Mixed Race Studies

“I don’t think we have any full-blooded Māori,” Dr. [Tīmoti] Kāretu said. “But it is not a problem. As long as you have a Māori (ancestor), you are Māori. It’s left to the individual to identify with their Māori or European.”

K. C. Cole, “Chickasaw and Māori Celebrate Similarities, Language and Culture,” Indian Country Today Media Network, May 31, 2014. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/05/31/chickasaw-and-maori-celebrate-similarities-language-and-culture-155051.

The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā Encounters, 1642–1840

Aukland University Press
May/June 2012
320 pages
228 x 148 mm
Paperback ISBN: 978 1 86940 594 6

Vincent O’Malley, Research Director
HistoryWorks Ltd., Wellington, New Zealand

How did Māori and Pākehā negotiate a meeting place? Would Māori observe the Sabbath? Should Pākehā fear the power of tapu? Whose view of land ownership and control would prevail? How would Māori rangatira and Pākehā leaders establish the rules of political engagement? Around such considerations about how the world would work, Māori and Pākehā in early New Zealand defined a way of being together. This is a book about that meeting time and place, about a process of mutual discovery, contact and encounter — meeting, greeting and seeing — between Māori and Pākehā from 1642 to about 1840.

After introducing the brief encounters and misunderstandings between European visitors and Māori before 1814, O’Malley focuses his study on the period between 1814 and 1840 when he argues that both peoples inhabited a ‘middle ground’ meeting place in which neither could dictate the political, economic or cultural rules of engagement.  By looking at economic, religious, political and sexual encounters, O’Malley offers a strikingly different picture to traditional accounts of imperial Pākehā power over a static, resistant Māori society.

In this meeting place, O’Malley shows, Māori and Europeans re-evaluated cultural priorities, adapted the customs of the other people that they found useful and sometimes ‘went native’ as they fell over into the other culture. O’Malley concludes with an analysis of how the middle ground gave way around 1840 to a world in which Pākehā had enough power largely to dictate terms.

White Mothers, Brown Children: Ethnic Identification of Maori-European Children in New Zealand

Journal of Marriage and Family
Volume 69, Issue 5 (December 2007)
pages 1150–1161
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2007.00438.x

Tahu H. Kukutai, Senior Research Fellow
Population Studies Centre
University of Waikato

Studies of multiethnic families often assume the ethnic identification of children with the minority group results from the minority parent. This study examines an alternate view that mainstream parents also play an important role in transmitting minority ethnicity. It explores this argument using data from New Zealand on the ethnic labels mothers assign to their Māori-European children. It finds that European mothers are just as disposed as Māori mothers to designate their child as Māori, either exclusively or in combination. Two explanations, grounded in ethnic awareness and gendered inheritance, are proposed. Although neither satisfactorily predicts maternal designation decisions, the readiness of European mothers to identify their child as Maori underscores their role in diffusing Māori ethnicity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mai i ngā Ao e Rua–From Two Worlds: An investigation into the attitudes towards half castes in New Zealand

University of Otago, Dunedin
October 2006
91 pages

Suzanne Boyes

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours), in Māori Studies at the University of Otago, Dunedin

This dissertation investigates the attitudes of others’ experienced by ‘half-caste’ or biethnic people of New Zealand, that is, people who have both Māori and Pākehā heritage. The dissertation combines the personal narratives of four half-caste people, my own story, and historical/theoretical literature to illuminate this subject. The dissertation introduces the topic by firstly, discussing the current identity politics in New Zealand, which has tended to dominate the political landscape as of late, and left half-caste people between the crossfire. Secondly, I introduce part of my own story as a half-caste person in New Zealand. In Chapter one, the pre-colonial origins of attitudes towards race, intermarriage and miscegenation are examined through an analysis of religious and scientific discourses. Chapter Two provides a basic understanding of Māori and Pākehā identity as separate entities, with the aim of demonstrating the binary opposites that have informed attitudes towards half-castes in New Zealand. The third chapter outlines a number of themes regarding attitudes towards the half caste people I interviewed as part of this research. The final chapter brings together literature and interview material through the lens of a Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People to provide an approach for looking towards the future of half-caste identity politics.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Gender, Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand

Gender & History
Volume 19, Issue 3 (November 2007)
pages 501–518
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2007.00495.x

Barbara Brookes, Professor of History
Otago University, New Zealand

The 1929 New Zealand Committee of Inquiry into the Employment of Māori on Market Gardens affords insight into the ways in which masculine fears of racial degradation through miscegenation—of a ‘hybrid’ Chinese/Māori race—operated within a hierarchy of race, gender and Iwi (tribal) interests. The participation of Māori men in national politics contributed to a new articulation of ‘National Manhood’, in which Māori men and white men combined to express fears about women’s work and sexuality and young women’s potential to undermine a fragile and contested hierarchy of racial purity. Māori women, silenced in the cacophony of voices lamenting their plight, were at the centre of debates between Māori men, Pakeha (white New Zealander) employers, Chinese market gardeners, Anglican and Methodist interests and Pakeha women’s groups. I argue that the Inquiry was about commerce, both in a business and a sexual sense. As a historical episode, it also serves to complicate the picture of New Zealand as a historically bicultural society, made up only of Māori and Pakeha, by signalling the importance of the Chinese in debates about national belonging.

Read or purchase the article here.

Being Māori-Chinese: Mixed Identities (Book Review)

Sites: a journal of social anthropology and cultural studies
University of Otago, New Zealand
Volume 5, Number 2 (2008)
pages 180-182

Kate Bagnall

Being Māori-Chinese: Mixed Identities, Manying Ip, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2008, 255pp. ISBN 978-1-86940-399-7

Manying Ip makes it clear from the outset that Being Māori-Chinese: Mixed Identities is a very personal book. It begins with an explanation of her own inspiration for the project – the emergence of tantalising snippets about Māori-Chinese families that kept popping up in her wider research on New Zealand Chinese – and her own process of locating subjects and conducting interviews. Ip tells of being warned by a ‘well-meaning elder’ from Te Wānangao-Raukawa about the difficulties she would encounter in her project, due to the sensitivity of the subject matter and the reticence that Māori-Chinese as a group would have towards sharing in-depth information with her. ‘Are you sure you wish to pursue this study on Māori-Chinese relations? I don’t think people will tell you much’, he said.

The publication of Being Māori-Chinese is, then, an acknowledgement of Ip’s reputation as a researcher and community advocate. It is only through mutual trust that she has been given access to the personal stories of the seven Māori-Chinese families whose experiences make up the heart of the book.  Each chapter focuses on a particular family and presents an intimate journey into the family culture and individual identities of family members. The book is further testament to the courage and generosity of her subjects, who shared memories and thoughts on many aspects of their lives. Their generosity is particularly moving because, as Ip states, ‘those memories involve a struggle against social discrimination and, in many cases, family disapproval’…

…Family stories, such as those told in Being Māori-Chinese, are at the core of the growing body of Australasian scholarship that explores mixed race lives, families and communities. Such stories counter the assumptions of previous generations that interracial encounters were either unthinkable due to race prejudice or occurred under unsavoury conditions that were detrimental to one or both parties. Ip is to be commended for encouraging the Māori-Chinese families included in the book to share their experiences, and also for carefully structuring each chapter so that her voice takes a secondary place to those of family members themselves. As she notes in her Introduction, the book explores lives that ‘have been largely overlooked in the formal historical and sociological discourse of New Zealand’. This book is an important step in inserting Māori-Chinese into the story of New Zealand’s past, present and future…

Read the entire review here.