Maori try to get baby back from Pakeha

[super_cardigan]

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A Maori toddler will grow up in a Pakeha family despite the objections of her biological father, who wants his daughter brought up in her own culture.

A judge ruled on the girl's future this week, after a year and a half of legal wrangling.

Comments

[phaetonschariot]

Taonga is a really complex thing to explain, as well, I'm not sure how to fully get the meaning across, but I'd describe it more as something that's sacred. School uniform here you're not supposed to wear obvious jewelry but uniform codes make specific exception for "taonga" which in that situation means usually a pounamu (greenstone) pendant or something similar - the idea is that, it being taonga, the school rules are not at a high enough level to forbid it.

On the actual article, I think some of the idea that a pakeha couple can raise a Maori child lies in the fact that we cling very hard to the idea that we're not racist. Because we never had slavery or anything quite so obviously bad as the stolen generation, people pretend that everything was basically hunky dory because in comparison the ways we mistreated Maori were more subtle. The custody decision itself will be partly because they've had her for two years, but that specific statement ties in to what I've been looking at in news and social debates over the last year or two

[opheliastorn]

Oh, yeah. New Zealand, totally best at ensuring the equality and well-being of our indigenous people! Hah. The only reason I haven't seen the caves the Parihaka protestors were kept in down here in Dunedin is because I haven't been past them since I got my glasses.

Hum. I don't know much about the practise in specifics, but isn't there a Maori tradition of giving children to close friends/relations who want children but do not have them, for whatever reason? The Pakeha angle complicates this, but I wonder if it had anything to do with, at least, the birth mother's initial willingness to adopt out her baby. Then of course, the whole thing's muddied more by the intersections of two customs of adoption and the expectations attached to each ... ugh, this just sounds so horrible for everyone involved. My heart is with the wee bub.

[phaetonschariot]

I believe typically it's also complicated by the different social structures of Maori and pakeha society where Maori didn't have as isolated family units until Europeans flooded into the country. So even though a child was being raised by a different couple, there would still be quite a lot of contact. I'm not sure exactly how much that's eroded over time or exactly what the birth parents' expectations were but yeah, I can see how there could be two different expectations there if the arrangement was understood to be different things by the different people involved.

[tyranno6]

Yeah, it's called "whangai" - but it really doesn't work with pakeha at all. Whangai is the practise of giving your child to another whanau/hapu to cement ties between the groups of people. Maori rights under tikanga extinguish if you don't have a whakapapa connection to the land, so whangai is one way of maintaining those connections.

We talked about this a lot in my Maori jurisprudence class, though, and one of the main criticisms is that the Family Court and the adoption system focuses on the rights of the child. Whangai is more focused around maintaining ties between families and doesn't have really much to do with concerns about the child's rights. As a consequence, you can't really legitimately draw analogies between the adoption system and whangai.

[phaetonschariot]

Yeah - from what I understand, it would be an act that unites both entire families, rather than just adoptive parents and child, yes? And with pakeha adoptions if you adopt a child you're not making the biological parents or siblings part of your family and vice versa. Rather poor analogy but the first thing that popped into my head was the difference between selling a car and pooling. :P

And of course in that culture I'd almost argue that it doesn't matter if the focus is on the rights of the child, because due to the family/social structure it would be neutral or good for the child almost all of the time anyway, if it's done in the spirit that's intended. It's not giving away a child because you can't or don't wish to care for zir, it's more like a marriage in making that connection which is supposed to be a strong, happy thing.