How colonisation created the state care to prison pipeline

7:07 pm today

By Dr Rawiri Waretini-Karena*

Dr Rawiri Waretini-Karena and whanau before he was taken into state care, 1974. Photo: Supplied

On 24 July, the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry's final report will be made public by the government. Ahead of the report's public release, survivors share their hopes for the healing process ahead.

First Person - Abuse in care is a colonial story. When I walked into the prison yard for the first time as a teenager, having never been there before - I already knew 80 percent of the men in there. We'd spent the last 11 years growing up together in state care.

That's when I knew there was a pipeline to prison; a pipeline that has spent decades sweeping up and funnelling Māori children from state care to prison.

We talk about fractured homes, fractured families, and fractured communities, but what is the whakapapa of how they became fractured?

Look at it this way: if I sold you a car and I had cut the brakes, and you went off and drove it and you crashed, who is responsible? You for driving, or me for cutting the brakes?

This acknowledges that whilst we are responsible for our actions, we are not responsible for the hidden mechanisms that operate within the environment we are born into, privileging one faction at the expense of the other.

For me, it's clear - the issue leads right back to legislative policies of successive governments. You can't separate abuse in state care from our history of colonisation and indigenous oppression. The stories of survivors of state care - their stories are all part of the colonial story.

Family violence, sexual violence and child abuse were not a traditional part of Māori culture prior to colonisation. This is captured in a proverb that states, "He Mareikura, he taonga tuku iho ki waenganui ko Ranginui rāua ko Papatūānuku. He tapu te wharetangata" - our women are a sacred conduit between heaven and earth, because they hold the holy house of birthing.

Dr Rawiri Waretini-Karena. Photo: Supplied

Māori families traditionally lived in communities where a child was loved and nurtured, so harming a child was tapu - because when one harms a child, they also harm their whakapapa, leading to serious consequences, as whakapapa was also considered sacred.

But when the British arrived, they brought with them the colonial tool of assimilation, targeting indigenous children - because they were the better bet to be assimilated to Western views and Western ways of seeing things, by being coerced into upholding Western pedagogies.

In Aotearoa, the British created Māori experiences of stolen generations through distributing assimilation policies via legislation, establishing the Native Department in 1861. In 1867, they implemented the Neglected and Criminal Children's Act, which Oranga Tamariki can whakapapa back to, as well as the Native Schools Act 1867, which established an education system designed to assimilate Māori into Pākehā society by requiring that only the English language can be written or spoken in schools. This was enforced through severe corporal punishment.

As an analogy, if you take a stone and you drop it into a pond, it creates ripples. The Native Schools Act 1867 represents that stone. The first ripple made the Māori language illegal. The second ripple saw te reo Māori banned by the state. The third ripple saw legal justification for beating and abusing tama-ariki for speaking their native language.

The fourth ripple saw the status of tama-ariki changed from taonga to the lower status as a commodity. This led to the fifth ripple, where tama-ariki over generations began experiencing abuse, neglect, and death at the hands of their caregivers, who experienced harsh corporal punishment in schools as children, and then in turn applied the same form of discipline to their tama-ariki, leading to the children ending up in state care.

From 1950 to 1999, more than 200,000 children were subject to state care abuse, perpetuating a never-nding systemic cycle of fractured homes, fractured families, and fractured communities without any intergenerational insights into the insidious systemic mechanisms that created the problem in the first place.

Dr Rawiri Waretini-Karena with others at the Tu Tonu Health & Rehabilitation Wellbeing Centre in Hamilton. Photo: Supplied

When this report comes out, I really want to see the government be brave and explore this cause and effect.

So far, the coalition has been really good at criticising crime rates, establishing boot camps and pointing the finger at gangs. But they've been really slow to identify contributing factors and the root causes that led to these outcomes.

The royal commission has been operating since 2018. It's collected the lived experiences of thousands of survivors and hard evidence that support both survivors' stories and the recommendations made. They have all the information they need to make informed, evidence-based decisions.

We've been here before - the Waitangi Tribunal and the remuneration process came about because there was finally, a recognition that the inalienable, inherited rights that Māori held previous to - and recognised under Te Tiriti o Waitangi - were breached over numerous generations, leading to intergenerational poverty, loss of cultural heritage, and a near extinction of te reo Māori, and that these breaches led to the privileging of pākehā at the expense of Māori.

But this has been accompanied by a certain political intentionality that has enabled what I call "historical amnesia", to pervade the country, perpetuating ideas about Māori riding a gravy train, as opposed to acknowledging a history of invasion, war, genocide and the confiscation/ theft of trillions of dollars' worth of lands, resources, and assets.

We can't let that happen again. We must unpack this narrative about state care and how it came about, and that is what the government is scared to do.

Dr Rawiri Waretini-Karena with others at the Tu Tonu Health & Rehabilitation Wellbeing Centre in Hamilton. Photo: Supplied

I want to encourage them to be brave and open, so we never have to repeat it. But they do not know how. Yet Māori, do. Because we have done this before as well.

In 1906, 95 percent of Māori could speak their native language. Eighty years later, only 5 percent could. We've gone from generations who lost their reo to future generations of fluent speakers.

When I look at the damage done to Māori children in state care, assimilation sought to disconnect them from their native voice, and cultural heritage, controlling the way Māori children perceive themselves. Because a people alienated from their cultural heritage are like a tree without roots, blowing to and fro, for they are not grounded and anchored in their whakapapa, customs, and language, becoming vulnerable to the manipulations of those who do not have their best interests at heart.

Part of the healing journey enables Māori children in state care to reconnect back to their cultural heritage, whilst our country as a catalyst for change, embraces working together as Te Tiriti partners honouring our history whilst simultaneously ensuring our futures, from a place of aroha, humility, and compassion to build the type of respectful race relations that would be the envy of the rest of the world.

* Dr Rawiri Waretini-Karena is from Ngāti Māhanga, Ngāti Māhuta, as well as Ngāti Kaahu, and Ngāti Hine. He spent more than a decade in state care before being convicted of murder and spending more than a decade in prison. Since his release, Waretini-Karena has become an expert in intergenerational trauma and alternatives to violence.

He graduated with a PhD Doctorate of Philosophy in Indigenous studies in 2014, and was a lecturer on the Masters and PhD Professional Doctorate Program at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi. He is a national and internationally published editor and author lecturing at Wintec specialising in counselling social work and mental health. He has recently been a head of research at Tuu Oho Mai Services facilitating workshops in the family violence and sexual violence field. And he was until recently the CEO of Tu Tonu Health & Rehabilitation Wellbeing Centre in Hamilton.

Today he is an executive sales representative for Te Mana Energy, a kaupapa Māori solar power, and solar desalination renewable energy company that operates globally.

This combination of knowledge and experience puts Rawiri Waretini-Karena in a unique position to make recommendations for change.

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