WAIARIKI PRESENTATION

DEFINITIONS

Words do not have inherent meaning. They only have the meanings that we attribute to them. Different social groups attribute different meanings to the same word and these meanings are largely determined by the prior experience of the group. “Colonialism” means very different things to the colonisers and the colonised, for instance. It’s important, therefore, to establish some definitions of terms that will occur throughout this presentation.

CRITICAL THEORY

The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School is a critique of capitalism, its appropriation of the surplus value of collective work, and its commodification of every aspect of our modern society. It provides a better understanding to present social conditions, how these conditions evolved, how they are transformed, how they interact with each other, what laws govern their transformation, and how they are legitimated and by whom. Beyond this, critical theory is intent on not just describing the world from a critical viewpoint, but in changing it to bring about greater equity and justice. As Marx put it:

"Philosophers have only interpreted the world in certain ways; the point is to change it.’

Karl Marx

Origins: The Frankfurt School of Social Research (1930s)Derives from: Critique of the failure of Marxism and the rise of FascismInvolves: Critique of Society and Culture (as opposed to Class)A Social Theory oriented toward actively changing society as a whole, in

contrast to traditional theory wishing only to understanding or explain it.

Includes: Many disciplines Economics History Philosophy Politics Epistemology Cultural Studies Psychology Sociology Aesthetics (and more)

Investigates: the (Economic) Base - (Cultural) Superstructure relationship

Highlights: the reciprocal relationship between theory and practice Questions whose interests are served by accepted common beliefsFollows the Money: Looks for who stands to make financial profit

Demystifies common beliefs and their links to power structuresEmphasises the relationship between Theory and PracticeBASE- SUPERSTRUCTURE: ECONOMICS vs CULTURE

Amerindians protesting the 500th A Garuda Airline AdAnniversary of Columbus’ Arrival

Although Critical Theory has its roots in Marxism, it has one important difference. Marxism considers Economics (specifically the ownership of the means of production) as the base of all human social and cultural forms and behaviours, Critical Theory, on the other hand, while acknowledging the importance of economics also stresses the important part played by culture and cultural identity in maintaining or transforming the status quo. This is important, because it suggests the possibility of social transformation without the need for armed revolution. Significantly, successful Marxist regimes (the USSR, Yugoslavia, China, Nicaragua, Myanmar) by focusing on a unified and centralised model of nationhood and the State ownership of the means of production (on behalf of the workers), have failed to address the legitimate claims for autonomy of their indigenous minorities at their own ultimate cost, leading to civil (and sometimes armed) resistance by indigenous groups. It is this cultural sensitivity of Critical Theory that makes it an appropriate vehicle in bicultural education.

Nevertheless, the ownership of the means of production still impacts after 500 years for these Lakota protesters who were stripped of their productive capacity. Similarly, the Thai peasant who is obliged to wade (smiling no less!) through fetid ponds to retrieve the golf balls probably driven in there by white American (or European) tourists is most certainly not the owner of the pond, or the golf course.

ANTHROPOCENTRIC MATERIALISM vs INDIGENOUS SPIRITUALITY

Having said this, the fact that Critical Theory comes out of the Western tradition of Enlightenment rationality with its emphasis on anthropocentrism and materialism offers potential difficulties for the Western scholar wishing to work in a bicultural context. There is the very real danger of reproducing the very thing he or she is trying to eliminate – the language and practice of conquest and domination. The traditional rationality of the western academic - suffused as it is with the perspectives that have been nourished by scientific rationality and analytical reason don’t coexist easily with indigenous cosmologies.

For many traditional indigenous communities, the world is numinous – sacred, mysterious, ultimately unknowable and magical - embodying a belief in a “spirit world” or “non-ordinary reality” inhabited by “spirit beings” with whom we are able to communicate. The Navajo singer (above) who tries to cure a seriously ill individual’s balance with the universe is not easy to accept for someone steeped in Western post-Enlightenment materialist traditions. Yet nor can it be dismissed without falling into the colonial trap of white supremacism that sees indigenous cultures as “primitive” or backward. The fact is, that these “primitive” beliefs may have a more intimate relationship to the natural world and may contain the seeds of a philosophy that is much more sensitive to the needs of the planet than our own.

HEGEMONY

While physical conquest and oppression provides short-term results, it is ultimately unsustainable without the added imposition of hegemony. Hegemony is the process by which the coloniser persuades the colonised to participate in the process of their own colonisation. The imposition and assimilation of a new and imposed “commonsense” understanding by the colonised is fundamental to the success of the project.

The western media uses many devices to achieve hegemony on issues that suit western business interests. It’s proclivity for diverting public attention from the west’s own misdeeds (as above in the witch-hunt for Iran’s supposed Nuclear programme (similar to Bush’s fictitious WMD used in iraq as a justification for invasion?) while ignoring the overwhelming nuclear arsenal of nearby Israel is but one. Equally effective is the process of differentially mis-naming that takes place for those countries seen as ”friends” and those seen as “enemies”.

Other typical examples are the invitation to “expert” theorists to legitimate patently exploitative policies and to rebrand them as economic or political sophistication. The neo-Liberal concepts of the “Free market” and the “Trickle Down Theory” that demonstrably do not work are a case in point. The oppressed must come to believe that their oppression is not really oppression but in the interests of the common good. It is a strategy of pacification. It requires the exercise of control by the dominant class or culture, over all of every facet of public life through its control of the State:

The Spiritual (through the Churches, particularly the promotion of Fundamentalism)

The Political (through control over the Lawmaking, the Courts and Parliament, the Prisons)

The Economic (through the Professions, the Banks and the Finance system, the means of production)

The Educational (through control over public education)

The Social and Cultural (through control over and monopoly of the public media and all facets of cultural production).

As Marx so succinctly put it:

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas; ie., the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production...”

Karl Marx

POLITICAL CLOUT One of the main means of control exercised by the dominant culture is through the control of the political process. For example, the oil companies have exerted major influence in political processes in oil producing countries, particularly, the US, making sure that anti-environmental, oil-friendly legislation has been introduced, taxes reduced, subsidies increased etc. The oil industry has donated $238.7 million to candidates and parties since the 1990 election cycle, 75 percent of which has gone to Republicans. During the 8 years of the Bush-Cheney Administration, far reaching legislation was introduced favouring the oil companies. These policies resulted directly in the BP Gulf Horizon environmental and economic catastrophe.

Oil Industry contributions to the Bush Campaign

The same thing happened with the banking industry and Wall Street. The deregulated uncoupling of the barriers between the savings and investment branches of the finance industry ultimately led to the 2008 collapse of the world economy, but created unimaginable wealth for a select few.

In addition to campaign contributions, political lobbying by the (unelected)

large corporations in Washington and other Western Capitals ensure that legislation is passed involving deregulation, tax breaks and investment incentives and dismantling of the labour unions. These laws allow the corporations to pay little or no tax but to increase their profits at the expense of the community who must fork out for the supportive infrastructure. Democracy, then, is a sham but the illusion of political choice is maintained in order to keep the lid on public awareness, anger and protest.

Total Lobbying Spending 1998 $1.44 Billion 1999 $1.44 Billion 2000 $1.57 Billion 2001 $1.64 Billion 2002 $1.82 Billion 2003 $2.05 Billion 2004 $2.18 Billion 2005 $2.42 Billion2006 $2.62 Billion 2007 $2.86 Billion 2008 $3.30 Billion 2009 $3.50 Billion 2010 $3.55 Billion 2011 $3.33 Billion 2012 $1.64 Billion

In New Zealand we are seeing a similar public media campaign evolve promoting the sale of profitable State assets and deep-water oil exploration of our pristine coast.

KEYWORDS

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas; ie., the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production...”

Karl Marx

Food Not Bombs Demonstration

San Francisco

In general, the dominant culture in any society is the one that determines the more generally accepted meaning of a word, and in this sense there is a constant struggle going on by subordinate cultures to “have a voice” - that is, to have their meanings heard and accepted. Although we assume them to be timeless and universal many of meanings of key words that shape our awareness and understanding about our lives were embedded in our western culture in the 17th and 18th Centuries - the time of the Enlightenment when the colonial process was in full swing. These meanings are therefore infused with aspects of cultural elitism and superiority, and with the logic of conquest. Their meanings were prescribed by the political and cultural elite of that time and remain in place today. One of the primary roles of Critical Theory is to reveal the silenced or excluded meanings that words have and to unpack these exclusions as the workings of power relationships.

Key words like “Progress, Liberty, Democracy, Art, Education, Intelligence, Development, Sustainability and Culture have been captured by the dominant culture and their meanings shaped to serve conservative ends.

CULTURE

The ancient root of the term “Culture” had several diverse meanings – most usually associated with growing or cultivation. Not until the late 18 th Century did it emerge as a noun signifying a general process which, by the early 19th

century came to have a class connotation – as in a cultivated or cultured person. This suggested an association with “High” Culture or, in Germany as Kultur – that is, aspects of public life to do with high art and literature – ballet, opera, music, etc., what in other words, came during the period of colonial expansion to connote civilisation or the civilised person (as opposed to the primitive or savage. This was associated with ideas of societal development and a progress-ion from savagery to civilisation.

I am reminded of the response of Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi to a British reporter in 1931. Shortly after being named Time magazine's "Man of the Year," Gandhi travelled to London to meet with British authorities to argue for an end to British colonial rule in India. Wherever he went he was peppered with questions. One day a reporter yelled out, "What do you think of Western civilization?" to which he replied: “I think it would be a good idea.

In our postmodern and supposedly postcolonial world, we no longer speak of Culture as a singular expression of (white) superiority, but rather of a multiplicity of cultures in the plural. This meaning has two strands - the first, associated with multiculturalism is a depoliticised noun – associated with the externalities of cultural identity - food, dress, music and so on. It is in this context that we celebrate Chinese New Year, Matariki, Ethnic Food Festivals etc.

From a critical (social) theory point of view, the plural use of the term cultures is taken a step further to describe the differences in power between cultures or cultural groups, so that we can speak of dominant and subordinate cultures. A dominant culture has the power and resources to control its own destiny and to determine the shape and nature of society in order to maintain its position of power. Subordinate cultures, by definition, lack that power.

BICULTURALISM

Seen in this light, we are able to ask: How do we define Biculturalism? Is it simply the ability of two cultures to live harmoniously side by side, each celebrating the other’s language, festivals and traditions? Can we say that Aotearoa is truly a “Bicultural” country? I think not. Its legacy as a colony - as part of the Empire that attempted to extinguish or assimilate its colonised indigenous subjects renders the issue more complex than it first seems. Taking this issue of differential power seriously, I suggest that the “gloss” of the bicultural label is intended to mask a deeper and more pervasive institutional racism that remains largely unaddressed.

My own personal definition of biculturalism hinges on an equality of power and opportunity - of partnership between equals which remains an elusive goal at every level of the cultural, legal and economic relationships between Māori and pakeha. As the Canadian Theologian Gregory Baum once observed:

"True dialogue takes place only among equals. There is no dialogue across the boundary between masters and servants, for the master will listen only as long as his power remains intact and the servant will limit his communication only to utterances for which he cannot be punished. In fact, to recommend dialogue in a situation of inequality of power is a deceptive ideology of the powerful, who wish to persuade the powerless that harmony and mutual understanding are possible in society without any change in the status quo power."

Even a cursory reading of New Zealand history shows that this equality has never existed since the signing of the Treaty. Māori have never been truly consulted about many of the major pieces of legislation that have impacted upon them as a people – not least, that associated with immigration policies

that further reduce their tenuous hold on what they believe to be a unique “partnership” relationship with the Crown through the Treaty.

MAORI IDENTITY

The so-called Māori renaissance began in earnest the 1970s, on a wave of protest and Independence-seeking by the indigenous communities around the world. While an identification with indigenous cousins was a useful lever for highlighting the commonality of oppressive conditions of colonialism and of situating the present in its colonial past, it also had a counter-productive aspect - confirming and reinforcing the notion of Māori as a uniformly integrated cultural group - “white-washing” the important differences between iwi, hapu and whanau, and of the different dialects, cultural perceptions and practices that make up the constitutive elements of identity in any tribal culture. Historically there was no “authentic Māori” collective. The term meant “ordinary”, and was taken up and re-imposed by Europeans as a classification

of uniform(alising) indigenous identity.

Similarly, the notion of a static Māori identity implicit in this collectivisation fails to address the very real shifts in Māori identity that have resulted from ongoing colonisation, free-market economics and globalisation and multicultural immigration policies - rendering the supposed biculturalism of our nation significantly problematic. I believe this is one reason why, from a Māori perspective, the Treaty-as-Partnership model is so important, promising to protect, as it does, the very differences that constitute Iwi, hapu and whanau identities.

What is at stake and what connected all of the diverse indigenous groups is the issue of rangatiratanga - the right and ability to name themselves and their world and to cast off the imposed identities that have been part of their colonial reality. Key to this is the issue of language. and of tikanga, whanaungatanga, manaakitanga - themselves not static, but evolving to account for changing circumstances. It is this right and ability not to just be, as it were, frozen in a nostalgic past, but to recreate themselves that underpins the importance of the Treaty. It is for this reason that any critical study of biculturalism must be situated in the previously suppressed indigenous understanding of history

THE MEANING OF HISTORY

Who controls the past controls the future.Who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell, 1984

One of the central hegemonised meanings that reinforces the status quo power is the meaning of History. The idea that we can control the past seems absurd. But of course the past is being rewritten all of the time. This process of writing and rewriting the past is a key aspect of the process of colonisation. While it is now commonly accepted that History is written by the victors, what interests me are the silent and suppressed histories of the “losers” - particularly the histories of the oppressed and of indigenous peoples that have been silenced. A critical analysis of history can reveal much about our social, cultural and political failures in the present and help us to chart a path to a better future.

Colonisation begins with a process of conquest, theft and physical displacement of original inhabitants which is often masked not just in subsequent historical documentation, but in the way that cultural objects are framed and depoliticized. Many of our most cherished cultural artifacts have been framed and contextualized to conceal their dark histories and to portray them instead as stand-alone things of beauty with inherent qualities that defy or forestall social or political critique. Such is the Enlightenment philosophy of the Aesthetic as conceived by German philosopher Emmanuel Kant in his (1790) Critique of Judgement. In a move designed to bolster the status of the ruling class, Kant maintained that beauty was inherent to the object and could only be discerned by those (discerning!) individuals who had no pecuniary

interest in the outcome of their perception – clearly the privileged leisure class who did not have to work or buy and sell.

LOOKING BACK AT THEIRSTORY

“Ethics and aesthetics are one.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

To take but one example from my own field – Architecture, it’s possible to see here the shift that happened to Spanish Church Architecture after 1492. The plain Gothic has become infused with a sanctuary dripping with gold.

The great surge in European exploration and colonisation began in earnest with Columbus in 1492. His discovery of the Americas opened up a whole

new arena of investment and economic expansion. All of this was supported by a franchise system initiated by the Pope. The “New World” was divided up for colonisation among the great European countries. This was legitimated by the papal bull Inter Cetera Divini (1493) which established a right to colonise and appropriate resources based upon the legitimating argument of “saving souls”. The real agenda was access to increased resources and power by competing European monarchs and bankers and by the Pope.

COLONIALISM

The “discovery” of America, was very profitable to the European colonisers (primarily the Spanish). The amounts of gold and silver taken were staggering. In the mid-Seventeenth Century silver constituted more than 99 percent of mineral exports from Spanish America, and between 1503 and 1660, 185,000 kilograms of gold and 16,000,000 of silver arrived at the Spanish port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Silver shipped to Spain in little more than a century and a half exceeded three times the total European reserves - and probably much more since these official figures are not complete. The Church played a key role in the legitimation of the process and profited richly from it. We have to ask who paid the price for this gold that adorns the supposedly beautiful churches of Spain and Rome?

JUSTIFYIING OPPRESSION

Throughout Spain, Portugal and much of Western Europe gold and silver was used by the Church to decorate its altars and to add power and awe to its rituals.

The churches of Europe still groan under the weight of American silver and gold jealously guarded but ostentatiously displayed. The centerpiece of the Treasure Room at Toledo is a 500-pound, 10-foot high, 15th-century solid silver gilded monstrance by Juan del Arfe, a German silversmith. It was gilded with gold brought back from the New World by Columbus. It is still carried through the streets of Toledo during the feast of Corpus Christi. In Andalusia alone over 300 such processions march during Holy Week

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Toledo Monstrance

The process continued through to the 18th Century, as the Church poured all of its economic resources into a Counter-Reformation relying on awe and opulence to (successfully) wean the faithful back from their Protestantism. Church and lay authorities found themselves with so much gold that they decorated their palaces with it. They put gold leaf on the ceilings, added golden cherubs in the corners, strung vines of golden grapes between them, and puffed up golden clouds to fill any unadorned spaces. The gold of America gave Europe the baroque and finally the rococo styles of ostentatious decoration for public buildings, churches, palaces and even the homes of the rising new merchant class.

Asamkirche, 1733 Zimmerman Church, Munich, 1746

THE CONQUISTADORS

So what were the costs associated with this aesthetic exhuberance and who paid them? The fact is that all of this architectural brilliance and virtuosity was acquired at a terrible cost to indigenous peoples.

In the Potosi mines of Bolivia alone, six thousand African slaves all died of altitude sickness.

Four out of five of the local Indians forced into slave labour for the Spanish died in their first year in the mines.

By 1600 over three million native people were murdered or died from the results of their enslavement in South America

In the fourteen years after of Columbus’ arrival more than a quarter of a million Haitians were murdered by the Spanish

Although in European culture, Christopher Columbus is portrayed as a hero-explorer who brought “progress” and Christianity to native peoples. To the indigenous people of the Americas, Columbus is seen as a terrorist who brought death, slavery, starvation and centuries of subjugation.

COLONIAL EXPANSION

The invasion and colonisation of the New World was just the beginning of a process of European colonial expansion that in the next 400 years would cover the planet. So much wealth poured into Europe from South America that it fueled a massive investment programme. Each of the European nations joined in the subjugation of indigenous peoples to increase its economic power. October 12th 1492 was in some ways the birthday of modern capitalism.

“...(the) discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”

Karl Marx

By the mid 19th Century indigenous people across the planet had been

AMERICAN PROGRESS

American Progress - John Gast, 1872

In America, under the quasi-legislative ideology of “Manifest Destiny” (the Darwinian-justified God-given right to displace “inferior” races) the indigenous people were lied to, hunted down, displaced, starved, beaten, murdered, herded into concentration camps (called Reservations), their children abducted at gunpoint and forced into Boarding Schools to destroy their language and culture. They were forced into State dependency and then blamed for their “laziness”. And all this in the name of “Progress”, “Freedom” and “Democracy”.

COLONIAL IMPERIALISM AT HOME: THE ENCLOSURES

But the colonisation didn’t just happen abroad. Within colonial Britain itself an identical process of dispossession was taking place - initiated by the dominant aristocratic culture.

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

In Britain, throughout the 17th, 18th and part of the 19th Centuries, British society and the British landscape were transformed by a series of Parliamentary Acts - the Enclosure Acts. These Acts allowed rich and powerful politicians, and landowners to force millions of peasants off what had been until then, common land over which they had had grazing, hunting and growing rights for centuries. Since you had to be a landowner to vote, the common people had no power to prevent or overturn the legislation initiated by the landed gentry. Think Foreshore and Seabed and raupatu lands!

THE ENCLOSURES 1750-1850

By 1700 more than half the arable land in England and almost all of the arable land in Wales and Scotland had already been enclosed and taken from the peasants. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary rural people had been swept off their lands and forced into the burgeoning cities to form a vast pool of cheap labour to work at starvation rates in the factories that would be the foundation of the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire, and which coincidentally, were owned by guess who? - the same land-owning political class that had displaced them in the first place.

In the 1760s the writer Oliver Goldsmith witnessed the demolition of an ancient village and destruction of its farms to clear land to make a wealthy man's garden. His poem The Deserted Village, published in 1770, expresses a fear that the destruction of villages and the conversion of land from productive agriculture to ornamental landscape gardens would ruin the peasantry. It is widely believed to have been the village of Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire which Simon Harcourt, First Earl Harcourt had demolished and moved 1.6 km away to make the park for his newly built Nuneham House STOURHEAD

The profits from these dispossessions and economic exploitations was poured into the large mansion houses that now (dis)grace the English countryside. The Stourton family had lived in the Stourhead estate for 700 years when they sold it to Henry Hoare I, son of wealthy banker Sir Richard Hoare in 1717.

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

The gardens were designed by Henry Hoare II and laid out between 1741 and 1780. Now part of the National Trust, tens of thousands visit every year, guidebook in hand, marveling at the “beauty of the landscaping” and oblivious to the pain, oppression and exploitation that this so-called “beauty” is built upon. Hundreds of properties like this exist throughout Britain, part of the nation’s sanitised history and heritage that operates still to mask the horrors of that time, so as to justify the present and to promote the seemingly impregnable aesthetic narrative constructed by the Monarchy, the aristocracy and the parliamentarians - the dominant culture – and all legitimated by Emmanuel Kant.

BRIGHTON PAVILLION

At the same time that the British Aristocracy/ Parliamentarians were stealing common land and coincidentally resisting the abolition of their hugely profitable slave trade, the philandering playboy and obese drunkard King George IV was known largely for his extravagant lifestyle. While he indulged in such lavish fantasies as this Brighton Pavillion Palace, his subjects were literally starving as a result of the infamous Corn Laws which prevented the importation of affordable grain (in order to boost the profits from the Enclosed commons that had been stolen from the people).

These protectionist laws enhanced the profits, the value of land and political power associated with ownership. There were serious riots throughout the country by starving citizens seeking parliamentary reform and a universal franchise.

Royal Pavillion, Brighton

ARTISTIC SPIN DOCTORS

Richard Wilson Landscape Gainsborough: Mr. and Mrs Andrews.

All of this brutality and murder was carefully hidden from the gentility themselves, lest they find the source of their wealth and power even slightly

distasteful. Contemporary paintings of the refined minor aristocracy and emerging merchant class depict an idyllic landscape peopled by relaxed-looking gentry like that by Richard Wilson and Gainsborough. Only Mr. Andrew’s casually-held rifle hints at the social and political reality.

PETERLOO MASSACRE

The lie was given to the supposed pastoral harmony in August, 1819, The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had resulted in periods of famine and chronic unemployment, exacerbated by the introduction of the first of the Corn Laws. By the beginning of 1819 the pressure generated by poor economic conditions, coupled with the lack of a power to vote, had enhanced the appeal of political radicalism. In response, the Manchester Patriotic Union, a group agitating for parliamentary reform, organised a demonstration at St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, to be addressed by the well-known radical orator Henry Hunt.

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Cavalry charged into the crowd with sabres drawn, and 15 people were killed and 400–700 were injured. The massacre was given the name Peterloo in ironic comparison to the Battle of Waterloo, which had taken place four years earlier. This was 3 years after the founding of the first Mission School in New Zealand and 21 years before the Treaty of Waitangi. The dominant culture that sanctioned the massacre was the same that was to colonise New Zealand.

TRANSPORTATION: EXPORTING DISSENT

Emigration to the new colonies became a real alternative for those few who had the means. Emigration to the colonies increased as unscrupulous speculators made fortunes by selling overseas land that they did not own to

unsuspecting would-be emigrants. But for those without the financial means to leave voluntarily the more realistic possibility was transportation. Like today, the general increase in poverty and the massive disparities of wealth brought about increased social unrest. As today, the parliamentarians number of criminal laws, criminalizing the poor and homeless and increasing the imprisonment rates. Many of the British prisons were built at this time. The prisons were overflowing and convicted felons were usually transported to a penal colony - either to the Americas, from the 1610s and through the American Revolution in the 1770s, or to Australia between 1788 and 1868.

Large numbers of convicts were transported to Australian penal colonies by the British, many for petty crimes such as “poaching” (on land they had formerly occupied) to feed their starving families and driven by the poverty they were forced to live in.

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

An 1830s Emigration Poster Transportees to Australia

By the 1770s there were 222 laws carrying the death penalty (the so-called Bloody Code) - mostly for small property crimes. Over 80 years more than 165,000 convicts were transported to Australia, the last convict ship arriving in 1868. The number of transportees and immigrant workers to the new American colony was not enough to keep up with the demands of economic growth. The gap was conveniently filled by slaves - until the Civil War (1861-5). British slave-ports like Liverpool witnessed unimaginable expansion, and once again of course the slave owners and shippers were none other than – the same aristocratic British Parliamentarians who had resisted abolition to protect their business interests.

SLAVERY

Much of the wealth of the dominant culture (or class) was acquired through the Enclosures. But this wealth wasn’t only poured into ostentatious displays. A great deal was invested in the developing Empire, that itself was built upon the slave trade through the Ports of Liverpool and London. Great profits were to be made. The main beneficiaries of the British sponsored slavery were the Company of Adventurers (1650s) started by the Earl of Warwick. Other

shareholders included Charles I and members of his family, important nobles and major London merchants from the City. It was replaced in 1762 by the Royal Africa Company, which, over 17 years, transported more than 90,000 slaves to America at a profit of almost £12 Million. The Duke of York was its Governor and major shareholder. Other shareholders included 15 Lord Mayors of London and 25 Sheriffs of London – all with considerable political clout to ensure the profitable trade in Africans continued.

Britain outlawed the slave trade with the Slave Trade Act in 1807, with penalties of £100 per slave levied on British captains found importing slaves. But trading continued - captains throwing their slaves overboard rather than being caught and fined. In 1823 the first Anti-Slavery Society was formed in Britain. They prevailed ten years later with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. Internal trading continued in the United States until slavery was ended at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. With the gradual cessation of their lucrative trade in black skins, the slavers needed other outlets where they could reinvest their accumulated wealth. What better place than the recently discovered and as yet uncontested Islands of New Zealand.

None of this is the history that you will easily find in the “official” history books or in the history that is generally taught in primary and secondary schools which glosses over the ugly role of the aristocracy, the gentry-lawmakers, their conflicts of interest, their duplicity, their greed, their perfidy.

Layout of a Slave Ship

In Britain, the schoolbook history tends to be about the succession of kings and queens, the Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the wonders of the Empire – all couched in glowing terms, portraying British colonialism as a kind gift to a savage world, devoid of the pain and brutality inflicted upon indigenous and working people. We never hear of the cruelty and lack of humanity and compassion of the British Aristocracy. That history has been hidden under a conspiracy of silence. And so, through the silenced history of those times, the world has come to love the British Monarchy down to the

present, oblivious to its actual shameful history. But this other, critical history of colonialism is just as relevant to the situation we in New Zealand now find ourselves in as we confront the issue of our supposed biculturalism.

NEW ZEALAND

It’s often said that the British were the “gentlest” of the colonial nations - treating the natives with more respect than the French, the Germans or the Dutch. We ought to ask ourselves whose interests it serves for that belief to be part of our common understanding. We can perhaps see that those who instigated the Peterloo massacre, who promoted the Enclosures and who profited enormously from the Transportations and the slave trade were not the social and cultural do-gooders we have believed, and that the supposedly benign intentions of the original NZ colonisers might not be quite as altruistic as we have been led to accept.

THE TREATY OF WAITANGI 1840

It was common in the 17th and 18th Centuries to refer the process of colonisation as “bringing civilisation” to indigenous peoples who were conveniently labeled as “savages” - given to barbarous warlike practices and to cannibalism - suggesting by reflective comparison that the otherwise “civilised” British were acting out of some natural order, akin to the American concept of Manifest Destiny. But the brutal cunning and cruel deception of British diplomacy is rarely if ever discussed - the dispossessions and genocide in India, Ireland, Sri Lanka, America, Australia and elsewhere. By the 1830s, the very same British Parliamentarians that had profited from the Enclosures, from the Transportations and from the slave trade now turned their attention to New Zealand. From the very beginning there was a desire on the part of the British to pervert any form of bicultural or partnership relationship, but to colonise the indigenous people and to deceive them into submission to British Rule and authority as recommended in William Hobson’s gazetted report to the Colonial Office in 1838.

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

The Treaty of Waitangi was used for this purpose. As we all undoubtedly know, there were two versions of the Treaty, one in English and one in Māori, and they were not the same. In the Māori version, Māori ceded Governorship (Kawanatanga). In the English version they ceded Sovereignty (Rangatiratanga). Māori would not have signed if they had known that they were being required to surrender their sovereignty. Governor Hobson, Busby (who both drafted the two versions of the Treaty) and Missionary Williams, (the latter two both fluent in te reo Māori) knew about, but downplayed this crucial difference.

COLONISING NEW ZEALAND

From the very beginning (and even before the Treaty of 1840, British scoundrels were plotting to steal Māori land and to reap huge profits by selling it to unsuspecting immigrants.

In 1838, five years after the Slavery Abolition Act, the enterprising felon (and reputed fraudster) Edward Gibbon Wakefield founded his New Zealand Company - the purpose of which was to ”buy” large blocks of Māori land cheaply and to sell them on, sight-unseen, at fantastic profit to unsuspecting settlers before the Crown could claim colonial monopoly on land sales.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield

By the end of 1839 he had dispatched 9 ships full of “settlers” lured by promises of homesteads. Wakefield’s ships brought immigrants to Wellington (the Hutt Valley) Christchurch (Lyttelton) and Nelson, where the new arrivals faced uncertain futures over land deals heavily disputed by the Māori residents. This was the year before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi itself.

Present Day Real Estate Poster

Amusing as the above illustrations might appear, they point to the ethic of land speculation that drove many to covet land in the America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

LAND ALIENATION

With the arrival of increasing numbers of British immigrants, land acquisition and speculation increased dramatically. Even Henry Williams himself, who

otherwise had developed a reputation for protecting Māori land interests, acquired 11,000 acres for himself and his family.

100 Years of Māori Land Loss

From Cook’s “discovery” of NZ in 1769 Māori were dispossessed of 95% of their land through government legislation, confiscation, theft and fraud.

LAND CONFISCATION

When Māori began to organize themselves to resist the sale of any more land to the burgeoning settler community, the Crown resorted to legalized theft. One of the primary means of land dispossession was “legal” confiscation. In 1860 in violation of agreements with Māori the crossing of the Waitara River by Government forces led to stiff resistance by Māori. In response and intent upon the acquisition of Māori land the Government first introduced the Public Works Act of 1864 that allowed Māori land to be taken for public works. More devastating to Māori was the New Zealand Settlement Act of 1863, through which tribes that were deemed “rebellious” (which really meant “tribes that resist our invasion”) had their land confiscated by the government. The definition of “rebellious” bore striking (slippery) similarities to American Indian “Hostiles” and today’s Islamic “terrorists” - convenient labels for demonising those we oppress or whose assets we covet. When provocative Government raids of native lands were resisted by Māori tribes, they were labeled “Rebellious”, their leaders imprisoned and executed and their lands were taken. Often Māori leaders (eg. Whakatohea, Ngati Awa) in possession of valuable land were “framed” for crimes they did not commit, and were tried and executed anyway so that their land could be acquired. (Those wrongfully convicted and executed have since been exonerated and pardoned).

In the 1860s and 1870s, the European invasion of the Waikato and Intent upon the acquisition of Māori land, the Government invoked the New Zealand Settlement Act and confiscated 1.5 million acres of Taranaki land in 1865 (the area coloured blue in the map (left). The promised (but never provided) Reserves are coloured maroon.

Through the Settlement Act more than three million acres of Mãori land had been confiscated. In a way reminiscent of the Enclosure Acts, the main financial beneficiaries of these confiscations were Frederick Whitaker (Attorney General) and Thomas Russell (Minister of War) - the very people who had pushed for the legislation and promoted an aggressive anti-Māori policy in the first place. They were joint owners of the Bank of New Zealand which held the government account and from which the Government had borrowed $3.5M to finance its war against Māori. They were also the owners of the firm of Whitaker and Russell, the biggest land speculation agency in the colony.

Frederick Whitaker Thomas Russell,

Attorney General Minister of Defense

They were unscrupulous speculators who were almost solely responsible for the alienation of millions of acres of productive Māori land. The confiscations were a theft of the entire means of material production by which Māori were previously able to sustain themselves, throwing them into a total dependence upon the largesse of the settlers and the new State. Russell’s legal successors (Russell McVeagh) are today ironically the leading Treaty of Waitangi settlement lawyers – making yet another fortune out of what racist commentators have called the “Māori treaty Gravy Train”.

ASSIMILATION BY MAORI EDUCATION: CIVILISING THE NATIVES

As with the infamous Enclosure Acts, the NZ Settlement Act’s displacement and dispossession of Māori provided the white settler government with a dependent pool of labour on which to build its increasing agricultural and industrial power. This required the curtailment of Māori political and entrepreneurial aspirations, and the education system was used to achieve this end. Military campaigns, Parliamentary Acts and the Courts were the primary instruments of Māori subjugation. The Māori Land Court, particularly, was established to break up Māori collective land ownership patterns the better for facilitate its acquisition). All of these means were used to suppress Māori aspirations, but only served in many cases to increase resistance. To pacify the Māori population, the New Zealand education system was established as a front-line instrument of the cultural assimilation of Māori and the establishment and maintenance of white hegemony - ensuring obedience by Māori to the imposed law and to the idea of white supremacy and their own intellectual and cultural inferiority.

“The meaning of Education is derived from its latin root, educere which means “to lead forth, to nourish”. In relation to the Māori that noble purpose was debased by the founding fathers of our nation who used education as an instrument to subvert Māori culture and replace it with their own.”

Ranginui Walker

“Funding for mission schools was first provided in the Education Ordinance 1847 and continued in the Native Schools Act 1858. The schooling of Māori was readily seen by the government as a means of social control and assimilation. There was a deliberate effort to make Māori a labouring class.”

Linda Tuhiwai Smith

“There is no doubt that the initial overt purpose of the schooling that was provided for Māori people was to assist in the assimilation of Māori society. Schools... were placed in the heart of Māori communities like Trojan horses. Their task was to destroy the less visible aspects of Māori life: beliefs, value systems and the spiritual bonds that connected people to each other and to their environment. They were to be replaced by new sets of values, attitudes and behaviours. These were not quite the same ones being taught to Pakeha children, for Māori children also needed to be educated into their place in society based on class stratification and exploitation.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith

METHODS OF PACIFICATION

The first Mission school in New Zealand was established at Rangihoua in Northland in 1816 and over time the settler Government subsidized the schools for the teaching of Māori children. With the coming of the New Zealand Wars, Māori virtually abandoned the Mission schools and it wasn’t until 1867 that the Government established the Native School system. Schools were established in villages specifically for the education of Māori.

Communities were to request a school, to provide the land and to pay for half the cost of the building and a quarter of the cost of the teacher salary. Government would provide the rest. Instruction was to be only in English.

This did not trouble Māori because at that time the language was strong and being bilingual was seen as an economic advantage in dealing with the traders, government and settler population and of evening the cultural balance with bilingual pakeha. When the public school system was established in 1877, the Native Schools were absorbed into the Department of Education.

As the settler population increased and as English became more predominant the suppression of Māori language and academic achievement increased, but the process was not monolithic. Although the pakeha teachers were supposed to “civilise” their Māori charges, the remoteness of many of the schools and the social isolation of the teachers moderated the effects of Departmental instructions. Many classes were held in both languages and teachers themselves became acculturated to Māori customs and tikanga. Indeed, Departmental policy was to some extent supportive of the Māori language in schools – as a vehicle for making the transition to English – and teachers were expected to have some knowledge of the language.

However, by the 20th Century this began to change. In 1907 the Government introduced the Tohunga Suppression Act – designed to eradicate traditional elements of Māori knowledge and learning. In the school system, Departmental policies became increasingly restrictive and oppressive. The most striking single example was that of Te Aute College in Hawkes Bay. Under the headship of John Thornton in 1878 Te Aute College began to achieve academic result at or beyond those in the non-Māori world. Thornton changed the curriculum to train the students for positions of leadership in politics, medicine, law and the other professions. This resulted in the emergence of a cohort of well-educated and politically savvy graduates. In 1883, the organizing inspector of native schools praised Te Aute for the

standards achieved in teaching mathematics and science as “equal to the best in the country.” Graduates from the school eventually set up the Kotahitanga (Māori Unity) Movement which began to make its presence felt nationwide by the turn of the century.

Sir Peter Buck Sir Apirana Ngata Sir Maui Pomare Rewiti Kohere

By 1910, the Department of Education stepped in. Te Aute College was actively discouraged from preparing Māori for university training and in 1931 the Director-General of Education George Hogben declared that a Māori aptitude for mathematics was interesting but not relevant to their present or future needs as agriculturalists. Hogben and Bird (the Inspector of Native Schools) together promoted the notion of a two-tier society divided along racial line with Māori restricted to trades and service to the white community. Bird was later to recant on this and recommend academic as well as agricultural and manual training for Māori. The first real change to this policy came in 1935, however, with the election of the first Labour Government. Nevertheless, the 1930s and 1940s saw an increase in the punishment for Māori students caught speaking Māori in the Native School system.

CULTURAL IMPACT

The legacy of all of this suppression of Māori intellectual potential, of the educational practices designed to eradicate the Māori language and culture remains with us today in the form of the excessive rates of Māori poverty, ill-health, mental illness, mortality, imprisonment, suicide etc. It is also evident in the prevailing legacy of deficit theorizing in education that fosters the belief that Māori are intellectually inferior, lazy etc.; and among Māori themselves who have internalized the idea that they are “stupid”.

Despite all of the earlier attempts to suppress Māori culture and language through education it was not until the rapid postwar urbanization of Māori in the 1940s and 1950s that the Māori language and culture actually began to come under real threat and look like disappearing. Until then, most Māori families still spoke Māori at home and most were bilingual. Urbanisation changed all of that as Māori youth left the Marae and the close ties to te reo Māori-fluent whanau and kaumatua. Nevertheless, by the 1970s, Māori language and culture had survived – if only just, and it was the protests of Māori groups like Nga Tamatoa and the 1972 language petition (with 30,000

signatures) to Parliament that would lead to its revival beginning in 1982 with the initiation of the Kohanga Reo movement.

THE MYTH OF STATE NEUTRALITY

Such historical chain of duplicity suggest that the State is not the benign neutral referee it purports to be - working to balance the needs of different social or cultural groups or to resolve conflicts between them. Rather, the State has a definite bias towards the dominant culture for which it operates as an instrument of domination - a domination that can be broken not by rational discourse and persuasion, but only by protest, civil disobedience and the threat of direct action – by a confrontation with the power interests that it masks

To maintain hegemony without raising public ire and risking widespread resistance, States must maintain the illusion of impartiality. Education and the media play major roles in this process of illusion maintenance, which is why many indigenous communities have been so vocal in their language-loss protests and so keen to establish their own education and media systems.

MAORI RESISTANCE AND PROTEST

“Legal” theft of Māori land did not end in the 1800s. The Māori Land Court was established to break traditional Māori

collective ownership and to individualise land titles so that they could be “legally” purchased.

Throughout the C20th, land continued to be taken through the Public Works Act, and for non-payment of taxes

Sometimes it was actually taken for public works that were never completed. The Raglan golf course had been acquired during WW2 for an defense airfield that was never built, It was later sold to private interests and was only returned to Tainui after a very public protest campaign by Eva Rickard

Land taken under the PWA was never returned when its use became obsolete

The confiscations were a theft of the entire means of material production by which Māori were previously able to sustain themselves and develop a thriving economy. Until their land was confiscated, for instance, Taranaki tribes had a thriving export industry to Australia. They were now forced to watch white militia who had received their lands as payment for their participation in the militia into State dependency for which they were subsequently vilified. The First Labour Government in 1935 had forged an historic accord with Māori (via the Ratana Church), but the agreement had not lived up to Māori expectations. The language use continued to diminish and land was still being alienated by official sanctions. In the 1970s, Māori activist groups emerged, including Nga Tamatoa (The Warriors - top right) initiated protests over Māori Language and land loss, including the 1975 Land March. In September 1972, Nga Tamatoa presented a petition with more than 30,000 signatures to the Crown (bottom right) to have the Māori language taught at schools. In 1975, Dame Whina Cooper led a 1000 km march from her home in Hapua to Parliament in Wellington to protest land alienations

In 1974, amid mounting protests, NZs second Labour Government (1972-5) facilitated a Māori cultural renaissance by initiating the Treaty of Waitangi Act which recognized the Treaty in Law for the first time and established the Waiting Tribunal to assess Māori claims (addressing claims dating only from the time of the Act). But the protests did not disappear because the loss of the language and the land alienation continued.

BASTION POINT

During the 1950s the ancestral lands of the Ngati Whatua Tribe of Auckland had been taken under the Public Works Act, leaving the tribe landless. Their ancestral village was turned into a swamp by the construction of a coastal road. The village was burned to the ground by the City Council in 1951 because it was an “eyesore” on the processional route of the newly-crowned Queen Elizabeth II during her State Visit. Older members wept openly and many died within months “of heartbreak”.

In 1977-8 the tribe occupied their lands for 507 days in protest at Council plans to build private housing developments. They were evicted by 700

police, army and navy personnel. The tribe had widespread support.

1985 WAITANGI AMENDMENT ACT

With protests growing and with annual disturbances at the Waitangi Day celebrations, the ongoing display of cultural disharmony was beginning to dent New Zealand’s international reputation as a bicultural paradise – particularly following the widely published Springbok Tour protests of 1981. Following the election of David Lange’s Labour government in 1984 (carried in on a wave of anti-nuclear sentiment) the introduction of the Waitangi Amendment Act made it possible for the first time for Iwi to make claims going back to the signing of the Treaty in 1840 precipitating an avalanche of claims to the Tribunal for theft of land, loss of language, theft of intellectual property and abuses of the education system. Since that time Claims against the Crown have continued down to the present.

RECENT CLAIMS AND PROTESTS

Foreshore and Seabed Hikoi An Open letter to Helen Clark

Anti Drilling Protest Auckland Super City Protest

In more recent times, Helen Clark’s Foreshore and Seabed Legislation was seen as a modern day confiscation while the failure of the Government to ensure full Māori representation on the new Auckland Super City Council and the decision to allow oil prospecting contracts off the East Cape against the objections of Iwi Te Whanau a Apanui graphically demonstrate the difference in perceptions between the Crown and Māori about the meaning of the Treaty today.

The Crown’s position is to focus on cash and land settlements that are “full and final”. Their intent is to de-historicise the process. From a Crown perspective, once the settlement has been reached, the past can be forgotten and Māori can settle back into an acceptance of their subservient position as subjects of Crown sovereignty. Basically, they aim to end the dialogue with Māori - who on the contrary see both the Treaty and the settlement process as a basis for future ongoing dialogue and decision-making in partnership.

The Māori position is to focus on the injustices of the past, the sincerity of the government’s recognition of these wrongs, restitution, the return of lands acquired through colonisation. For Māori, it is the process of reconciliation rather than the product that is important.

This difference colours all of the narratives about the Treaty Settlement process, including the ways in which it becomes part of the normative public perception via the mass media.NZ MEDIA RACISM: HAVING NO VOICE

Rodney Hide’s Op. Ed. Piece in the Sunday Herald (12th Aug. 2012)

I started out this presentation by suggesting that one of the prerequisites for real biculturalism was an equality of voice - an equal ability to speak with authority and be receptively heard by both parties. An important ingredient in the issue of “having a voice” is the public media. An indication of the fact that biculturalism is more of a myth than a reality can be found in the different ways that New Zealand the media portray Māori from pakeha, particularly around the treaty of Waitangi and its Settlement process. The Māori position on these issues is given much less coverage and prominence. leading to an increasing public disquiet with Māori claims and claimants

While Māori protests have undoubtedly been successful in redressing some of the wrongs inflicted upon them since 1840, this success has to be set against a general background of misunderstanding and resentment expressed and sometimes fuelled by the media. There continues a systemic

background of anti-Māori racism that pervades the media and ridicules their attempts at Treaty redress. Don Brash’s infamous Otara Rotary speech about Māori privilege and the “Treaty Industry gravy-train” unleashed an outpouring of pakeha support that ultimately precipitated Helen Clark to initiate the Foreshore and Seabed legislation that cost her place in Parliament.

Yet the fact is that the combined ultimate cost of ALL settlements has been estimated to be the equivalent of no more than three month’s Government spending on Health or Education - and this spread over 25 years, and is currently less than half of the amount of taxpayer money used by the Government to bail out failed finance companies like South Canterbury Finance. Yet the media continues to hark on about Māori privilege and greed, all the while denying Māori an effective equal voice through which to discount or counter these assertions.

Not only the Treaty settlement process is involved. The Dominion Post’s 2007 release of selective portions of a police wiretap affidavit to cast the Urewera “Terrorist” defendants in a bad light was perhaps the most recent deplorable example. The DP refused to disclose its source, but it was widely believed that the police themselves had leaked the affidavit in an attempt to swing public opinion behind their prosecution. Little wonder, then, that Māori, for their part are suspicious of Crown and media motives and actions.

COMMODIFIED CULTURE:

The Crown’s position on Treaty settlements is shaped by its conception of land as a commodity to be traded. For Māori, issues of mana whenua, still bear witness to the pre-colonial, pre-invasion past and are an ongoing point of resistance to imposed social and political structures. Yet even here, the processes of the free market have resulted in the commodification of indigenous cultures at every level. Through what Makere Stewart-Harawira has called the “co-optation of tribal elites” - the nomination of those members of indigenous who buy into the “Free-market” policies and are willing to “do business” with the Government - to positions of authority as tribal

representatives in the negotiation process, the processes of globalisation has impacted even upon the grievance settlement processes.

The portrayal (above) of Tipene O’Regan (then Chair of Ngai Tahu Runanga) illustrates both the proclivity of the Government to deal with their Māori ideological mates and the capacity of the media to inflame the Māori claims process.

As already noted, the Māori desire to re-establish the grounds of partnership in future decision-making is critical to understanding the possibility of biculturalism, both at the legislative level, and also in the day to day practice of cultural relations – including in Education

CRITICAL BICULTURAL PEDAGOGY

All of this history and these contextual factors bear heavily upon the work and theorising of the would-be bicultural academic. I arrived in New Zealand in 1982 to take up my position as Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Auckland. This was six months after the infamous Springbok Tour that brought institutional racism to public light for the first time.

In my first week the late Matiu Rata, the Leader of Mana Motuhake and previous Minister of Māori Affairs asked me to come to advise him about developments at his Marae at Matauri Bay in Northland, stopping on the way at Te Tii Marae in Waitangi to listen to the Secretary for Māori Affairs, Kara Puketapu promoting the launch of Kohanga Reo. It was the start of a long association with Māori.

In 1986, four years later, at the University of Auckland I was giving a lecture to 100 First and Second Year students on the Social Theory of Design. Seeking to challenge their knowledge of how our understanding of History is controlled I asked how many of them had ever heard of Parihaka - the Taranaki Māori village that first practiced civil disobedience and passive resistance in thbe 1870s and 1880s. One lone (brown) hand was raised at the back of the class - the hand of Rau Hoskins (Nga Puhi) who was to become my close friend, teacher of things Māori and (recently) presenter and co-producer of the Māori TV series Māori Architecture. As a child, Rau’s family had been involved in the Land March and supporting the Bastion Point Occupation. After the lecture he came to see me and told me that in his studio design class with one of my colleagues he was being asked to put aside his cultural and political values, ignore the wishes and pain of Ngati Whatua and to design middle class condominiums for the development of Bastion Point. He was on the point of dropping out of the class and out of university - convinced that Architecture was unapologetically an embodiment of institutional racism. I helped him negotiate an acceptable process with his tutor (which involved interviewing Ngati Whatua elders and bringing them to class to share their concerns with all of the students) and he scraped a pass and eventually stayed on to complete do his Masters.

The following semester he asked to take my Community Design Studio. It was a decision that was to change both of our lives. Over the next few years we worked together continually, completing many projects in the Māori Community. I want to briefly share four of those projects with you here. A more complete and illustrated rendering of each is available for download from my website as detaqiled below:

The Whakatane Town Development Project(http://www.tonywardedu.com/content/category/6/17/49/)

Te Whare Wānanga o Ngati Awa(http://www.tonywardedu.com/content/view/188/49/)

Te Whare Kura o Hoani Waititi(http://www.tonywardedu.com/content/view/189/49/)

Te Pae Pae o Te Raukura, Parihaka Pa (http://www.tonywardedu.com/content/view/231/49/)

These four studies represent just a few of the projects carried out in the Māori community by the Community Design Studio between 1987 and 2000, but each was in some way pivotal in helping me to develop a bicultural pedagogy that seemed to work well. Following the project descriptions I outline aspects of that pedagogy and how it relates to Māori learning styles and to the learning experiences of other indigenous communities.THE WHAKATANE STUDY

Rau’s decision was to change both of our lives. I had accepted an offer from a development firm, Development Management Resources (DMR) to conduct a community study in Whakatane to determine the need for additional commercial development. DMR had been contracted by the Whakatane District Council and engaged us for the community consultation component of the study.

WAIRAKA

Whakatane is the site of one of the first Māori settlements in New Zealand - deeply historical and of great spiritual significance. The landing place of the Mataatua Waka (canoe) party - which brought the ancestors of the present day Mataatua confederation of tribes, Ngati Awa, Tuhoe, Whanau a Apanui, Ngai te Rangi, Whakatohea, and so on. It is the traditional home of Ngati Awa whose entire lands were confiscated in 1866 on the false charge of murdering the Lutheran missionary Karl Volkner (a Government spy). The leaders were hanged. They were later pardoned and the Govt apologised but the land was gone!

TOWN DEVELOPMENT

The town is squeezed between the river and a large escarpment to the South. It is steeped in Māori history. Successive Local Governments have “reclaimed” the harbour, destroyed sacred sites and developed a European township The riverbank used to wash the base of the Escarpment, and the rock, Pohaturoa, which now stands in the centre of the business district, was an island. Council wanted to develop the triangle of “reclaimed” land between the Strand and the river. Pohaturoa can be seen, surrounded by roads in the centre of the town.

MODERN TOWNSHIP

The modern (1988) township occupies the space between the Escarpment (from which this photo is taken) and the river. Pohaturoa can be seen, surrounded by roads in the centre of the town. Our project was to assist a development company (DMR) to complete an exploratory survey study for the addition of further retailing space in the triangular area behind The Strand and between it and the river. We were to undertake the design component of the study, but made it clear that our responsibility would be to engage with the people of Whakatane and discover what their dreams and expectations for the town might be.

THE COUNCIL

In our initial meetings with Council, it soon became clear that significant tensions existed between the Council and the Māori community. At a meeting with the Mayor and Council, we raised the point that the 50% Māori population represented a significant constituency that needed to have a voice in the planning decisions. The Council itself had only one Māori representative - a resident of Rotorua, over an hourʻs drive away.

We were reluctantly directed by Council to meet with the Ngati Awa Trust Board, but were told that they “did not have anything of significance to offer”. Accordingly, a meeting was set up with the Trust Board in the upper chambers of the Whakatane Hotel. We had brought to the meeting a scale model of the town to help facilitate dialogue.

NGATI AWA: THE MAORI VOICE

In our initial meetings with Council, it soon became clear that significant tensions existed between the Council and the Māori community. At a meeting with the Mayor and Council, we raised the point that the 50% Māori population represented a significant constituency that needed to have a voice in the planning decisions. The Council itself had only one Māori representative - a resident of Rotorua, over an hourʻs drive away. We were reluctantly directed by Council to meet with the Ngati Awa Trust Board, but were told that they “did not have anything of significance to offer”. Accordingly, a meeting was set up with the Trust Board in the upper chambers of the Whakatane Hotel. The first response of the Trust Board (later to become Te Runanga o Ngati Awa) to our project was not encouraging: “If you are working for the Council we are not having anything to do with you - they have stabbed us in the back too many times already!!!” We assured them that we were working independently of the Council and that we were seriously interested in what they had to say. Discussions took place around a scale model of the town (as currently existing) that we had made for the purpose. Using the model as a reference point, the members of the Board began to pour out their long-standing frustrations and stories of cultural abuse and insensitivity, pointing to specific sacred sites that had been violated over generations by successive Council plans and developments. It would be an understatement to say that we were appalled by what we heard. For many of the students, this was the first time that they had ever been directly confronted with first-hand evidence of colonial oppression. Most were shocked by what they heard, since New Zealand history as taught in schools at that time had been “cleansed” of any culpability.

Conceptions of neutrality became impossible to sustain. Students who had always believed that their knowledge was neutral and therefore innocent were quickly divested of this illusion. The class became, in effect, a laboratory in conscientisation. This process was helped by the presence of a Māori student in the class who consistently brought the discussions back to a cultural/political reference point, and there is little doubt that his impact upon the group and upon the process was significant. This raises significant issues from a pedagogical point of view and confirms value of participatory or collaborative research as a basis for design and planning projects. It also raises important questions about the composition of design teams in bicultural or multicultural settings.

SACRED LANDCAPE

It soon became clear that the entire landscape of the town had deep historical and spiritual significance. Many of these sacred sites had been systematically violated and desecrated by successive Councils, despite the pleas of the tribe.

WAHI TAPU

These included the three (shown here) that had been cited as location markers by Irakewa to his son Toroa, the captain of the Mataatua Waka, 700 years ago, as the site of a possible settlement.

Muriwai’s Cave Irakewa Rock (Dynamited)

Wairere Stream

Te Toka o Irakewa (Irakewa Rock) is one of three landmarks that Toroa was told to look for by his father Irakewa when he set off in the Mataatua waka. Irakewa had visited the site earlier. The other two sites that he told his people to look for were a cave “for Muriwai” and a waterfall. Using these references, Toroa was able to rediscover Kakahoroa (the original name for the area) and to settle it.

Over the years, these landmarks have been violated. Wairere stream has been polluted by the town dump above its source, Muriwai’s cave has been isolated from the river and largely filled in, and in 1925, the then Harbour Board dynamited much of Irakewa Rock to improve the harbour entrance - this despite vigorous protest from Māori. These and other examples made it very clear to the design team that no positive development of the town was possible until these (to Māori sacrilegious) acts of vandalism were acknowledged and atoned.

PIRIPAI

Piripai is the name of the sandspit which separates the Whakatane River from the Bay of Plenty and the Pacific Ocean. Apart from its outstanding beauty, it is also an urupa - the site of numerous burials from both ancient battles and more recently from the influenza epidemic that claimed many lives in 1918.

Piripai

Over the years, many proposals have been raised to develop Piripai for residential development by linking it to the township with another bridge. Fortunately, the development costs have, until now, prevented this from happening. One of the issues raised by Ngati Awa was that Piripai must be made sacrosanct and immune to development because of its highly tapu nature.

POHATUROA

The most saddening of all of the stories poured out by the members of the Ngati Awa Trust Board concerned the desecration of their sacred rock - Pohaturoa in the centre of the town. This rock, (bottom right in this photograph) had for centuries been a place where Ngati Awa mothers had buried the whenua (placenta and umbilicus) of their babies. The Council had constructed a public toilet over this most sacred of places (the white building up against the side of the rock). In Māori, the word whenua has a double meaning. One the one hand it means afterbirth. It also means land - signifying that the spiritual connection between the person and the place is more than metaphorical. Those who have a right to occupy a place are said to have mana whenua, and they themselves are tangata whenua - literally, “people of the land”. The construction of the toilet was therefore seen not only as an insult to Ngati Awa parents and children, but as a direct affront to the mana whenua of Ngati Awa as a whole, - the ultimate insult.

PPohaturoa and the Toilet

DESIGN DILEMMA

It was increasingly clear to us that the Council’s desire for economic growth was severely constrained by the background of cultural discord in the town. The historic institutional racism of the Council had alienated 50% of the population. We believed that no improvement in the town’s economic well-being was possible without first addressing the legitimate grievances of Ngati

Awa.

We faced a stark choice. Either we could conform to Council philosophies and ignore the pain of Ngati Awa and the cultural history of all previous developments or confront Council and risk the project. Instead, we collectively decided on a third alternative - to facilitate a reconciliation using design a dialogue and reconciliation between the two communities

RECONCILIATION

Clearly reconciliation was necessary. Before reconciliation could take place, a dialogue needed to be established. Before a dialogue could take place, trust needed to be established. Neither party trusted the other enough to initiate the process of trust-building (a vicious circle).

Creating an environment of mutual trust required that:

We establish trust of both parties. We reinforce the legitimacy of previously silenced or ignored

(Māori) stories We operate a process of inclusivity, taking everyone seriously We develop a common language using easily accessible accessible

media (models, visual images) We make no attempt to dictate the dialogue, only to record stories We continually reflect-back community concerns and issues to the

community We interpret, explain, reinterpret and mediate We facilitate open dialogue We promote community decision-making WE LISTEN! We stress common goals rather than differences

Key to the development of common goals was the finding of linkages between the different aspirations. We developed 67 Patterns to guide Town Development. They addressed not only:

economic and material concerns employment creation investment tourism etc.

but also: Reinstatement of Wahi Tapu, A truthful recounting of history Acknowledgment of past wrongs Appropriate Māori constitutional representation on Council

Our task became to demonstrate the linkages between these issues (for instance by portraying Māori culture and history as an essential ingredient for tourism and economic growth).

DIFFERENCES IN PERCEPTION

The Council’s Perceptions were: materialistic economic progressive.

They were interested in:

Town Growth Attracting Investment. Promoting and sustaining Development Increasing the rate income

Council were looking for future prosperity and wanted to bury the painful past.

Ngati Awa were unwilling to leave the past behind until it had been publicly acknowledged and forgiven. They were not anti-development, but the council failed to recognise the link between the past history, the present mistrust and the need for a post-colonial, bicultural future created in partnership. Our task was to make that link explicit.

DETAILS DISPLAYED

Using the patterns from our research, four different design proposals were fleshed out with sketches, plans and a scale model designed to illustrate the proposal for the non-professional general public. The model, the five design proposals and all of the supporting arguments and Patterns were displayed in the foyer of the District Council offices for a week in preparation for a Town Forum that was advertised in the local press and on talkback radio.

Proposals Displayed

The model, the four design proposals and all of the supporting arguments and Patterns were displayed in the foyer of the District Council offices for a week. This display, as well as the time and venue of the upcoming Town Forum were advertised in the local press and discussed on radio-talkback (where the Design Studio had been allocated air-time). In addition, students were encouraged to circulate throughout the town showing their work and

discussing their ideas. Public interest was very strong and a large number of citizens visited the display.

TOWN FORUM

Town Forum

170 people attended on a stormy night. All Councilors, Ngati Awa Trust Board members, many retailers and large numbers of Māori and pakeha members of the public came. 170 people attended - an extraordinary number given the conditions. The Forum was opened by Mayor Byrne and facilitated by the staff and students of the Community Design Studio. All the material was on display for people to view. The Forum began with an overview of the process and a description of the role of the University. The general parameters and criteria of the design were described as were the characteristics of each of the four design proposals. Participants included almost the entire Council, several Council officers, members of the Ngati awa trust Board, local retailers and numerous members of the general public both Māori and pakeha. Table sessions with representatives from each group eventually produced concepts for a consensus design that met with unanimous approval.

Final Design

The Mayor concluded the meeting by saying:

“We have all witnessed and participated in a truly historic moment in the history of Whakatane in which for the first time, people with long-standing differences have come together to find common ground in the interests of the whole community.”

A report was produced by the students which eventually shaped most of the features of the town’s District Plan which continue to have a positive influence on the relationship between once-antagonistic stakeholders

HERITAGE TRAIL, PIRIPAI, POHATUROA, IWI REPRESENTATIVES

The proposed Cultural Heritage Trail has been completed. All sites have been included. Signs with Māori versions of historical events, critical of past Council, are prominently displayed, and telling the Ngati Awa story. Most prominent were the stories associated with Muriwai’s cave Te Toka o Irakewa and the Wairere stream and waterfall.

The sacred quality of Piripai was noted and (especially significant) was the removal of the public toilets at Pohaturoa, where the area was tastefully landscaped with Māori motifs. Finally, the Council established an Iwi Liaison Committee – composed of twelve members from surrounding Iwi and Hapu to advise on all cultural matters in future developments, and the Whakatane District Council now draws accolades as one of the most culturally sensitive Local Authorities the country.

RIVER WALKWAY

River Walkway

As well as the recreation and integration of the Māori historical landscape, the commercial transformation of the town also required the realisation of its tourism potential by highlighting other natural features. Like many other NZ towns, Whakatane had always turned its back on the river. The development of the river frontage as a recreational cycling and walking track was a key shift, linking residential, commercial and recreational amenities

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS

This was the first time that any of the students (with the exception of Rau) had ventured into the Māori world. In addition, the had uncovered, addressed and solved cultural conflicts of a long-standing nature – conflicts that had for years eaten away at the community and stymied any collective agreement about future developments. It was a remarkable achievement. From a Pedagogical standpoint also, the project was an outstanding success:

All students passed with distinction All experienced profound changes in their perceptions of Māori All of them engaged more fully with their academic work than at

any time previously Following the project, they continued to meet, sharing exam

preparations and supporting each other – leading to an across-the-board jump of two points in their grade point average.

All now have successful professional careers. Eventually, four team members started the successful company

design TRIBE specialising in Māori design.

The Design Team

From a Critical Pedagogy viewpoint, the Whakatane Study was an outstanding success. Not only were students able to initiate and realise real change in the world - changes to the District Scheme, removal of offensive developments, introduction of a Māori voice and perspective etc. - they were also able to address their own dominant culture perspectives and values in a critical and reflective way. None of the team came out of the process as they went in. Each member in his or her own way, went through significant personal change. The Whakatane Study allowed us to confront our unconscious stereotypes, to challenge racist norms and to eventually commit to what Freire has called “class suicide” - to join with the oppressed in solidarity, confronting the prejudices that prevent each and all of us from realising our real potential.Three years later, Ngati Awa invited the Community Design Studio back to design their Whare Wānanga (tribal University).

KEY LESSONS

Internal consistency between means and ends (“Walking one’s Talk”) is crucial to building trust.

Reciprocity and balance (Utu) is an essential principle of process. The data and results belong to the subjects and utu must be maintained

Knowledge is not neutral, and learning means taking a position, being situated.

Cultural immersion is a valuable basis for self-knowledge and transformation

Reflection on privilege is key to personal development and to working with indigenous communities

In a (post-?) colonial context, cultural politics is an essential component of design.

Deep learning comes from direct engagement with concrete social, cultural and economic problems

Theory is no substitute for theory but is also an important partner to practice and direct experience

Through confronting our own fears, we learn to speak truth to power Students really do want to change the world and when they have

the opportunity will work very hard Change is possible, with patience, acceptance, truth and hope

TE WHARE WANANGA O NGATI AWA

In 1989-90, the Government introduced the Education Amendment Act abolishing the Department of Education and reforming it as the MOE. It did so on the basis of two reports that were to transform the nature of education in NZ. Administering for Excellence (known as the Picot Report) and Tomorrow Schools. The new policy placed control over schools in the community through elected Boards of Trustees, and allowed for the creation of new schools in response to community demand. Based upon the opportunities offered by the Act, and building on the trust established in our earlier design project, In 1990 the Community Design Studio was asked by Ngati Awa to return to Whakatane and to develop plans for a new Whare Wānanga in a disused part of a local paper mill. Plans, models and draft curriculum were developed and submitted for planning approval. A report setting out the logic and justification for the Wānanga was also produced. Four future founding Directors of design TRIBE (including Rau) again participated in the project. Plans, models and draft curriculum were developed and submitted for planning approval. A report setting out the logic and justification for the Wānanga was also produced. Amongst other things, this report noted that:

The University of Auckland was founded on money acquired from the sale of confiscated Ngati Awa land

The improved education of Māori would soon recover the $20m

cost of the Wānanga in savings from Unemployment, Ministry of Justice and and Welfare portfolios.

The Labour Government lost the next election and Ministers who had been negotiating with the tribe were replaced. The plans were shelved. Two years later (1992) the tribe opened Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiarangi in an old disused primary school in town.

WANANGA DEVELOPMENT

From 1993 Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiarangi operated out of an old primary school (left). Between 2000 and 2006 the Wānanga expanded from 400 to 4000 students and from 27 staff to 230. In 2004. Programme growth was also enormous - from 2 Bachelor degrees to 7, from 4 sub degree courses to more than 30, a greatly expanded Masters programme and the introduction of a PhD. The Wānanga finally received their $14.5M Establishment Grant through the Waitangi Tribunal Settlement, ($20M was originally sought and justified in our 1991 Report). The result has been a major development of the Wānanga’s physical environment

UNIVERSITY COMPLETION RATES

Although not materially successful, the Community Design Studio work on the Whare Wānanga had raised our collective awareness of the problems associated with the poor success rates of Māori students in the mainstream education system:

The low numbers of Māori in tertiary education. The Māori population of NZ was about 15%. The number of Māori students in the SOA (1990) - app.15 (5%)

Their high non-completion rates (less than 30% of Māori students completed their degrees).

Part of the cause was undoubtedly the lack of institutional support around

issues of tikanga and kaupapa Māori. There was a real need to do something within the University to address these issues. Accordingly, Rau, with another Māori architecture student, Saul Roberts, established Whaihanga – the first Departmental Māori support group in the University system, open to students in Architecture, Planning, Property Management and Engineering. Once organized, the collective efforts of the group went into successfully acquiring dedicated space, a kaumatua (Frank Paul) and the appointment of the first full-time Māori faculty member. I reluctantly accepted the role of honorary kaumatua. The group met regularly and established a tuakana-teina system of mutual support over academic issues. To initiate cross-disciplinary work and to focus support around a common goal we developed a joint project, including Māori students from all years and all Departments - the design of NZs first Kaupapa Māori High School, Te Whare Kura o Hoani Waititi at the invitation of University colleague Dr. Pita Sharples.

1993-4: THE WHARE KURA O HOANI WAITITI

By 1986 there emerged from the new Kohanga Reo a large group of Māori-fluent children, and the Māori community pressured the government to initiate a parallel system of kura kaupapa Primary Schools. The first was at Hoani Waititi Marae in West Auckland. Seven years later, in 1993, a cohort of culturally strong adolescents emerged from these schools and once again, the Māori community demanded a culturally-specific, kaupapa Māori post-primary school system for their children. The design of that first kura kaupapa Māori High School - again at Hoani Waititi Marae - was completed by the Māori

students at the University School of Architecture Whaihanga group.

In a move that upset some of my colleagues and outraged some pakeha students, I limited the Whare Kura project to a Māori-only class (with one exception for a fluent te reo speaker and member of the Hoani Waititi community, and that with the approval of the Māori students themselves).

A few no-Māori students accused me of “Apartheid”, and I had to explain that Apartheid had been a situation where the majority of the black population of South Africa were denied their rights by a small white minority. Here, a small minority was operating exclusively as a way of attaining their rights. I likened it to the situation in the 1970s where the Womens Liberation Movement began tio hold meetings that explicitly excluded men – on the basis that they needed the space, safety and freedom to voice the things that they had never prevuiously dared say in a male presence.

The Whaihanga students in the five-year BArch course were mostly Second Year students (with a couple of Third years. Despite their lack of experience they took collective responsibility in the Whare Kura project for every aspect of the design - site surveying, brief-making, programme scheduling, design project management, preliminary and final developed designs. Some students were later employed by a professional architect too complete the working drawings and specifications.

THE DESIGN

The design inspiration came from the evolving form of the growing koru (left), with the existing Marae complex and whare nui as the life-source of the development at the heart.

The finished Whare Kura was a testament to the hard work and dedication of the Whaihanga students. It was also a very successful project pedagogically. It was also a clear demonstration of the need for universities to cater more directly to the specific needs of their Māori students. Of the 15 Māori students involved, thirteen (86.6%) went on to complete their degrees (three with honours), and both Rau Hoskins and Saul Roberts went on to complete their Masters. Of the two students who did not complete, one is now a partner in a large Taranaki architectural practice, the other is the Director of a successful computer software company. Almost all of the Whaihanga students are still friends and in contact some 20 years later.

1995-6: THE PARIHAKA PROJECT

The Hoani Waititi Whare Kura established both Whaihanga and the Community Design Studio as a credible and affordable professional design service to the Māori community. On that basis we were invited, in 1995 to undertake two projects at Parihaka Pa in Taranaki - a site of one of the most infamous acts of cultural and political oppression in New Zealand history, but also a site of great pride and spiritual meaning to Māori everywhere..

In the 1870s, two Taranaki chiefs, Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and his uncle Tohu Kakahi established a peaceful community at Parihaka. They and their followers were devoted to the principles of non-violence and passive resistance later made famous by Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King. The community at Parihaka Pa, became a centre of resistance as members of other dispossessed tribes migrated to Parihaka where peace still existed. By 1870, it was a prosperous settlement with 1500 inhabitants. It had its own vegetable gardens and wheat fields and three flour mills. Europeans were always welcome. The community was peaceful, hard working and orderly. It remains a highly revered spiritual centre of Māoridom. Gradually, roads were built by the armed constabulary and were approaching the Parihaka community (top right). Surveyors arrived in 1879 to survey the Waimate Plains for European occupation. Te Whiti and Tohu directed them to leave until the Reserves had been established. They left but returned. On May 25th 1879, Te Whiti sent his ploughmen to pull out the survey pegs and plough symbolic furrows into the land taken from them at Oakura. On 29th June 1879, Te Whiti’s ploughmen were arrested. Within a week, more than a hundred were in custody, many were sentenced to hard labour in

the Dunedin gaol. None of them were ever tried. The Government passed a new law - the Māori Prisoners Trial Act - suspending habeas corpus and allowing Māori to be imprisoned without trial. This was followed by increasingly repressive legislation. The Māori Prisoners Act prevented any lawmaker from bailing or releasing untried prisoners. The Māori Prisoners Detention Act ensured that Māori from Parihaka who fenced across roads were to be held under the same laws as the ploughmen. The West Coast Settlement Act allowed that Māori could be arrested for on suspicion of gathering to engage in acts of civil disobedience, could be given for two year hard labour and only released on the payment of a surety to be determined by the court.

On 26th June, ploughmen who had caused 5 shillings worth of damage to were sentenced to 2 months hard labour in Dunedin gaol, with sureties of £600 to keep the peace for one year, or to serve 12 months hard labour in Dunedin. All of this without trial.

It was into this context that (seeking to crush the dissent and resistance) on the 5th November 1881, Parihaka Pa was invaded by a force of 945 volunteers and 644 armed constabulary all armed to the teeth and supported by munitions-laden pack animals and an artillery piece. They were led by John Bryce, the Minister for Native Affairs, a belligerent Glasgwegian immigrant (1840) farmer from Whanganui. They were met by children singing and performing poi. Inside the pa there were very few weapons - mostly old and inoperative. The people were under clear instructions not to engage in acts of aggression but to remain always polite and welcoming.

Following the invasion of the Pa, the Parihaka community found life extremely difficult, with continued resistance and imprisonments continuing through to the end of the century. A force of occupation remained in place for five years. Women were raped, gardens, crops and houses were destroyed, hundreds of livestock were slaughtered, precious artifacts were stolen and looted and public meetings were forbidden.

In March 1883, Te Whiti and Tohu were finally released and arrived back at Parihaka. They were still unable to hold meetings for another 17 months, but

quickly set about rebuilding the pa. New houses and a bank were built around the Marae. Roads were built and improved, a bakery and butchery were built. A good water supply was installed, as was electric lighting - before even Wellington could boast the same. It was not until 1897-8 that the majority of the prisoners returned from Dunedin, though many had died there. The return of the prisoners was greeted with celebrations, singing and great jubilation (below). But the economy of the pa had been critically damaged. The promised reserves of 25,000 acres were reduced to 5,000 acres “as punishment”. Even these reserves were not returned, but were instead vested in a Public Trustee and leased to Europeans at peppercorn rents in perpetuity. The continued poverty of Parihaka was thus guaranteed. Those prisoners that had survived were not released until 1898 – seven years after their arrest.

Over the years, the community declined although traditional gatherings on the 18th of every month were maintained down to the present. Both Te Whiti and Tohu died in 1907 and are buried at Parihaka

THE SURVEY

Aerial View of Parihaka Pa

In 1995, we traveled to Taranaki to survey the Pa and to begin construction of a scale model of the remaining 49 acres of the Pa. Readings were taken from the top of the hill where the 6 pound artillery piece had been situated during the invasion of 1881. In a great irony, we discovered that because Te Whiti’s had ordered the removal of survey pegs none could be found to which the new survey readings could be related. We eventually found two, buried almost a metre deep.

BUILDING THE MODEL

Once the survey was complete we were able to draw accurate topographical maps of the pa site and from these to construct an accurate 3 dimensional model. It was important that we use the model as a communications device with the residents, and so accurate surveys of all of the buildings were undertaken. The children from the community assisted us in constructing the model, placing the houses and integrating the vegetation. The elders, too, were always available to tell their stories and to help us to locate these with accuracy. The model became not only an indispensable aid to our knowledge and understanding, but also a vehicle for the Parihaka community to reconstruct their collective history, to pass it on to their children and to reaffirm their pride and commitment to the principles developed by Te Whiti and Tohu a century earlier.

TE PAE PAE O TE RAUKURA

In addition to the survey, model and development plan, we were also asked to develop designs for the rehabilitation - Te Whiti’s old Council building, Te Pae

Pae o Te Raukura. Though much loved, it was quite dilapidated and too small for the increasingly large groups that gathered there for the historic bicultural meetings on the 18th of every month (held to commemorate the British invasion of Waitara on march 18th 1860 which led to the Taranaki wars.

CULTURAL MATRIX

The heart of the Parihaka Pa remains intact and its geographical and topographical features remain as a reference for the history and heroism of the people. There, lie all of the major features that weave together the story of Parihaka. And the story is told, for us, in the organisation of the building, which points to and acknowledges this sacred history. The rebuilding of Te Pae Pae is inscribed with spatial and directional acknowledgments of the wahi tapu associated with its remarkable history through what we called a cultural matrix. Once we understood the geometries of the pa history, it became a matter of organizing the layout and design features of the new and remodeled building to refer to these points of historical pride.

THE DESIGN

Once the work was finished, it remained to present the results to the Pa Trustees and the other people of Parihaka. Both models elicited keen interest, comment and appreciation, and the final design won the unanimous and enthusiastic support of the people. Te Miringa Hohaia and Freda Paretaitu Tito (bottom centre and left) kaitiaki to Te Pae Pae were delighted with the proposal. And so the project came to an end. The models and all documentation were given to the Trustees to use as they wished. Later, they would form the centrepiece of the Exhibition Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance which opened at Te Puke Ariki, the New Plymouth Art Gallery and Museum, after exhibiting in Wellington and Auckland.

For their part, the people of Parihaka told how they had never before allowed anyone into their lives in so intimate a way and how they had never allowed their Pa or their homes to be surveyed. Everyone agreed that it had been a mostly memorable event, and everyone spoke of the hope they felt that this might be the turning point in the economic fortunes of Parihaka. One student, David Lash told how although he was a “local” he had known nothing of the Parihaka story, but now felt compelled to work towards correcting the wrongs that had been done to the Pa and its people

THE FLY-THROUGH

QuickTime™ and aCinepak decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

THE DREAM

On the last day of the project, I was taken aside by an elder and we walked towards where Te Whiti’s house had once stood. As we climbed up the steps of the ruin of Te Raukura, he told me of a dream he had had as a young child. He was in his late 80s now, and not quite old enough to have known Te Whiti.

When he was five, he had dreamed that he was standing on the edge of a very large crowd, surrounding Te Whiti who was sitting on the verandah of Te Raukura in a wheelchair. Slowly he wriggled his way to the front of the crowd. As he got closer to the front, between the legs of the adults, they tried to hold him back. But Te Whiti had seen the child and told those present to let him through. He climbed the steps to stand in front of the old man. Quietly, he now told me that Te Whiti had said to him, “Child, I will soon die, and Parihaka will decline. But one day it will return to its former glory. You will not see the day of its full greatness, but you will see the dawn of that day - the beginning of that rebirth!”

On the spot where Te Whiti had sat in his dream, the old man turned to me with tears flowing freely down his cheeks and said, “ I believe that this is the day that Te Whiti told me about.”

WHAT TO DO?

The authoritarian practices and values that flow from the hierarchical structures of power and are built into the practice of Western “Education” are grounded in a military model with its language and practice of conquest and domination albeit “softened” with trappings of Christian morality. They are a direct reflection and expression of the ethics of capitalist ideology - of conquest, displacement, subjugation, cultural assimilation, privatisation, individualism, cultural commodification and alienation, property laws,

exploitation of human and natural resources, economic manipulation, punishment, etc. If we want to educate our children to save the planet, we must do so differently - based upon a different model and with different premises.

Although they no longer exist in their pre-colonised form, traditional indigenous perspectives and practices nevertheless offer some useful insights into what such an education might look like. The evolved when the world was very different and much smaller, but they evolved out of a symbiotic relationship to the material world that we might emulate to our benefit.

What follows are a series of guidelines culled from 30 years of working in indigenous communities in the US and more specifically with the Māori community in Aotearoa-New Zealand. They are loosely based upon principles developed by the New Zealand bicultural scholar Joan Metge, others are culled from my own experience of working in indigenous communities.

GUIDELINES FOR A BICULTURAL PEDAGOGY

Māori tend towards a holistic approach to education with subject connections, rather than divisions, stressed

Learning in groups is favoured over individual learning

Tuakana-Teina (older sibling helping younger sibling) is traditional

Knowledge belongs to the group and is to be used for the group rather than individual ambition.

Individual achievement is less important than learning to be an acceptable group member

Awhinatanga (support) and utu (reciprocity) are cornerstones of the learning experience

Where possible, learners are integrated into existing groups comprising a range of expertise

Much important knowledge is gained in the peer group where information is pooled.

There is emphasis on the learner LOOKING, LISTENING and IMITATING with a minimum of instructional words

Māori adults tend not to prepare learners for problems beforehand and do not warn them about possible mistakes

Inclusiveness and valuing difference makes everyone feel safe and encourages participation and learning

Learners are encouraged to learn by DOING tasks in the proper setting

Much significant learning takes place ad hoc and when needed, often after a crisis situation, when emotions are high.

Māori teachers avoid singling out individuals for praise or blame in

public.

Memorising and rote learning have an important role in transmitting culture and values

Storytelling is an important learning-teaching medium

The relationship of mutual respect between “learner” and “teacher” is very important

Education involves the heart as well as the head.

Accretive learning in a collective (talking circle) situation is the preferred mode

Teachers model consistency between behaviours and values for students (walking their talk)

Learning takes place within a cultural framework (tikanga)

The spiritual has an important place in learning. Other reality frameworks are not excluded

Trust is a key component of the learning environment

Mutual dependency between students increases trust and learning depth

Supportive communication enhances learning, criticism diminishes it

Good decisions are recognised by their consensus

Taking the time to arrive at consensus is more productive and sustainable than majority voting

The process is more important than the outcome. If the process is good, the outcome will be good.

Ritualised learning processes are very powerful

Learning is deeper when it integrates mental and physical activity

Acknowledgement is a crucial aspect of communication

Allowing time to dream and reflect and taking these dreams seriously is important

Learning in the context of community needs is critical

Students work harder and better when they believe they are changing the world

Indigenous students work better when they are working to advance tino rangatiratanga

It helps when the “teacher” is committed to indigenous sovereignty

Gradually, over time, these principles have come to inform my teaching and led me to recognise the deeper and more applicable significance they had for the wider learning community, and it was perhaps on the that in 2000 I was

invited to join the faculty of Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiarangi, the successor to our earlier Wānanga project as the Director of Programme Development.

2000 - 2006 TE WHARE WANANGA O AWANUIARANGI

In 2000 I completed my last project at the University of Auckland – a $20m rehabilitation of Te Puia Springs Hospital for Ngatio Porou Hauora and left to take a position of Director of Programme Development at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiarangi – the reincarnation of our original Te Whare Wānanga o Ngati Awa. I have to say in retrospect that I was very nervous about my appointment - being away from friends and support in the Māori community and worried about my lack of te Reo Māori or a comprehensive understanding of tikanga. I need not have worried.

My job was to develop sub-degree and undergraduate degree programmes in kaupapa Māori and to teach courses in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Media Studies and Art and Visual Culture. Looking back, I consider it to have been the best job I have ever had. Enjoyable as my work running the Community Design Studio at the University of Auckland for 20 years had been, I had always found it a struggle to justify the work I did to my colleagues who constantly criticised the developing pedagogy, my evaluation methods and the quality of work that my students turned out - all at the same time that they marveled that I “managed to get them to work so hard”. The truth was I didn’t “get them” to do anything. They were entirely self-motivated to levels that put the students in other studios to shame. And the clients loved it. We

were doing real things, out there in the world.

My colleagues thought that this somehow impinged upon my students’ creativity and stifled their ability to theorise and experiment. There was a constant tension in justifying the social and cultural solutions that we were producing. The use of Māori-based pedagogies (of consensus decisions, group work, collective evaluations and “talking circles” was, to them, unacceptable. They constantly questioned the need to be fully engaged in rangatiratanga - happy for me to be working in the Māori community but insisting that this same community was not able to make aesthetic decisions of the same calibre as professional architects. The work produced by their students was, to me, impractical, unbuildable and fanciful - paper architecture with seductive but unrealisable images.

At the Wānanga everything was different. I no longer had to justify my position which was in any case completely congruent with that of my Māori colleagues and my students. We shared common goals and ambitions and every day was a joy of sharing and creating. During my time there the student role increased from 400 to almost 4000 and the staff numbers increased from 27 to 230. We started with 2 undergraduate degrees and one Masters paper and ended up with seven Bachelors and four Masters and a PhD programme and I was involved in all of it. It was the best of times. For the first time, my heart and my head were in the same place.

All of this came to a head when the (Labour) Government of the day abandoned its Community Education funding. The budget was blowing out - largely as a result of the “bums on seats” funding structure that encouraged tertiary institutes to offer marginally legitimate courses to secure additional income. These funds had been the life-blood of the three Wānanga - allowing us to reintroduce disenfranchised Māori youth back into free, safe, non-threatening but still serious education and to build capacity in our bridging, degree, masters and PhD programmes to staircase them to their highest abilities. Prompted by the success of the Wānanga and by the consequent jealousy and complaints of the Universities, the Government turned a deaf ear to Wānanga pleas for exemption and axed the funding. Within a week we posted a huge deficit and were forced to “restructure” - shedding more than 30% of our staff, axing successful programmes and stifling the emerging Māori educational renaissance at birth. It was difficult not to draw comparisons with the earlier attempts to curtail the academic successes of Te Aute College.

In my teaching duties I came face to face with the dilemma mentioned earlier – the neo-colonial issue of imposing a Western materialist and anthropocentric cosmology on my Māori colleagues and students. Again, I need not have worried. My Māori students were more than capable of integrating the best of what I had to offer with the socio-political and cultural issues bearing down on them. They were able to translate my “Western” understanding into an acceptable blend of indigenous beliefs and expectations. In fact, I probably learned much more about critical theory – its potentials and limitations – than they did.

CRITICAL EDUCATION: HEGEMONY REVISITED

The colonisation of indigenous minds did not end in the 19th or even the 20th Centuries. Education continues to be a site there the State’s hegemony is played out and resisted. The content of the curriculum continues to be a site of cultural struggle (Should Māori language, NZ History, be compulsory? Should there be one national testing system? How can testing be rendered non-discriminatory for minority students? How can other, non Eurocentric, knowledge systems be accommodated and validated?) What is called the Hidden Curriculum, too, continues to be used as a means of social and cultural pacification and it is here that inroads can be made into the deadening methodologies of our educational practice by an engagement with Critical Pedagogy. Critical pedagogy takes as its mission the transformation of education in order to bring about greater social equity and justice - both in the classroom and out. It views the way we educate critically, noting that it induces public apathy by promoting:

an acceptance of hierarchy an acceptance of the status quo power through

an inability to think critically or to question authority to be reflective to weigh evidence to recognise the difference between reasoning and opinion

to recognise the relationship between cause and effect to differentiate between espoused values and values in action to dialogue across difference work collaboratively for common goals

Critical pedagogues seek out sites and instances of oppression and inequity in the community and wider world and make these sites the subject of their work in the classroom and in the community itself revealing the workings of power and forging links between between students and oppressed groups so that they may work towards their mutual advantage.

THE CURRICULUM

The struggle to determine what to include and what to exclude from a curriculum is often portrayed as a technical problem – does it fit the subject matter? Is it clear and concise? Can it be fitted into the time-frame? Are there resources to support it? Will it cover the requirements of a national testing scheme? Are there jobs “out there” that need this knowledge? Is there a market for it? Less often do we ask: Will it challenge accepted notions of reality? Whose interests will it serve besides the students? Does it add to or detract from increasing inequity? Does it purport to be ideologically neutral? If so, do those claims stand up? Does it contribute to the well being of the wider community – particularly those who are poor and disadvantaged? It will be clear from what has gone before that I have a position on this. Is it, for instance, acceptable to lecture on the history of Renaissance Art without revealing and discussing its oppressive foundations in the genocide of indigenous peoples, or the collusive manipulation of Western art theoreticians to exclude any mention of the horrors for which it is responsible?

THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM

While the content of the curriculum is really important in the shaping of young minds it nevertheless operates within the sphere of awareness of the conscious mind. Of perhaps far more deeper and lasting significance are those elements of the teaching-learning environment and experience that

operate at a much lower threshold of awareness and that are apprehended not consciously - but unconsciously: that operate on the unconscious mind.

These patterns of behaviour and routinised spatial and temporal arrangements and organisation have been called the Hidden Curriculum.

COLONISED EDUCATIONAL SPACE

The shape and control of the learning environment is an important element of the hidden curriculum. Schools are becoming increasingly places of containment - like prisons. Behaviour is tightly controlled and the space is organized to ensure that the teacher is in a place of power and authority. As the child progresses through the system and comes to understand and internalise the “rules”, restrictions are gradually eased until, at the level of PhD the student is allowed free access and is able to contribute to the ruile-making.

THE CONTROL OF THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Schools are increasingly places of containment Students are told when to

study, when to rest

The “rules” cover all aspects of the learning environment.

Colonised space Colonised time Colonised concepts of intelligence Colonised pedagogy

Use of shame and punishment Emphasis on individuality Knowledge as private property Prohibitions on sharing (as “stealing”) Insistence on “Originality” Imposition of hierarchy Primacy of competition, suppression of cooperation Teaching as “student/classroom management” The use of punishment as a means of control Denial of experience Exclusivity of evaluation

THE BANKING SYSTEM OF EDUCATION

The Banking System of education was a term coined by Paulo Freire, and refers to teachers erroneously presuming that students come to the learning experience with no prior knowledge or experience, with empty heads into which the teacher must make deposits from a (set) curriculum. These deposits then accumulate and acquire a certain degree of "interest" - that is, by virtue of the accumulated knowledge deposited, more knowledge is intrinsically gained. If the students come with any prior knowledge, it is necessary under the banking system to replace this, as one might replace false currency, so that legitimate knowledge can be deposited.

Eventually (so the system suggests) the accumulated knowledge can be cashed in for real money. Looked at another way, the banking system of education is theft, since it presumes a universal truth and reality to which only the teacher has access, and that steals from the subject his or her subjectivity - the opportunity to "read" a world creatively. It both marginalises and devalues the voice of the person-wishing-to-know

THE CODIFICATION AND MYSTIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE

One of the difficulties that my Māori students at Awanuiarangi did experience was in understanding the complicated and often incomprehensible jargon of much Critical Theorizing, despite the fact that I tried very hard to explain and simplify the language for them. In this sense, they came face to face with one of the most pervasive instruments of hegemony – the codification of knowledge as a means of exclusion.

There are different levels of education available, but not all are available to everyone. In the US increasingly only the wealthy can afford to send their children to the good schools and universities where they receive all of the trappings of power and privilege and the weapons of high cultural capital to ensure their continued success and status. The poor, meanwhile, must make

do with low-level knowledge and instruction from over-worked and underpaid teachers in large classes.

As any other commodity (in a free market economy) the value of knowledge (including aesthetic knowledge) is determined by its scarcity. Scarce knowledge has a higher cultural capital value. This means that people who have learned the complex language codes of aesthetics, or finance or science can command more respect and therefore higher social status (and salaries) than those who have not, and the complex codes are a means of rendering knowledge systems increasingly incomprehensible and therefore inaccessible to the general public and therefore increasing its scarcity and valuable. Cultural capital works like economic capital – the more you have the more you can create.

For someone growing up in a home surrounded by high cultural capital objects and experiences – books, art works, sophisticate software etc., it’s easier to gain access to still higher codes and learning. An ability to learn and decipher complex codes is by higher formal education. The codes are used to differentiate the knowledgeable from the ignorant and are therefore primarily an instrument of social and cultural discrimination and exclusion - a way of maintaining power elitism.

For the young rural Māori engaged in the mostly white urban world of academia the knowledge codes can be quite intimidating and many young Māori give up, seeing their difficulties as a mark of personal failure and inadequacy rather than as the intent of the system. In my Critical Theory of Education classes at the Wānanga, I went to some pains to clarify this, situating it also in a history of Māori Education to show that the evidence pointed towards a systemic discrimination which was masked behind the mythical neutrality of the State.

SCHOOLS FILTER THE CULTURAL ELITE

A student who starts out with a high cultural capital background has the resources necessary to escape the banking system of education. Those who don’t remain trapped in their role as subservient consumers of others’ perceptions. All high-status learning institutions (Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, private schools etc.) dialogue, not monological teaching, is the norm. As a person moves up through the different levels of the educational system each domain is guarded by gatekeepers whose job it is to ensure that no-one passes without the ability to translate the new and more complex codification.

THE CODES OF THE DOMINANT CULTURE PREVAIL

“Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things - the former dehumanised by an excess of power, the latter by lack of it. And things cannot love.”

Paulo Freire

As the system commodifies knowledge, time, space, resources and people, students become bums on seats provided to balance the books and turn a

profit. We teachers become the deliverers of prescribed texts and pedagogies, losing touch with the most human, compassionate part of ourselves - the part that takes risks, that grows, that seeks to create a better world. We become alienated from ourselves, reified, motivated by fear and obedience to authority. We become bureaucratic, avoiding responsibility while seeking acknowledgment and reward.

As the representative of the all-powerful State, the teacher is the ultimate authority. His or her word is law. There is no room for dialogue, challenge or questioning. The values and meanings of the system are transmitted through the teacher to the student are not negotiated. These values then carry a Pavlovian contingency of reinforcement associated with unquestioning obedience to unchallengeable power. As education budgets are cut and classroom sizes increase, classroom management becomes increasingly the norm, and there is less and less room and time left for reflection, dialogue or negotiation of meaning. Those teachers with higher qualifications migrate to private schools or to tertiary education leaving their less qualified colleagues to inadvertently reproduce the status quo power through their banking system pedagogy.

EDUCATION AS INTERNALISED JUDGEMENT AND SOCIAL CONTROL

"...this large number of people who do not read or write and who were expelled from school do not represent a failure of the schooling class; their expulsion reveals the triumph of the schooling class. In fact this misreading of responsibility reflects the school's hidden curriculum... Curriculum in the broadest sense involves not only the programmatic contents of the school system, but also the scheduling, discipline, the day-to-day tasks required from students in schools. In this curriculum, then, there is a quality that is hidden and that gradually incites rebelliousness on the part of children and adolescents”

Paulo Freire

In school, resistance to the authority of the teacher is useless, and the child learns early that the faceless system cannot be easily faced-down. For the schoolchild, there are no appropriate avenues of complaint without the danger of being labeled a “trouble-maker”, a “malcontent”, a “dunce” or a “problem child”. For the working class child or an indigenous child, resistance, when it does happen, expresses itself as a refusal to adopt the values being imposed and a move into the counter-culture - swearing, smoking, sexual promiscuity, truanting, and generally forming a self-fulfilling culture with low horizons and expectations. One learns early to keep one’s head down and to stay quiet or pay the price of shame and exclusion. The consequence is a life of self-imposed cultural inadequacy and economic failure.

PASSIVITY IN THE FACE OF POWER

After ten or fifteen years of school, being bombarded with and internalising these colonising conceptual structures, the young adult is ready fior the BIG WORLD and the school experience is carried over into adult life. As as adult individual it is very difficult to resist authority or to make changes happen. One of the reasons for the promotion of individualism is to create a sense of

helplessness in the face of (usually faceless) power. George Tooker’s painting, Government Bureau (left) illustrates this well. In the painting, the Government bureaucrats can only be seen in fragments - hands and eyes - never as a whole person, as a human being. It depicts the state of alienation or the process of reification by which a person turns him or herself into an object, a non-person, usually for reasons of emotional or physical survival. Implicit in the painting is the hierarchy that stands behind the individual behind the screen - a hierarchy that becomes increasingly inaccessible as one moves toward the top. By creating the conditions for passive acceptance of “the way things are” those who wield power do not need to resort to force to achieve their aims - the reproduction and augmentation of their own power over others for their own economic gain. In this sense, the State operates as the partner of business in creating the conditions for profitable development. Schools play a crucial role in engendering a sense of passivity in the face of power and in providing a ready compliant workforce for international industry and commerce.

CULTURAL REPRODUCTION

Through the careful control and arrangement of space, time, what counts as legitimate knowledge, values and perceptions the school system maintains a cycle of cultural reproduction that ensures its continual survival and the continued survival of the power status quo. By the time the young person graduates, they have been conditioned to accept its rules and become an advocate and spokesperson for the system, carrying them on into their own parenting and professional teaching roles.

THE COLONISED MEANING OF KNOWLEDGE: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.

In mainstream Western academic culture, Knowledge is.... Power. Its ownership bestows upon the individual an ability to exert more control over his or her own destiny. Often this control over oneself is acquired through a high degree of control and exploitation of others who have less knowledge and therefore power, or over the environment. This is clearly spelled out at the School. In another part of the University of Miami sits the Myaamia project, where a few dedicated Myaamia Indians are attempting to resurrect their spoken “dead” language from written texts. They have another definition of Knowledge. Their word, Nipwaahkaalo has four roots, which collectively describe the need to establish, nurture, consolidate and heal relationships.

For the Myaamia, knowledge is all about harmonious relationships.

CORPORATE THEFT

Given this ethic that “Knowledge is Power” that seems to be the norm in our professional universities and courses it seems fair to

question whether the 2008 economic meltdown was an “accident” or was it a premeditated strategy by a cunning and immoral individuals to become fabulously wealthy? We continue to buy in in to the mythology of the “Trickle Down” theory of economics despite all of the evidence that it has not and does not work. Millions have dropped out of the middle classes, mortgage foreclosures have escalated. Families have been torn apart, but the wealthy money managers have continued to prosper - not only that, but they have done so on taxpayer bailout money, using their connections, campaign contributions and lobbying skills to promote the myth that they are “too big to fail” and legislation that greases the wheels of their theft.

KNOWLEDGE, POWER AND THE PROFESSIONS

“Dude, I owe you big time!... Stop round later, I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger”

Barclays Trader on illegal fixing of LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate

The idea that “Knowledge is Power” is not without its consequences in the world of academia - particularly in the education of professionals. The bankers, financiers, brokers, traders and free-market idealogues that destroyed the world’s economy in 2008 were graduates of MBA courses in Business Schools just like the one at Miami university.

The leaders of Morgan Stanley and Barclays Banks were educated in business schools like this where the ethic of power is paramount. From the 1990s, MBA programmes have gradually dropped courses in Business Ethics (they are now reinstating them!) and have pursued a policy that allowed them all power without responsibility over the world economy. As many protesters in the Occupy Movement, in Greece and Spain have noted, the bankers (with their callous lack of empathy for others, not the people, were the ones to be baled out by their mates in the Federal Reserve Bank, the Bank of England, the IMF, the European Central Bank and the World Bank. The result has been a dramatic loss of confidence and trust in the finance. But the effects of free

market economy in education are not confined to MBA courses. The ideology of the free market has shifted many of the ways in which education is now viewed and practiced - with dire results. The recent manipulation of the LIBOR rates by Barclays Bank Traders which appears to have been widespread, may be the latest example.

WHAT’S THE POINT?

The point is – continued growth and development all centred around the mythology of universal prosperity. The latest buzzword, of course, is Sustainable Development. It’s a myth! Planting trees to offset carbon footprints is an empty gesture. Carbon Credits are licenses to pollute - like the Church Indulgences of old were a license to sin. It’s a way of trying to keep the wheels of capitalism and development rolling, to keep the party going. The word development originates from the French in the 17th Century meaning of unfolding or un-envoloping. It was originally used to describe the unfolding of faculties of the human mind. In the 18th Century, it became associated with the idea of evolution, and associated with economic change. At that time, the theory that societies and cultures progressed through a series of evolutionary stages, giving rise to the idea of progressive development and stages of development (1860). There is a parallel movement in developmental psychology, where stages of development are seen as a progressive state of “growing up.

In the First World countries, notions of Community Development have gained some favour as a means of ameliorating the hardships brought about by

privatisation and loss of (free) local-government provided resources. Here, the emphasis (at best) has been upon public-private partnerships to provide disappearing social and cultural services and activities - all couched within the epithet of economic sustainability - ie. self-funding and profit-generating.

THE MYTH OF “DEVELOPING ECONOMIES”

Alongside this shift towards an economic theory of development, there emerged the polar concept of undevelopment - giving rise eventually to the notion of underdevelopment - characterising a place or environment where the resources had not yet been exploited for economic gain. This suggested that lands (and people) in stages of underdevelopment were appropriate locations for investment and exploitation, leading eventually to the notion of developing countries. The issue at stake here is the domination of the world market by others than national governments or citizens - and the exploitation of the people for financial off-shore profit, leaving the host countries stripped of their resources, at the mercy of the World Bank for continuing aid, pressured to privatise their remaining state assets, burdened in futile attempts to service their national debt. The problem is, that globally, we are now encroaching on the last untouched resources which hold the potential for catastrophic failure, and, if exploited successfully have in any case, the potential to cause irreversible changes to our planet. Furthermore, those previously underdeveloped countries like China, India, Pakistan, South America etc. whom we have exploited for centuries now want their own development. They want to attain the same living standards that we attained through our exploitation of them. Unless the Northern and Western nations are prepared to tolerate a significant drop in their living standards, this cannot be done. The result will be a complete ruination of the planet or endless wars and conflicts for diminishing resources or both.

12 percent of the world’s population lives in North America and Western Europe and accounts for 60 percent of private consumption spending. A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary US$21 trillion ($26 trillion) of wealth offshore - as much as US and Japanese GDPs put together.

For many developing countries the cumulative value of the capital that has flowed out of their economies since the 1970s would be more than enough to

pay off their debts to the rest of the world.

Assuming the mountain of assets earned an average 3 per cent a year for its owners, and governments were able to tax that income at 30 per cent, it would generate a bumper US$189 billion in revenues - more than rich countries spend on aid to the developing world each year.

STUDENT AS CONSUMER

Until the 1970s economic prosperity was seen to be connected to increased production. This was because without a so-called “free market” of cheap offshore labour, producing more and more commodities satisfied the affluent western market. Since that time, and since the western market has become increasingly saturated, economic theory and concepts of growth have been increasingly tied to consumption, and consumer capitalism has infected every nook and cranny of our social, cultural and economic lives, and this in nowhere more true than in education.

In the “free market” education system, knowledge is a commodity to be bought and sold, and students who are themselves treated as commodities,

as “bums on seats”, are trained to be passive consumers of knowledge in preparation for their role as citizens in a consumer-capitalism economy where growth is mandatory and where steady-state economics is the greatest heresy.

Their passive “reception” of knowledge from knowledgeable educators belies the way that knowledge is created and denies them the exploration of their greatest assets - their curiosity and their capacity to change the world. If any University wants its students to change the world, it will have to radically change its pedagogy and this will mean more than just adding a few courses in Sustainability. It will have to consider its students as co-producers of knowledge and social change, taking up the task of challenging the normative status quo and speaking truth to power.

BLACK GOLD.

As global supplies of oil diminish military conflicts for access and supply have been increasing. The superpowers - the USA, Britain, Russia, China, France, as well as Holland are scrambling to get their hands on this most precious of all commodities. Since the early part of the 20th Century, many of the

international conflicts have been about oil. Everything we have and use depends on petrochemicals. besides the fuel that drives out vehicles and machines that drive production and therefore our entire productive economy, oil also provides all of the fertilizers and the insecticides that feed the burgeoning world population of 7.2 billion. No oil, no food.

It’s Easier to Find a War than a Job Libya

In addition, the ongoing demonisation of those States that have the audacity to want to develop and exploit their own oil resources for their own benefit poses not just a revealing view of recent history, but a bleak view of future potential wars.

BAD GUYSArgentina (Falklands)IraqAfghanistanLibyaIranSyriaVenezuelaWho is next?

GOOD GUYSQatarUAENigeriaKuwaitSaudi ArabiaBahrain

When oil runs out, as it will (we are NOW at peak oil, where consumption is outpacing production) there will be enormous social conflicts and mass migrations. M. King Hubberts 1956 projection of oil stocks has proven to be remarkably accurate. The remaining oil stocks (in the Arctic, Antarctic and deep oceans) are now much more difficult to access and therefore much more expensive. Their extraction also comes with enormously increased environmental risk.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Let’s look at some indicators. First, ecosystems:

• 90% of the large predator fish have already disappeared from the oceans

• 97% of the indigenous forests are already gone. Tropical rainforests are being eradicated at a rate of 160,000 sq. kilometres a year.

• The Amazon Rain Forest (which has been called the “lungs of the world” is disappearing at a rate of 15,000 sq. kilometres a year.

• 65% of Rainforests in Central Sumatra have been cleared in 25 years.

• 30% of the earth’s surface and 70% of all dry lands are in danger of desertification.

• 40% of the world’s agricultural land has become degraded in the last 50 years

• The loss of forests reduces the amount of carbon dioxide uptake globally, significantly accelerating the process of global warming. Some scientists believe that the effect of this loss could be so significant as to make the planet uninhabitable.

• One of the other significant aspects of deforestation is to reduce the amount of global transpiration – that is, the ability of forests to create and maintain the atmospheric moisture necessary to support a stable climate. Deforestation reduces transpiration which promotes drought, which reduces transpiration – in a vicious circle. Some scientists predict a tipping point for the Amazon at which point the process becomes irreversible. One estimate has been 2007!

The Arctic ice is melting at a rate of 50% more than even the most conservative scientific predictions estimated.

Add to these troubling facts the emerging consensus on climate change. The findings of the 2006 British Government’s Stern Review suggested that:

• All countries will be affected by climate change, but the poorest countries will suffer earliest and most.

• Warming of 2°C could leave 15-40% species facing extinction.

• Average temperatures could rise by 5C from pre-industrial levels if climate change goes unchecked.

• Warming of 3°C or 4°C will result in many millions more people

being flooded. By the middle of the century 200 million may be permanently displaced due to rising sea levels, heavier floods and drought.

• An additional 30-200 million people at risk of hunger with warming of only 2°C -3°C;

• An additional 250-500 million at risk if temperatures rise above 3°C;

• Some 70-80 million more Africans will be exposed to malaria; and an additional 1.5 billion exposed to dengue fever.

• Warming of 4°C or more is likely to seriously affect global food production.

• Climate change is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.

One study, based on historical shifts in climate change, suggests that within a hundred years, at the present rate of CO2 emissions, the CO2 in the atmosphere could increase from its present 390 parts per million to 1000 parts per million – leading to an increase in temperature of an astonishing 16°C!

Permafrost covers almost 25% of the Northern Hemisphrere. Beneath it is secured more than a trillion metric tons of 30,000 year-old methane-producing vegetation. Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The permafrost is thawing at an alarming rate.

END GAME

In 1972, a multidisciplinary group was commissioned by the Club of Rome to assess, through computer modeling, the carrying capacity of the earth’s resource base against population growth. They predicted a collapse of the resource base by the mid 21st Century. A recent 30-year update has shown that their predictions remain surprisingly accurate (bottom right). We are approaching or have already arrived at Peak Oil, our oceans are almost completely depleted. An economy based on GROWTH is planetary suicide.

CODA

Capitalism has brought the world to the edge of catastrophe Normative Education both expresses, embodies and reflects the

values of capitalism The purpose of education has been to advance the cause and

development of capitalism Education, in its present form, has therefore helped to create the

current crises If we wish to mitigate the effects of these crises, we need to

radically change education Critical Theory offers part of the solution for making this critical

change The values and practices of indigenous - precapitalist - communities

has much to teach us about the form that education should take Since most of us teach the way we were taught, we are not

currently equipped to adopt the values and practices that are necessary to bring about these necessary changes

TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING

I believe that collectively, pre-capitalist indigenous knowledge systems and pedagogies point a way out of the vicious circle of educational, social, political and cultural reproduction in which we have been trapped. Current educational theories place a great deal of emphasis upon a change to Engaged Learning. This has come to mean many things - student engagement in the “outside” community through “service learning” that seeks to increase the student’s engagement with the course material. But engaged learning will no by itself bring about social or cultural transformation.

For this to happen, students and their curriculum and pedagogy must engage directly with the issues of power and oppression that maintain the status quo, and for this a new form of transformative pedagogy is essential. Here, I present some preliminary suggestions about what such a pedagogy might look like. These characteristics are not purely theoretical. They have been tried and tested with great success in real situations and real students engaging with real communities in their struggle for equity and justice.