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

[entelodont]

Please change the name of the source link from "source" to the actual name of the source.

[super_cardigan]

whoops, sorry, fixed?

[entelodont]

Yep, that's good!

[pandaseal]

I'm not from NZ, but this case seems to just exist due to the kyriarchy as many contested adoptions do.

[tatjna]

I think you're right about the inherent racism in the foster and adoption system - I haven't looked into it but taking a wild stab in the dark about who is eligible to adopt and gets approval, I'd say that'd be a pretty pale, middle-class group of people. Never mind the assumptions about what makes a family.

However, I also know NZ's family court mostly finds in favour of shared custody in disputes, and that they are reluctant to move children from situations where they are settled into unfamiliar ones. So while I think privilege is inherent in the system, I'm not sure that's the main reasons why this particular case panned out the way it did.

I doubt a pakeha family could bring up a child in Maori cultural style (plz forgive clunky wording). They could, however, in cooperation with others who care about the child, provide many opportunities for the kid to know her culture and spend time immersed in it - which is probably about the best a pakeha family could offer in that respect.

[super_cardigan]

yeah, i think you might be right about the outcome of this specific case stemming from a lack of desire to uproot a child from a stable situation. idk, i guess i just had a kneejerk reaction to to the implications of the particulars of the case. thank you for your input!

[tatjna]

Nah, not knee-jerk at all. The point you brought up about the systemic racism inherent in the child welfare system is really important here, because of our abysmal record. I just finished writing an essay about the way the state used law to engineer the shape of families in New Zealand (and still does, to a lesser extent), and it went a little into adoption law and the development of 'closed' adoptions, how that came about, etc. Unfortunately I couldn't do any more than touch on Maori issues around adoption (mostly because there's a Masters thesis right there and I only had 2000 words, but it made me want to look further into it.

And because we're a teeny-tiny country nobody gives a shit about, and we have a Treaty so everyone goes "Oh they're fine!" and ignores us, it always makes me happy to see people raising issues that affect us on the world stage.

[phaetonschariot]

CAN I READ IT :o

[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.