Dear Mr (Dover) Samuels
You are reported on Radio New Zealand on September 3 as saying that “the Crown” should apologise to Ma¯ ori who had been beaten as children for speaking in Ma¯ ori at school, and that this “had been a deliberate policy on the part of the Crown to disempower [your] generation”. You have received support from Hon Kelvin Davis, who is reported as saying “that the issue of . . . discrimination against Ma¯ ori children is a significant one”.
Well now, may I say for a start that I am totally opposed to any violence towards children, having supported Sue Bradford in the ‘anti-smacking’ referendum. However, the issue which you raise has a significant past, which is seldom mentioned in discussion today. There are two important facts which should be accepted right at the start.
First: in the early days of universal education, considerable efforts were made to provide appropriately for Ma¯ ori children, and a number of ‘native schools’ were established.
Now a most significant development was that very many Ma¯ ori parents decided that it was necessary that in these schools all instruction should be in English, and no Ma¯ ori was to be spoken. Clearly these parents, in contrast to many today, understood correctly that if their children were to have the best opportunities in the modern world, it was necessary for them to be proficient in English.
Thus, at least two considerable petitions were presented to Parliament. One such was the 1876 petition of Wi Te Hakiro and 336 others that “[T]here should not be a word of Ma¯ ori allowed to be spoken in the [native] school.” ‘The Crown’, that is the educational authorities of the day, responded positively to such clearly expressed wishes of Ma¯ ori parents. It would surely be absurd to apologise today, 143 years later, because it did so.
Second: much is made by some today of the corporal punishment of children caught speaking Ma¯ ori, ignoring the fact that in those less enlightened days it was applied for all breaches of school rules, not simply by Ma¯ ori children but by all. There was no “discrimination against Ma¯ ori children”. In my own school days the cane was in frequent use, irrespective of the ethnicity of its victims, and no doubt some of them still feel resentment and hurt.
So, we cannot bring back the past and amend its behaviour to that which we consider appropriate today. It had its rights and wrongs, as so, surely, do we. But the “deliberate policy on the part of the Crown” was to meet the wishes of Ma¯ ori parents seeking the best outcome for their children, not to “disempower” your generation. I suggest that you and the minister accept this and let it go.
BRUCE MOON
Nelson