Ngā waiaro o te Māori ki te taurimatanga
Māori attitudes to care

Ngā tikanga a te Māori ki te whakatipu tamariki
Traditional Māori models of parenting

10. Māori traditionally lived in papakāinga (village settlements) consisting of whānau groups of 30 to 45 people. These were normally made up of kuia and kaumātua (female and male elders), pākeke (senior adults such as parents, uncles and aunts), and tama and tamāhine together with their spouses and tamariki (children). Everyone helped to raise the tamariki. This practice reflected a fundamental belief that “the child is the child of the tribe”.[1]

11. Caring for and raising tamariki as a collective, with whānau members having different roles and responsibilities, meant that tamariki were brought up in an environment that knitted the whānau together. It also meant that multiple people were observing each other as a further way to ensure care for tamariki Māori.[2]

12. Tamariki were generally treated with reverence in traditional Māori society and it was rare for adults to be violent towards them. Traditional whakataukī purākau speak to the high regard held for children. Dr Rawiri Taonui notes “the most insidious and destructive form of racism, though, is institutional racism. It is the outcome of monocultural institutions which simply ignore and freeze out the cultures of those who do not belong to the majority”.[3] Wāhine (women) and tamariki were the bearers of future generations and any violence against them was generally viewed as a transgression against whakapapa.[4]

13. As noted in Part 1, this is not to suggest that traditional Māori society did not have instances of abuse. What is clear from narratives within pūrākau (myths and legends), waiata (songs), and whakataukī (proverbs), as well as tikanga, is that abuse was not something condoned and that it carried consequences. There were culturally acceptable behaviours concerning the care, nurturing and protection of tamariki and other whānau members in traditional Māori society.[5] Knowledge passed down through generations of pukenga (experts) speak to this.

14. Early written material about care within Māori society has also been collected and published by non-Māori academics and researchers who studied and often lived with Māori communities. Many European traders and missionaries recorded observations in the early 19th century of the loving care given to pēpi (babies) and tamariki by parents and other adults. Māori fathers were nurturers and caregivers of young children in Māori society. Reverend Samuel Marsden observed in 1814 that Māori were “kind to their women and children. I never observed a mark of violence on any of them”.[6] Trader Joel Polack noted that “the [Māori] father is devotedly fond of his children, they are his pride, his boast, and peculiar delight”.[7]

15. Dr Edward Shortland, a colonial administrator and interpreter,[8] observed in the 1840s that “a parent is seldom seen to chastise his child, especially in families of rank”.[9] Practices associated with tikanga Māori concepts including tapu, mana, utu and muru helped influence behaviour.

16. Dr Shortland observed that, were a parent to physically punish a child, a relative would probably interfere to protect the child “and seek satisfaction for the injury inflicted on the child by seizing some of the pigs or other property”.[10]

Ngā waiaro me ngā rautaki o te Māori ki te hauora me te whaikaha
Māori attitudes and approaches to health and disability

17. Traditional Māori attitudes to hauora (health and wellness) had multiple dimensions, including hauora hinengaro (mental health and wellbeing), hauora tinana (physical health and wellbeing), hauora whānau (family health and wellbeing) and connection to whenua (land).

18. Wellness required a state of balance in all spiritual aspects of a person, including their tapu, mana, mauri and wairua. Traditional Māori healing operated within this broader holistic context. Tohunga (expert, healer) addressed the root cause and the symptoms rather than trying to treat a single underlying cause.[11]

19. The Western medical concept of disability had no equivalent within te ao Māori (the Māori world).[12] For example, Māori oral histories suggest that being kāpō (blind) was seen not as a disability but a source of greatness or special power to be shared with their hapū.[13] There is limited evidence about attitudes to disability and Deafness in te ao tawhito (the ancient Māori world).[14] Tāngata Turi Māori likely experienced limited but functional participation in Māori society pre-colonisation.

20. The arrival of European missionaries and settlers disrupted Māori systems of health and wellbeing.[15]

Ngā waiaro o te Māori ki te iatanga me te hemahematanga
Māori attitudes towards gender and sexuality

21. Before colonisation, both Māori men and women were regarded as essential parts of the collective whole, with evidence of fluid conceptions of gender and sexuality in pre-colonial Māori society.[16]

22. Ancestral names could be gender neutral, emphasising the importance of whakapapa rather than gender. Sexual expression was integrated into various aspects of life, both spiritual and social, and was regularly discussed and depicted in carvings. Additionally, relationships of a sexual nature served as a means to strengthen and forge alliances and relationships.[17]

Ngā waiaro o ngā iwi Pasifika ki te taurimatanga
Pacific Peoples’ attitudes to care

Ngā tikanga o ngā iwi Paskifika ki te whakatipu tamariki
Pacific models of parenting

23. Pacific cultures treated infants with attention and understanding. Raising children was a collective effort. “Parents are fairly remote figures to young children, and they are not necessarily the ultimate authority figures; older members of the household may be.”[18] This included older siblings who could play a significant role in raising children.[19]

24. Children were expected to learn their place in the family and in the community. They learned through observing and listening to others. Through this learning, children would mature to “assume responsibility” and to be contributors to the collective.[20] Part of this responsibility was learning the importance of service, and it was “widely understood that one’s existence is to honour, serve and protect their family.”[21]

Ngā waiaro me ngā rautaki o ngā iwi Pasifika ki te hauora me te whaikaha
Pacific Peoples’ approaches to health and disability

25. Before colonisation, Pacific cultures did not consider mental illness to come only from within a person. They viewed mental distress as ‘spiritual possession’ caused by the breach of a sacred covenant between people and their gods.[22]

26. Since colonisation and Christianity, some Pacific attitudes towards disability and mental distress have changed. Christian perspectives tended to see disability as a punishment for sin and this may have influenced Pacific Peoples’ views towards disabled people.[23] Pacific disabled people can face discriminatory attitudes from people within their own communities, attitudes that are based on beliefs in divine punishment, and breaches of tapu.[24] These beliefs express themselves in attitudes of cultural stigma and shame.[25]

27. Pacific Peoples still see mental distress and disability as not just a medical issue with a physical cause but as an inseparable part of overall wellbeing involving “body, soul and spirit”.[26]

Ngā waiaro o ngā iwi manene ki te taurimatanga
Settlers’ attitudes towards care

28. Europeans came to Aotearoa New Zealand in four main waves in the 19th century. Before 1840, European settlement had consisted of small numbers of missionaries, whalers, traders and some government officials. After 1840 there were large waves of officials and colonists (land purchasers), people assisted to emigrate by the New Zealand Company and its affiliates, imperial soldiers, and people who came for opportunities such as the goldrush. In the 19th century many people left Britain and Ireland to escape worsening economic conditions and social upheaval. Ninety percent of the 500,000 or so people who came to Aotearoa New Zealand from 1840 to 1945 were from Britain and Ireland.[27] They brought beliefs and ways of doing things with them, some of which influenced how care settings developed in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Te taurima i te hunga e rongo ana i te wairangitanga
Caring for people experiencing mental distress

29. Before the mid-18th century in Britain, Deaf, disabled people and people experiencing mental distress were part of the community, cared for by a patchwork of family and Christian charity.[28] If they were thought to be a risk to themselves or others they might be cared for in a hospital, or jailed. The State intervened sometimes in the case of landowners experiencing mental distress to protect the land title.[29]

30. After the dissolution of the monasteries and abbeys that had traditionally provided care, and the enclosures and advances in agricultural technology that led to the loss of labouring jobs, more and more people became dependent on parish relief, moved to towns or formed dispossessed, homeless groups who were seen as a threat to social order. The State responded with more institutional forms of social control such as workhouses and asylums.[30] Outdoor relief (aid delivered to people in their homes) was used until the 19th century, when the new Poor Laws focused more on provision of aid through the workhouse.[31]

31. Disruption to social structures from population growth and urbanisation meant that “consequently, while a family-based system of caring for the mad may never have worked especially well, one suspects that by the turn of the [19th] century it was likely to have been functioning particularly badly”.[32]

32. This carried over into Aotearoa New Zealand. By the end of the 19th century, there were gaps in Pākehā extended family networks due to people having fewer extended family members living nearby. This led the Inspector of Lunatic Asylums to complain that many patients were in the asylums only because they had no one else to look after them.[33] The 19th century was also when mental distress began to define a person as an identity.[34]

33. Awareness of conditions inside early asylums in Aotearoa New Zealand prompted the establishment of some private hospitals for people experiencing mental distress. Ashburn Hall (now Ashburn Clinic), for example, was founded in 1882 “as a humanitarian alternative to state hospital care of the day”.[35]

Te taurima tamariki
Caring for children

34. The way people cared for children in Britain and Ireland, and the ideas about this they brought with them to Aotearoa New Zealand, were influenced by circumstances such as wealth, class and poverty. Parents loved their children and did what they could to protect them but were sometimes limited in what they could do by wider social and economic conditions.[36]

35. Children made an important contribution to the household economy for many working families. Until the middle of the 19th century, “children’s lives were dominated not by schooling but by labour”.[37]

36. The decline in disease had a big impact on childhood and on the child’s place in the family. In 18th century Europe, mortality rates before reaching puberty were sometimes as high as 45 percent. As medicine, hygiene and nutrition progressed, parents could afford to focus on emotional and psychological as well as physical wellbeing.[38]

37. A belief in the possibility of childhood for all children emerged in the 18th century and was developed in the 19th century. Through this period reformers were horrified by child labour in factories and worried about children as future citizens. They lobbied for legislation to protect them. Childhood became a public concern and institutions and laws associated with it grew.[39]

Te orokohanga o ngā whakaritenga taurima i Aotearoa
Origins of care settings in Aotearoa New Zealand

38. Social policy in Aotearoa New Zealand, including those in care settings, originated from the 1837 House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines.[40] The Committee was established to investigate the living conditions, treatment and welfare of indigenous populations in Britain’s colonies, and had a major influence on assimilation policy, including in Aotearoa New Zealand.”[41]

39. The Committee saw Britain as having a responsibility to spread European civilisation and Christianity to other peoples and believed that influencing aboriginal children was the best way to do this.[42] The House of Commons Committee was also influenced by the 1834 Royal Commission (Poor Law Report) in Britain. This report recommended ending in-home charitable aid in Britain in favour of institutionalising the poor in workhouses.

Te mākohakoha me te taurima i te hunga rawakore i te rautau 19 i Piritana 
Charity and care for the poor in 19th century Britain

40. The 1834 Poor Law changed how welfare was provided to people in poverty in Britain. Instead of providing support to the poor in their own homes (outdoor relief), a new chain of workhouses was built across the country.[43] Workhouses had already existed for more than a century alongside outdoor relief, but from 1834 workhouses would be the main form of support available to the poor and were built using architectural models based on prisons.[44]

41. Conditions in workhouses were designed to be worse than those outside to discourage people from claiming poor relief. There were strict rules and minimal food or comfort. Families were separated, with husbands, wives and children housed in separate sections.[45]

42. Both the Poor Law Report and the House of Commons Committee were concerned about how to deal with people that were considered unproductive and potentially a source of disorder. The preferred solutions included:

• asserting control
• integrating outsiders into British society and economy (including institutions)
• appointing protectors and overseers
• removing children from their parents (as children were considered particularly open to education and salvation).[46]

43. These views would come to influence care settings in Aotearoa New Zealand. Due to the settlers’ dislike of workhouses and their desire to build a ‘Brighter Britain’, workhouses were not established here for providing aid to the poor.[47] However, their influence could be seen in the industrial schools established for children in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 19th century.[48]

Te taurimatanga me te tokoora i te rautau 19 Aotearoa
Care and welfare in 19th century Aotearoa New Zealand

44. In the 19th century, faith-based care was often the only available option for care outside of the family unit, particularly for Pākehā with few or no family networks. For most of the 19th century, the State did not see itself as responsible for the care of those in need, preferring to leave that to the individual’s family or church community.[49] Provincial governments also provided financial relief, subsidised existing institutions, or set up their own institutions such as the Otago Benevolent Institution.[50]

45. Churches were also trusted institutions, seen as safe places that could provide good care for children, young people and adults in care. The faiths have a long history of providing care.[51] Faith-based care was motivated by a sense of charity for the destitute as well as a desire to spread Christian values and beliefs.

46. The 1877 Destitute Persons Act reinforced the existing principle of family responsibility for the care of the poor, making both ‘near relatives’ and more distant relations of a destitute person responsible for supporting them.[52]

47. From 1867, children and young people charged in the Courts with being ‘neglected’, ‘uncontrollable’ or ‘criminal’ could be sent to one of a series of industrial schools.[53] The list of ‘offences’ that could lead to a child’s committal to industrial school included ‘begging’, ‘wandering about or frequenting any street or public place’, being homeless, and ‘associating with prostitutes, drunkards, thieves or vagrants’.[54] In 1880, the newly-established Department of Education took over control of the industrial schools.[55]

48. In 1885, the government established a system of district Charitable Aid Boards. The boards’ powers included control of charitable institutions in their districts, and the guardianship of children in the care of industrial schools.[56]

49. Institutionalisation was not the only option for children who committed offences or were charged with being a neglected child in the late 19th century. From 1882, children sentenced to industrial schools could be boarded out to foster homes or placed into service, which meant farm labour for boys and domestic service for girls.[57]

50. Fostering or ‘boarding out’ came to be governments’ favoured option for such young people, as it created both a ‘family environment’ for the child, and a cheaper alternative to institutional care.[58]

51. There were issues with abuse in these early care settings. For example, a 1908 inquiry into the Te Oranga Girls’ Home (called Kingslea Girls’ Training Centre from 1965) in Ōtautahi Christchurch heard evidence of physical abuse,[59] while the Catholic Sunnybank Boys’ Home (called Garindale from 1975) in Nelson had reports of physical and sexual abuse in the 1940s.[60]

Footnotes