Full-blooded or just bloody-minded?
In this editorial, I’m about to explain to Maori Television presenter Oriini Kaipara what it means to be Maori.
Yes, you heard right: This Pakeha proposes to lecture the woman identified with fanfare as being ‘‘full-blooded Maori’’ about what it means to be her. Offensive, much?
But bear with me, please. Because a job of journalism is myth-busting. And Kaipara this week found herself written into the mythology of blood quantum, the creepy racial ideology that measures one’s ethnicity by the percentages of red, white and Maori cells in your blood.
It came when Maori Television’s Native Affairs show uncritically embraced Ancestry.com. This is a website whose press releases (‘‘George Clooney is cousin five times removed from Abraham Lincoln’’, ‘‘Richie McCaw is Jamaican’’) are ignored by most journalists. It is a website that touts for business from the lonely by promising to find a DNA strand that connects them to greatness.
The show announced: ‘‘A DNA ethnicity test taken by more than 9 million people worldwide has discovered a full-blooded Maori.’’ (Kaipara, by contrast, pointed out that she was aware of at least two English tupuna, and that this DNA test result didn’t make her more Maori than anyone else).
Never mind. The myth-making wheels were already turning.
In New Zealand, the Census once counted Maori as full-blood, half-castes and quarter-castes, as if to measure ‘‘the dying race’’.
In 2006, then National Leader Don Brash rejected legal rights for Maori, saying ‘‘there are few, if any, fully Maori left here’’. And government departments still bat off OIA requests asking if there are any ‘‘pure-blooded Maori’’ left.
It is in this context that Maori TV, in a misguided defensive parry, embraced this bunkum blood quantum ‘‘pseudo-science’’.
That’s what Professor Tahu Kukutai calls it. In a 2004 study she said DNA testing to trace ancestry was scientifically dubious, and coopted for ‘‘pernicious’’ purposes.
In truth, blood means nothing. This is not a high school arithmetic problem. What determines one’s ethnicity is the strands of your heritage that you embrace. There is a word for that: It is whakapapa.
Blood quantum’s only meaning is as a metaphor – and metaphors do have their uses. For instance, we report today a tribal deity who stands in the way of lucrative plans to build salmon farms in Pelorus Sound. For those of us who struggle to accept the existence of a giant taniwha, consider it as a metaphor for the duty of care the iwi have to their environment.
Blood quantum is a far more sinister metaphor. Its only use has been to diminish the claim of indigenous peoples to their ancestry, and ultimately to their resources. Ask the Moriori, who have spent decades fighting for recognition, after reports they had died out with Tommy Solomon, ‘‘the last full-blooded Moriori’’.
So what does it mean to be Maori or, indeed, any ethnicity?
It means being descended from that culture; identifying with it; being embraced by it. It doesn’t mean handing over your identity in a test tube to a DNA testing firm.