it doesn’t matter how simple or straightforward the issues are, what the tribunal recommends, nor what the courts decide. It doesn’t matter how much money, time, energy, or lives tangata whenua put into their cases. It doesn’t matter what is fair or true. If it’s an important issue for the Crown, then the Crown will win—they own the game and they make up the rules to suit them.
As Key has said, and many instances show, Tribunal recommendations are not binding, so the Crown can ignore those it doesn’t like (eg, the Radio Spectrum claim). The Crown loses still more moral high ground, but it’s already buried under so much bullshit, what does a few more metres matter?. And if it loses in the courts, it can simply make up a new law (eg, the Ngāti Apa seabed and foreshore case). This is one reason why I hate this process—our people die fighting for justice in a system that is set up to fail them (eg, the WAI 262 claim).
But back to the freshwater case. Here’s some links in lieu of specific analysis:
Enjoy. Or not.
In short, most of the land and resource claims are pretty similar. Prior to European arrival, tangata whenua had mana for their rohe and everything within it. If tangata whenua have not given that mana to someone else, then they must retain responsibility (mana/ rangatiratanga). It doesn’t matter how many times the Crown says “but you can’t own [whatever they are currently trying to take control of]”. It doesn’t matter how much the Crown wants to take control or has always assumed that it has control of something, be it the coastline, radio spectrum, fresh water or anything else. If tangata whenua haven’t given it away, then responsibility must remain with them. Really simple stuff.
So why does it always seem so complicated?—Because it is in the interests of the Crown to make it complicated. It takes a really complicated argument to make anything resembling a case for Crown sovereignty (Moana Jackson calls these arguments legal magic), whereas tangata whenua arguments are straightforward. —Because many tau iwi want to believe that New Zealand has an honourable history and their culture is legitimately dominant, so they are invested in ignoring all the simple truths that tell a different story. Again, they must rely on magic to believe in Crown sovereignty.
Time after time, politicians show they care less about justice than they do about getting elected. Popular opinion is more important than justice, so it doesn’t matter how simple or straightforward the issues are, what the tribunal recommends, nor what the courts decide. It doesn’t matter how much money, time, energy, or lives tangata whenua put into their cases. It doesn’t matter what is fair or true. If it’s an important issue for the Crown, then the Crown will win—they own the game and they make up the rules to suit them.
As Key has said, and many instances show, Tribunal recommendations are not binding, so the Crown can ignore those it doesn’t like (eg, the Radio Spectrum claim). The Crown loses still more moral high ground, but it’s already buried under so much bullshit, what does a few more metres matter?. And if it loses in the courts, it can simply make up a new law (eg, the Ngāti Apa seabed and foreshore case). This is one reason why I hate this process—our people die fighting for justice in a system that is set up to fail them (eg, the WAI 262 claim).
But back to the freshwater case. Here’s some links in lieu of specific analysis:
- Audrey Young's summary of the freshwater claim (from Feb, 2012)
- Tapu Misa's column on ideas of property ownership and the claim: Water claim really about Maori's role as caretakers
- PDF of the interim recommendation by the Waitangi Tribunal that the Crown hold off any share float until the Tribunal reports on stage 1 of the inquiry
- Donna Hall’s summary of the interim recommendation
- Carwyn Jones’s summary: Tribunal requests crown to wait for water report
- Bryce Edwards explaining which method Key will likely use to ignore the Tribunal: Water claim – three possible paths for National
Enjoy. Or not.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Won't somebody think of the children—sexuality, marriage and adoption
This is a summary of my previous very long post “Ahunga Tikanga: Tikanga and sexual diversity”.
There’s been a bit of talk lately about tikanga and sexuality, triggered by debate over whether two men or two women should be legally able to marry or to adopt children as a couple. One side is saying things like same sex marriage and adoption are anti-tradition/ tikanga, anti-society and endangering children. The other side tells us that opposing same sex marriage and adoption is discriminatory and bigoted, and also anti-tradition/ tikanga. I can understand not wanting to be associated with either of these sides.
What is missing is discussion about whose values are at the heart of the debate. When Hone Harawira and Brendan Horan say there are more important issues than gay marriage (on Rhema and Native Affairs episode 6/17 respectively), I agree—but what I think is more important is probably very different from where they’re at.
The legal rights we give to different sorts of relationships are much less important to me than how we treat people in our communities. Too many kids never get old enough to be in a relationship. Around a third of 21 years olds with same sex attractions have already tried to kill themselves (eg, in New Zealand and other studies). The messages they hear about homosexuals are so clear and hateful that the thought of being one, or trying to live as one, is just too awful. This isn’t because these young people are weak, this is because of the bullying, stigma, and hatred they see and live through. Stopping that crap is more important to me than legalising same sex marriage, or even adoption. At the same time, legal discrimination justifies hateful behaviour.
Europeans, and especially the Christian churches, introduced their fear and hatred of homosexuality to these lands. English law is strangely obsessed with who people have sex with. Until very recently, men who had consensual sex with men could be imprisoned, or even killed. Te Awekotuku talks about the church trying to have one of its own priests hanged because he liked sex with men (he survived because English racism was greater than their homophobia—the only evidence they had was from the Māori men the priest had slept with, and it wouldn’t be right to kill an Englishman based only on evidence from natives). I don’t know why they developed such violent practices to control something as joyful and fun as sex, but they brought them here.
When we look to our parents and grandparents for guidance on how to think about different sexualities, we need to remember that for generations we have lived under English law, and been educated in their schools and churches. There are very few places to avoid the awful messages of that culture—it called tikanga primitive and violent, then told us it was right to hit children, to dominate women and to hate homosexuality. Our kaumātua may genuinely believe that there is something wrong with homosexuality. After a couple of hundred years of colonisers trying to shame us into rejecting our values and adopting theirs, that’s hardly surprising. Many of us aren’t sure what is really ours and what has been forced on us (perversely, Māori who have come to accept values the colonisers taught us, like homophobia and patriarchy, are now called primitive and ignorant).
We can’t stop children being exposed to hatred, but we can fight the impact, just as we have with all the messages about Māori being less than awesome. We can stand up for sexual diversity; we can talk about our own crushes or curiosity or lovers; we can treat their crushes equally, whether it’s a boy or girl they’re obsessing over; we can speak against homophobia, silence and discrimination; we can show our children that it is safe for our whanaunga to be honest about their relationships. We can make sure they understand that it is wrong to even ask whether gay couples should be able to legally marry or adopt. It’s a ridiculous question that reflects a ridiculous but dangerous culture.
We need to be clear that homophobia (the belief that homosexuality is wrong, depraved, and dangerous) does not come from tikanga. It comes from the colonisers. Whakapapa is about inclusion—there needs to be a bloody good reason to exclude or demean someone in any way. Who they sleep with is not a good reason. Our children grow up in an environment where they will see, hear and experience hatred of different sexualities. Whoever they grow up to be, these messages are dangerous. These messages will limit how our children see themselves and who they can imagine being.
Two women or men loving each other does not endanger children, homophobia does.
There’s been a bit of talk lately about tikanga and sexuality, triggered by debate over whether two men or two women should be legally able to marry or to adopt children as a couple. One side is saying things like same sex marriage and adoption are anti-tradition/ tikanga, anti-society and endangering children. The other side tells us that opposing same sex marriage and adoption is discriminatory and bigoted, and also anti-tradition/ tikanga. I can understand not wanting to be associated with either of these sides.
What is missing is discussion about whose values are at the heart of the debate. When Hone Harawira and Brendan Horan say there are more important issues than gay marriage (on Rhema and Native Affairs episode 6/17 respectively), I agree—but what I think is more important is probably very different from where they’re at.
The legal rights we give to different sorts of relationships are much less important to me than how we treat people in our communities. Too many kids never get old enough to be in a relationship. Around a third of 21 years olds with same sex attractions have already tried to kill themselves (eg, in New Zealand and other studies). The messages they hear about homosexuals are so clear and hateful that the thought of being one, or trying to live as one, is just too awful. This isn’t because these young people are weak, this is because of the bullying, stigma, and hatred they see and live through. Stopping that crap is more important to me than legalising same sex marriage, or even adoption. At the same time, legal discrimination justifies hateful behaviour.
Where does all this fear and hatred of homosexuality come from?
It certainly doesn’t come from tikanga mai rā anō—there’s no evidence of homophobia in anything that I’ve come across (such as creation traditions, whakataukī, art, pakiwaitara). There are enough people looking to justify their homophobic beliefs that I’m confident if there were homophobic traditions, we’d all know about it. There’s plenty of evidence from the period of early contact with Europeans that tangata whenua didn’t consider ‘sexual orientation’ a big deal at all (eg, Te Awekotuku, Ngahuia (2005) "He Reka Anō – same-sex lust and loving in the ancient Māori world" Outlines: Lesbian & Gay histories of Aotearoa. Edited by Alison J Laurie & Linda Evans. LAGANZ, Wellington )—whereas Europeans did (eg, Parkinson, Phil (2005) "'A most depraved young man': Henry Miles Pilley, the New Zealand missionary" Outlines: Lesbian & Gay histories of Aotearoa. Edited by Alison J Laurie & Linda Evans. LAGANZ, Wellington).Europeans, and especially the Christian churches, introduced their fear and hatred of homosexuality to these lands. English law is strangely obsessed with who people have sex with. Until very recently, men who had consensual sex with men could be imprisoned, or even killed. Te Awekotuku talks about the church trying to have one of its own priests hanged because he liked sex with men (he survived because English racism was greater than their homophobia—the only evidence they had was from the Māori men the priest had slept with, and it wouldn’t be right to kill an Englishman based only on evidence from natives). I don’t know why they developed such violent practices to control something as joyful and fun as sex, but they brought them here.
When we look to our parents and grandparents for guidance on how to think about different sexualities, we need to remember that for generations we have lived under English law, and been educated in their schools and churches. There are very few places to avoid the awful messages of that culture—it called tikanga primitive and violent, then told us it was right to hit children, to dominate women and to hate homosexuality. Our kaumātua may genuinely believe that there is something wrong with homosexuality. After a couple of hundred years of colonisers trying to shame us into rejecting our values and adopting theirs, that’s hardly surprising. Many of us aren’t sure what is really ours and what has been forced on us (perversely, Māori who have come to accept values the colonisers taught us, like homophobia and patriarchy, are now called primitive and ignorant).
We can’t stop children being exposed to hatred, but we can fight the impact, just as we have with all the messages about Māori being less than awesome. We can stand up for sexual diversity; we can talk about our own crushes or curiosity or lovers; we can treat their crushes equally, whether it’s a boy or girl they’re obsessing over; we can speak against homophobia, silence and discrimination; we can show our children that it is safe for our whanaunga to be honest about their relationships. We can make sure they understand that it is wrong to even ask whether gay couples should be able to legally marry or adopt. It’s a ridiculous question that reflects a ridiculous but dangerous culture.
We need to be clear that homophobia (the belief that homosexuality is wrong, depraved, and dangerous) does not come from tikanga. It comes from the colonisers. Whakapapa is about inclusion—there needs to be a bloody good reason to exclude or demean someone in any way. Who they sleep with is not a good reason. Our children grow up in an environment where they will see, hear and experience hatred of different sexualities. Whoever they grow up to be, these messages are dangerous. These messages will limit how our children see themselves and who they can imagine being.
Two women or men loving each other does not endanger children, homophobia does.
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