http://waikato.researchgateway.ac.nz/ Research Commons at the University of Waikato Copyright Statement: The digital copy of this thesis is protected by the Copyright Act 1994 (New Zealand). The thesis may be consulted by you, provided you comply with the provisions of the Act and the following conditions of use: Any use you make of these documents or images must be for research or private study purposes only, and you may not make them available to any other person. Authors control the copyright of their thesis. You will recognise the author’s right to be identified as the author of the thesis, and due acknowledgement will be made to the author where appropriate. You will obtain the author’s permission before publishing any material from the thesis. PROCESSES OF PAKEHA CHANGE IN RESPONSE TO THE TREATY OF WAITANGI A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Waikato by Ingrid Huygens 2007 DEDICATION To my father the labourer‐philosopher who pondered these things as he drove his tractor i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My most respectful and loving acknowledgments to my peer study group of Mitzi and Ray Nairn, Rose Black and Tim McCreanor. Their combined experience spanned a depth and breadth of Pakeha Treaty work that framed my research project. Their academic, emotional and practical support during times of ill-health and scant resources made this thesis possible. To my colleagues, the Treaty and decolonisation educators who shared with me their reflections, their dreams and their ways of working. It was a privilege to visit each group in their home area, and my year of travelling around the country will always stand out as one of warmth, colour and generosity. My deepest appreciation to my supervisors, Maria Humphries, Isaac Prilleltensky and Neville Robertson for their generous guidance and for sharing their own courageous work for change. To my loving family for their warm acceptance, as always, of my projects in life. To my trusted friends, Gloria and Heather, for their daily encouragement, outings and generous librarian expertise. To my neighbours Heather, Barbara, Ben and Annemarie for their walks, talks and lunches to keep my spirits up. To my beloved dancers and musicians of Dance Folkus, the Celtic Dance Club and Ni Ghabhan Irish Dance academy – without their dancing, music, ceilidhs (and haggis) I would never have believed that doing a PhD could be so much fun and so good for your health! To Jon Smyth of FlipCity InfoMedia for his extended contribution to the filming, graphic and electronic resources. To the Electronic Media Foundation Aotearoa New Zealand (EMFANZ) for supporting the production of electronic resources for community action projects such as this. My grateful thanks to the University of Waikato, Federation of University Graduate Women, Trust Waikato and the Stephen Tindall Foundation for their generous financial assistance in the form of scholarships and expenses funding. To Whirimako Black, the Soweto String Quartet and Chris Thompson for their sublime musical accompaniments. ii ABSTRACT The sense of crisis that marks our times may be seen as a crisis for dominant groups whose once-secure hegemony is being challenged by marginalised others. It is in theorising the reply from the dominant group to the voices of the oppressed that existing Western conceptions of social change fall silent. The dominant Pakeha group in Aotearoa New Zealand has used discourses of benign colonisation and harmonious race relations to resist 165 years of communication from indigenous Maori about their oppression and a dishonoured treaty for settlement. My research documents the appearance of the Treaty of Waitangi into the Pakeha consciousness, and the now 30 year-long response by a Pakeha antiracism movement to educate their own cultural group about its agreements. Targeting government, community and social services organisations, activist educators used Freire’s (1975) approach of conscientising dialogue to present a more critical view of colonisation, and to encourage participants to consider the complicity of their organisations in ongoing structural and cultural racism. Based on my membership of local and national networks of activist educators, I was able to organise and facilitate data gathering from three sources to investigate processes of Pakeha change in: (i) unpublished material describing the antiracism and Treaty movement’s historical theorising and strategies over 30 years, (ii) a country-wide process of co-theorising among contemporary Treaty educator groups about their work and perceived influence, and (iii) a collection of organisational accounts of Treaty-focused change. The collected records confirmed that a coherent anti-colonial discourse, which I have termed ‘Pakeha honouring the Treaty’, was in use to construct institutional and constitutional changes in non-government organisations. My interpretation of key elements in a local theory of transforming action included emotional responses to counter- cultural information, collective work for cultural and institutional change and practising a mutually agreed relationship with Maori. I concluded that these emotional, collective and relationship processes in dominant group change were crucial in helping to construct the new conceptual resources of ‘affirming Maori authority’ and ‘striving towards a right relationship with Maori’. These counter- colonial constructions allowed Pakeha a non-resistant and facilitative response to Maori challenge, and enabled a dialogue with Maori about decolonisation. By examining in one research programme the genealogy and interdependencies of a new discourse, my research contributes to theorising about the production of iii new, counter-hegemonic discourses, and confirms the crucial part played by social movements in developing new, liberatory constructions of the social order. My research calls for further theory-building on (i) emotional and spiritual aspects of transformational learning, (ii) processes involved in consciously-undertaken cultural change by dominant/coloniser groups, and (iii) practising of mutually agreed relationships with indigenous peoples by dominant/coloniser groups. My research has implications for theorising how coloniser and dominant groups generally may participate in liberatory social change and decolonisation work, and the part played by the Western states in the global struggles by indigenous people for recognition of their world-views and aspirations. It remains to be seen whether counter-colonial discourses and organisational changes aimed at ‘honouring the Treaty’ with indigenous peoples will be sufficiently widely adopted to help transform Western dominating cultures and colonial projects. In the meantime, acknowledging and documenting these counter-colonial discourses and their constructions opens up increasing possibilities for constructing, from a history of colonisation, a different future. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1.0 INTRODUCTION ............................................................... 1 1.1 Purpose of study ........................................................................................................................1 1.1.1 Research aim .......................................................................................................................2 1.1.2 Local & international significance ......................................................................................3 1.2 Personal background ................................................................................................................9 1.2.1 Professional involvements.................................................................................................11 1.3 Research orientation ...............................................................................................................12 1.3.1 Focusing on Pakeha process..............................................................................................12 1.3.2 Ontological and cultural blindness ....................................................................................14 1.3.3 Useful terminology............................................................................................................16 1.4 Guide to the thesis ...................................................................................................................17 CHAPTER 2.0 LOCAL COLONISATION AND RESPONSES................ 21 2.1 Standard story of New Zealand history.................................................................................21 2.1.1 Critical commentary ..........................................................................................................24 2. 3 Revisiting history....................................................................................................................28 2.3.1 Maori and Pakeha activism................................................................................................32 2.3.2 Published alternatives to ‘standard’ colonial history........................................................35 2.3.3 Critique of legal and institutionalised racism ...................................................................39 2.3.4 Maintenance of the standard story/dominant discourse....................................................42 2.3.5 Current attitudes ................................................................................................................43 2.3.6 Critique of public discourse and the media .......................................................................44