That was the question headlining a lengthy article by Marty Sharpe in the weekend's DomPost.
Here are my questions in response.
What if the Maori child's aunties, uncles and grandparents are non-Maori families?
More Maori partner with non-Maori than Maori. This is a long-standing trend.
Will the radicals who are currently pushing a separatist agenda decide that a Maori child must be placed with a Maori family in preference to kin family?
Will cultural ties triumph over blood ties?
These questions literally keep me awake at night.
In the sixties in Auckland more Maori married non-Maori than Maori. These people formed life-changing and often lifelong bonds. They were possibly the most important thing in each others lives.
They were being what it is to be human.
In the same way children can and do form bonds with caregivers. They don't care about about skin colour.
Pause.
So not far on from the original question posed in the headline, will we hear, "Should Maori be having children with non-Maori?"
When that sort of thinking gets a grip, well...
I am reminded of a gut-wrenching novel I read in the late 1990s, Holly, by Albert French, set in North Carolina 1940s. The story of a young negro who fell in love with a white girl, Holly, who reciprocated. She got pregnant. He lost his life for it.
4 comments:
Lindsay, your comment about the novel you read "Holly" and the impact it had on you, reminded me of a movie I saw back in the late sixties.
It was called A Patch Of Blue and it starred Sidney Poitier and Anne Hartman. Story about a black man meeting a blind white girl and the white girl didn't know the man was black. Everything was fine until someone whispered the fact into her ear. It was "gut wrenching" stuff even for someone like me who lived on the wrong side of the tracks.
Lillies of the Field was another Poitier classic I remember from those times.
I met my Wahine many years ago when I stopped off for a coffee at the cafe where she worked.
I asked her out for dinner, she told me to get lost. Being of Viking stock I wasn't put off by her refusal so I went back a week later and posed the same invitation, I received the same reply. . I did it again a week after that and she agreed. To be honest I think it was only to stop me annoying her.
We had dinner at a fancy restaurant, where the little Maori Lady taught the BFG some table manners before we went to a Maynard Fergusson jazz concert at the recently refurbished Palmerston North Regent theatre.
We have been together 20 years and married for 16 and not a week goes by we dont celebrate the day the Gods made our paths cross. The adventure continues........
And may you both enjoy each other for many more years to come.
We know "child welfare" has nothing to do with the welfare of children, they are just pawns in the power games.
Outcomes for Maori children are worse in whanau placements than in general placements, I can't see how cultural placements will be any better. Having a bit more melanin does not necessarily make a better placement for a child, nor does having less.
It is the children who suffer.
Oranga Tamariki (OT) which in a previous life was known as Child Youth and Family Services – was not so long ago performing mightily over the uplift of a Maori infant in Hawkes Bay. The rights and wrongs of that case have faded away somewhat but not the resolve of OT to maintain its pursuit of Maori methods to solve all childcare issues.
OT is itself now, on the grounds of cultural needs, seeking to uplift a school age child (6 yrs) from a semi-long term placement. How can it make sense if OT was involved in originally placing the child with the caregivers? Suddenly it seems undefined cultural needs overtake and eliminate all other needs. The child now a six year old was placed with the current caregivers at age three. The child is said to be thriving in the caregiver’s household and will probably have bonded fully with them.
If the child was removed from a failed family unit or extended family and has now improved out of sight why should she be uplifted a second time. Where is the proof that any new placement would do any better? The child would have been uplifted in the first place, we would hope, for good reasons. And those good reasons might well have related to real cultural needs, such as a sense of belonging, parenting, plus care in a safe and secure environment.
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