Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author. i Ringleaders in Mischief: A study of one Māori whānau in New Zealand child welfare case records, 1926 - 1948 A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science (Psychology) at School of Psychology Massey University, Manawatū Aotearoa New Zealand Summar Austin-Collins 2024 ii Abstract The causes of Māori over-representation in state care have been connected to enduring symbolic and structural violence and can be linked to processes of colonisation. Recent survivor testimony has highlighted the need to critically examine the way welfare service providers understand and engage with service users. However, limited opportunities exist to examine the historical roots and impacts of violence on Māori in their engagement with the foundational child welfare agencies of the settler society. This research seeks to address this gap, by documenting an exemplar of the relationship between four Māori siblings - who were rendered wards of the state - and the Child Welfare Branch of the Education Department between the years 1926 to 1948. The inquiry applies a narrative analytical framework to examine the way power was expressed and contested within the case file records of these siblings. The analysis identified several broad themes in the representation of power. These related to the construction of the state’s actions as heroic, and the behaviours and identities of the Cole whānau as threatening. The goal of state intervention was assimilation, and success was measured against a set of assumptions of good citizenship, which limited the siblings’ capacity to thrive. The research theorises that stigmatising narratives take on the guise of truth, and these create the context for the state’s engagement with whānau. Creating a more empowering social context requires targeting the narrative social field as well as the legitimating political structures. Limitations of the research are discussed, and recommendations made that link historical antecedents to the current welfare environment. iii Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge that my extended whānau assisted this product in numerous ways. Firstly, thank you to Lester Jeffs for facilitating our access to the record to begin with, and to Malcolm Mulholland for facilitating our return to Papawai. Secondly, thank you to everyone whose stories provided context for some of the stories in the file, and shared their memories of my grandmother and her siblings. A special thanks is reserved for my mother, Heather Austin, who put up with my many calls for information, advice and moral support. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my supervisors, Darrin Hodgetts and Pita King, whose support and critique pushed me to go further, think more deeply and read more widely. Their support of this project was invaluable. I am also thankful for the support of Te Rau Puawai, a Massey University initiative to support the development of the Māori mental health workforce. Te Rau Puawai was an invaluable source of support and connection. Additionally, the Teach NZ study award afforded me the opportunity to dedicate my time to this project. Thank you to my friends who lent moral and practical support, particularly Daria Williamson, whose proof-reading and feedback were greatly appreciated. Last, but certainly not least, I wish to thank my husband, Scotty Collins, whose unfailing support, both emotional and practical, made this all possible. For the many adventures with our daughter while I worked, for the times you believed when I did not, and for making sure I was well-caffeinated, thank you. This thesis is dedicated to our daughter Mackenzie, the teller of stories. iv Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents .................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures .......................................................................................................................... vi List of Appendices .................................................................................................................. vii Glossary ................................................................................................................................ viii Chapter 1: Telling our Stories ................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Locating Myself ............................................................................................................... 2 1.2 Narrative and Storytelling ................................................................................................ 4 1.3 A key concept for the present study: Symbolic Violence ................................................ 6 1.4 Inquiry Aims .................................................................................................................. 11 Chapter 2 : Historical Context.............................................................................................. 13 2.1 Colonisation and its Impact ........................................................................................... 13 2.1.1 Colonial imposition on whānau .............................................................................. 19 2.1.2 Othering of Māori ................................................................................................... 24 2.2 Child Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century .............................................................. 27 2.2.1 Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care ................................................. 33 2.3 The Context for this Thesis ............................................................................................ 36 2.4 Chapter Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 41 Chapter 3 : Methodology....................................................................................................... 43 3.1 Kaupapa Māori Theory .................................................................................................. 43 3.2 Narrative Inquiry ............................................................................................................ 45 3.3 Māori Contributions to Narrative Inquiry ...................................................................... 47 3.4 Case-Based Research ..................................................................................................... 48 3.5 Procedure ....................................................................................................................... 48 Chapter 4 : Analysis: An Autobiography of Symbolic Power ........................................... 54 4.1 Language and Form ....................................................................................................... 56 4.2 Synopsis ......................................................................................................................... 58 4.3 Origin Stories ................................................................................................................. 61 4.3.1 Committal to the state ............................................................................................. 62 4.3.2 The Moral Binary .................................................................................................... 64 4.3.3 Constructing the Other ............................................................................................ 65 4.3.4 Constructing the Heroic State ................................................................................. 68 4.4 Thinking of the Children ................................................................................................ 70 v 4.4.1 Constructing the Problem Child.............................................................................. 71 4.4.2 Constructing the Useful Citizen .............................................................................. 80 Chapter 5 Respectability or Resistance ............................................................................... 86 5.1 A Good Home ................................................................................................................ 86 5.1.1 The Home Inspection: A Game of Punishment and Reward .................................. 88 5.1.2 A Good Home is a Pākehā Home ........................................................................... 89 5.1.3 The Paternal Role in the Home ............................................................................... 94 5.2 Negotiated Futures ......................................................................................................... 98 5.2.1 A Staid Girl and a Good Worker .......................................................................... 100 5.2.2 A Typical Native ................................................................................................... 105 5.3 Chapter Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 112 Chapter 6 Discussion ........................................................................................................... 115 6.1 Protagonists and Antagonists ....................................................................................... 117 6.2 Bad Eggs ...................................................................................................................... 122 6.3 The Bootstraps of Success ........................................................................................... 124 6.4 Conclusions and Recommendations ............................................................................ 127 Chapter 7: Epilogue ............................................................................................................. 130 Reference List ....................................................................................................................... 133 Appendix: Simplified Cole Family Tree ............................................................................ 142 vi List of Figures Figure 1: Margaret Jeffs (nee Cole), pictured at age 18. ........................................................... 1 Figure 2: Margaret Jeff’s autobiographical writing next to the Cole whānau record. ............... 5 Figure 3: Note in the file: “1&2 at St Joseph’s Orphanage. 3&4 with mother Puiaki Cole. Puiaki Cole – Good. Herbert Cole – Bad.” .............................................................................. 66 Figure 4: An example of an annual report dated November 1938 .......................................... 83 Figure 5: Margaret Cole (left) pictured with friends, Te Kowhai, circa. 1937. ..................... 101 Figure 6: The Cole siblings at a family function in the 1980s. Pictured from left: Kuia, Stanley, Margaret, Francis and Francis` wife Aileen. ........................................................... 132 vii List of Appendices Appendix: Simplified Cole Family Tree…………………………………………………142 viii Glossary Kauhanganui – alternative spelling of Te Kauwhanganui, the Māori parliament for many of the iwi associated with the Tainui waka. Kotahitanga – unity and togetherness. Kotahitanga also used to refer to a nineteenth century self- government movement that was strong in the Wairarapa and held parliamentary assemblies at Papawai marae. Manaakitanga – hospitality, kindness, generosity, and the process of showing hospitality. Mana Motuhake – self-determination, autonomy, independence mokopuna – grandchild, grandchildren Papawai – marae near Greytown, Wairarapa Pūrākau – the transmission of ideas through storytelling, and a Māori narrative research practice Rangatira – a person of high rank, nobility or well-esteemed Tangata Whenua – literally, people of the land, the local people, indigenous to the land Taonga – prized treasure, includes physical possessions and abstract treasures like language. taonga tuku iho – a treasure passed down through generations. te ao Māori – the Māori world te reo Māori – the Māori language Tino Rangatiratanga – sovereignty, self-determination Tīpuna – ancestors, grandparents Hapū – a collection of whānau joined by common ancestry. Primary political unit in Māori society Iwi – an affiliation of hapū, joined through common ancestry and shared territory. ix Whakapapa – genealogy, lineage, descent, central to Māori identities Whāngai – literally, to nourish and bring up. Traditional Māori fostering practice. Whānau – extended family group and primary economic unit of Māori society 1 Chapter 1: Telling our Stories Many times I have related to my family stories of my life and everytime [sic.] they have advised me to write it down, so I have decided to do so, to the best of my ability, word for word as my memory will allow, not only for their benefit, but for future generations as well... My memory returns to those first few years while living with my parents, first at Papawai, then at Mangaroa and although we had lived in several towns (according to our birth records) during those six years, it is only the last couple of years of my life with my parents that I remember everything, any incidents that took place at that time. Margaret Jeffs - (personal communication, December 16, 1997). On Saturday, February 27, 1926, Hokotoki, Margaret, Francis, and Kuia Cole were committed to the guardianship of the state in Wellington, New Zealand. The details of their Figure 1: Margaret Jeffs (nee Cole), pictured at age 18. 2 committal are recounted in the spare prose of a government memorandum. It hints at a history of what would come to be called intimate partner violence, but which was at the time prosaically referred to as ill-treatment. The children had been living with their mother, Puiaki Cole (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa), at Papawai Marae, when her estranged husband Herbert forced his way into the home. Puiaki, then pregnant with her sixth child recounted that he remained there, against her wishes, for three days. Her relatives told her she needed to do something to keep her children safe, so she left Papawai, placing her two eldest in St Joseph’s Orphanage, and taking her younger children with her to Wellington. Still, she feared her husband would track her down. It was not the first time he had done such a thing. So, on February 11, 1926, she sought the assistance of Child Welfare, and all four children were committed to the care of the state. These facts are a matter of record, although my retelling of the narrative represents my own interests rather than those which were of concern to the state. The Cole family welfare record came to me via my maternal grandmother, Margaret, who was six years old at the time of their committal to state care. Documenting the years between 1926 to 1948, it provides an insight into the priorities of the state during a period of increasing public interest in the personal lives of Māori whānau (Dalley & Tennant, 2004). 1.1 Locating Myself I began this section with a narrative fragment to illustrate the power and purpose of narrative storying. It is a section of my maternal grandmother’s autobiographical writing. The excerpt is confronting in its incompleteness. It is the first and last paragraph of a page-long account of her early childhood. She had written and re-written this account repeatedly, suggesting her struggle to articulate a narrative. She writes that her family “have advised” or “insisted” that she write her story down. Her family may have sought an heirloom story, a taonga tuku iho, but such legacies require emotional labour (Hochschild, 2012). Some stories are too difficult to tell (Riessman, 1993). Her story is trapped in a kind of nostalgic narrative 3 space, taking place before her committal to state care and the ensuing trauma. My grandmother’s writing is located temporally, contextualised historically, and written for her family. It is characterised by fragmentation and narrative absence, and it is from this point that my inquiry begins. As a researcher and grand-daughter of one of the subjects of the case records, I am positioned as both an insider and outsider to the research (Seed-Pihama, 2019). This means that my interpretation of the stories contained in the file are informed by inside knowledge gleaned from my whānau membership, as well as the academic and literary traditions taken from my background in psychology and education. As I am positioned in relation to my grandmother, my knowledge of her comes through family stories and my own memories. During my childhood, my grandmother presided over family gatherings from her armchair, a keeper of idiom and narrative, capable of cutting barbs mumbled to herself, perhaps more audibly than intended, or a laughing response to a joke with the exclamation, “oh, my hat!” My memory fixes her as permanently aged, baring little resemblance to the child who had been committed to state care as a six-year-old, who before that had been born on Papawai marae, a mokopuna of Rangatira Hoani Rangi-taka-i- waho. I had little understanding of the way governmental systems of care and protection scarred her childhood and impacted her life. This allowed me to read the narratives in the case files with a degree of distance, if not entirely as an outsider. The case files did not come into my possession until after my grandmother passed away in 2007. Her health had been deteriorating since her first stroke in 1998 had left her partially paralysed. It was also after her passing that her writing, referenced in the opening lines of this thesis, was re-discovered. My recollection of this time is that I was struck by the difference between the two. The case files were substantial; a non-digitised record comprised of 900-odd pages of single-sided copy. In comparison, my grandmother’s story was handwritten, scrawled over foolscap paper, written, and re-written five times. The case files are not just weighty in the literal sense. They 4 represent the symbolic spaces within which the state was able to name and define my tīpuna and construct a single narrative of their engagement with welfare services. As I read the case files for the first time, I was struck by the way ideologies of Māori inferiority and class consciousness were given voice and the ramifications these had for my grandmother and her siblings. My whānau were evaluated against middle-class, predominantly Pākehā standards of propriety, and the narrative formed around them determined the state’s response. The stories contained in the file seemed at once unique and universal, and it occurred to me that this case file could provide some insight into the processes and impacts of colonisation on individual lives. This thesis emerged from a desire to challenge dominant narratives, both in terms of the specific story of my tīpuna, and more generally, the shared community narratives that continue to harm Māori, and the welfare-involved. My aims in carrying out this inquiry are twofold. First, I hope to better understand the way the case files represent a site of violence, through the construction and reproduction of harmful narratives, which had material and long-lasting effects on our whānau. Secondly, it is to provide an indepth examination of the simultaneously unique and recognisable patterns of power reflected in the file, in order to suggest empowering alternatives in contempoary social welfare practice. 1.2 Narrative and Storytelling Central to this research is the question of whose story is told, by whom and for what purpose. If, as Rappaport maintains, “the right to tell one’s own story is an index of power and of psychological empowerment” (2000, p. 7) the fragment at the front of this thesis represents the relative powerlessness of my maternal grandmother’s position, in comparison to the recorded stories written and preserved by the state. This inquiry is particularly interested in the state’s employment of narrative as an ordering structure that allows people to derive meaning from and/or impose meanings on events and lives (Crossley, 2000). Welfare case files explored in this thesis applied narrative structures to their subjects. As I document 5 below, these draw on dominant colonial meanings and story structures which reproduced inequitable social relations between Māori and the state. As Riessman (1993) suggests, the narratives gain political currency through the reproduction of existing societal power dynamics. The composers of the case files drew on dominant narrative tropes, such as archetypes of the deserving and undeserving poor, to produce a case file which reinforced the privileged societal position of affluent Pākehā and portrayed the working classes and Māori as inferior. These stereotypes and tropes were historically used to justify the expanded reach of the state (Armitage, 1995; Walker, 2004). Their cultural dominance limited the impact of alternative representations of identities. The size of the Cole case file dwarves that of my grandmother’s attempt to tell her own story. Figure 2 shows the two sets of documents. The sheer volume of the case file was made possible due to the state’s ability to devote substantial resources to narrative construction and organisational record-keeping. However, the state’s actions also comprised a significant trauma that limited my grandmother’s ability to revisit her life’s narrative. Colonisation is multi-modal, and committal to the state, with the purpose of assimilation, is a colonising action that limits the potential for people to tell their own stories. These processes are evident in Rappaport’s (2000) seminal work on tales of terror and tales of joy, describing the relationship between individual life-stories and the culture and context in which they are produced. He suggests that some shared cultural narratives constitute “tales of terror” as negative stereotypes may become appropriated by Figure 2: Margaret Jeff’s autobiographical writing next to the Cole whānau record. 6 individual members of stigmatised groups when they tell their own life-stories. For individuals like my grandmother, who was Māori, female, and the child of poor parents, the wider cultural narratives about the groups to which she belonged were often negative (Johnston & Pihama, 1995; Labrum, 2004a; Mikaere, 1994; Ware et al., 2017). Rappaport (2000) describes the way members of such communities resist tales of terror, by drawing on shared resources to construct alternatives, which he refers to as “tales of joy.” Ahuriri- Driscoll (2024) argues that self-stories of Māori identities have, as a product of colonisation, taken on the dominant constructions offered by stories of Māori subordination. The movement to turn these stories into tales of joy has been a focus of Māori academics and storytellers, and can be construed as a means through which Māori researchers and activists creates space for Māori knowledge-creation (Lee-Morgan, 2017; Pihama, Campbell, et al., 2019; Seed-Pihama, 2019). 1.3 A key concept for the present study: Symbolic Violence The notion of symbolic violence was first conceptualised by Bourdieu (1991), who wrote that the elite exert control over the lower classes through their ability to name and describe the world in such a way as to favour the members of ruling groups Bourdieu observed that the state, through its institutional practices, often normalises the beliefs and values of the ruling group, so that they become widely accepted as truth. Central to the notion of symbolic violence is the participation of members of marginal groups in their own subjugation through the internalisation of harmful narratives. The dominated often take on the discourses that are supplied to them by dominanting groups (Thomas et al., 2020). Dominant stories become hegemonic when they are widely accepted, even by those groups for whom acceptance of the story necessarily entails their continued subjugation. Symbolic violence is difficult to resist. According to Bourdieu, once the ideological positions of the dominant group become widely accepted, they take on the guise of truth, which renders them 7 invisible and less amenable to challenge (Bourdieu, 1991). When individuals operate out of these “common sense” understandings of a given historical epoch, they act and react to social situations in ways that maintain power relations (Kramsch, 2020). Unlike other forms of colonial power that are direct and decipherable, violence that takes place in the symbolic sphere is often invisible and therefore endures. Once harmful narratives become embedded, then they may be wielded, often inadvertently, through everyday interactions between people in settings such as welfare organisations. The concept of symbolic violence has been drawn on to help understand the relationship between these harmful cultural narratives and the suffering experienced by economically deprived and indigenous communities (Barnett et al., 2007; McGhee, 2017; Thomas et al., 2020). For instance, narratives of deficit texture welfare policy and practice, and the assumption that poverty indicatess a lack of personal responsiblity contributes to measures which restrict access to financial support (Thomas et al., 2020). Furthermore, evidence suggests that child protection practices are often shaped by motherhood ideals of self-sacrafice, and narratives of “putting children first”, which indavertently marginalise welfare-involved mothers (McGhee, 2017). Historically, colonisation introduced narratives to Aotearoa New Zealand, which through their increasing dominance in social discourse, had the effect of stigmatising certain groups or people in society (Johnston & Pihama, 1995). These narratives took on a guise of “truth” in public perception, they were supported by, and lent legitimacy to government policy. Accordingly, the narrative resources made available within particular contexts constrain and allow a certain set of responses (Rappaport, 2000). The Cole siblings, as children of a precariously employed Pākehā labourer and Māori mother, were particularly vulnerable to negative identity constructions based on harmful stereotypes, which were 8 mediated through the policy and practices of the state. Two dominant narratives were that of deserving and undeserving poor and the inferiority of the Māori race. Colonial understandings of the deserving and undeserving poor were rooted in class consciousness and ideologies of personal responsibility associated with the British Poor Laws (Hodgetts, 2017). The Poor Laws obligated parishes to provide for the disadvantaged living within their borders, and evolved systems to determine who was considered deserving of assistance (Seabrook, 2013). The deserving poor included the eldery, the sick, and children, while the undeserving poor were described as beggars and criminals. The Poor Laws evolved to become a national system of relief, which was concerned with the provision of aid to the infirm, and which compelled the able-bodied into labour through various means. The underserving poor were described by one clergyman, writing in 1668 as work-shy “rats” and “servants of vice” who “are not the poor, but the worst robbers of the poor” (Seabrook, 2013, pp. 53-54). By this argument the criminal poor were just as responsible for the impoverishment of the deserving poor as the wealthy landowners, as they unjustly appropriated the resources that should be used to support the elderly and infirm. The belief in the necessity of protecting resources from fraudulent claims of need contributed to systems of scrutiny and surveillance, which remain a feature of many modern welfare systems (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2017). Intensive urbanisation following the industrial revolution only increased anxieties among the more affluent members of society, as the population increased along with the perceived threat posed by the so-called dangerous classes. The debate about the appropriate response to urban poverty largely excluded people who were personally affected by it. Some groups advocated for a compassionate response to poverty, while others argued for punative actions to control the growing underclass. Solutions offered by the affluent ruling classes, however well-intended, were often limited in scope. Changes to labour and 9 living conditions which arguably had a greater impact on lives were more often than not the result of the organised resistance of members of the working class (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2017). Relatedly, dominant narratives of New Zealand’s history posited that settler society was broadly egalitarian, affording every settler the opportunity to escape the limitations of the British class system (Nolan, 2007). Pākehā settlers access to land was facilitated by the colonial government’s land distribution schemes. This facilitated cultural narratives of opportunity and fairness that became part of the national character of settler society (Thomson, 1998). Settlers brought with them some of the principles of the Poor Laws, and reified the responsbilities of family members, rather than local or national government, as caretakers of the poor. The story of self-responsiblity stigmatised impoverishment by associating it with poor choices (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2017). The ideal citizen was an economically autonomous individual who would not constitute a burden to other citizens. The ensuing moral binary positioned some people as more deserving of charity than others. These individuals may have been less responsible for their impoverishment, perhaps as wives or children, unable to care for themselves in a social order dominated by husbands and fathers (Beaglehole, 1993). These ideologies drove cultural narratives of the pauper and scrounger. Within the wider cultural story of the undeserving poor, there emerged a characterisation of the impoverished as a figure of disgust, a pauper entrenched in destitution, or a scrounging member of the underclass who sought to improve their social position through the misappropriation of state’s funds (Jensen & Tyler, 2015; Tyler, 2013). Similarly, dualistic processes of symbolic power were also evident in the positioning of Māori as inferrior to Pākehā. Interactions between Māori and Pākehā in Aotearoa’s colonising environment were contextualised by constructions of racial heirarchies which posited that the European settler was naturally superior to other groups (Reid et al., 2017). Racialised ideologies were encoded in religious, scientific and political debates, where tropes 10 of Māori inferiority were used to convey the naturalness of colonisation by the superior Pākehā settler (Walker, 2004). In naming the colonised world, the settlers invoked dual constructions of savage and civilised, immoral and moral, heathen and Christian, which located Māori as the “other” in relation to the settler (Johnston & Pihama, 1995). The repeated, pervasive derogatory conceptualisation of Māori as colonised subjects had a profound impact on Māori identities, through the acceptance of the colonial narrative and internalisation of the self as flawed and deficient (Ahuriri-Driscoll, 2024). As the settler population increased, the construction of Pākehā racial superiority permeated all aspects of New Zealand society (Johnson & Pihama, 1994). Colonial philosophies, fuelled by both Biblical constructs of manifest destiny and scientific-evolutionary ideologies provided a backdrop to discourses of the technological, racial and religious superiority of settlers (Walker, 2004). These dominant stories were perpetuated through state structures, embedded, and normalised in policies and processes of state departments. Galtung theorised that structural violence, whereby societal structures limit and prevent certain groups from reaching their potential, and enable others to thrive, is embedded in state systems (Saleem et al., 2021). Historical evidence of practices which consituted symbolic and structural violence will be outlined in the following section. However, it is worth noting that the enduring impact of symbolic and structural violence is evidenced in numerous markers of inequality between Māori and Pākehā (Bishop, 1998; Cram, 2011; Dickson, 2006; Durie, 2001; Groot, 2017). In Aotearoa, affluent Pākehā men were, and remain, more likely to hold positions of authority in institutional settings, are also more likely to benefit from structural inequities as their upbringing equipped them with the necessary cultural and linguistic capital to navigate and perpetuate systems of power. In constrast, working class Pākehā, Māori and women were, and remain, more likely to struggle for a foothold in economic and political systems 11 (Cochrane, 2017; Smith, 1992). These inequities are mutually reinforced within symbolic, structural and interpersonal spheres. Symbolically, inequalities are supported by the widespread continued association between te ao Māori and defecit. Symbols associated with Māori, such as Māori place names or the use of te reo Māori in public spaces has brought the debate into the public sphere (Bidois, 2023). Structurally, inequitable access to decent work, healthcare, educational opportunities, and the continued over-representation of Māori as members of the precariat or lower socio-economic spheres of society indicate that the dominant frameworks that structure public-private relations continue to cause harm (Groot, 2017). In spite of this power imbalance, Māori resistance to hegemonic power is evident in the revitalisation of Māori language, culture, counter narratives, and continued attempts to create space for Māori in fields of healthcare, education and welfare reform (Hoskins & Jones, 2017). 1.4 Inquiry Aims This inquiry began with a story of personal significance, and a search for identity. It is reflected in the question, “how was it that the mokopuna of the Rangatira Hoani Rangi-taka-i- waho of Papawai … could within the space of a generation become estranged from their turangawaewae?” (Mulholland, 2021, p. 120). This question positions my whānau’s experiences within the context of colonisation. The aims of the inquiry therefore focus on a single significant case as a means of understanding wider historical, social, and political forces. Case-based research has precedent in psychological research as it provides insight into “social relationships, processes, and categories that are simultaneously recognisable/typical and unique” (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2012, p. 382). The purpose of focusing my inquiry on an exemplar of the state’s engagement with a working-class Māori whānau, and against the backdrop of early twentieth century welfare reforms, is to shed light on the historical antecedents of current welfare practices. To that end, I consider how power was expressed 12 and contested within the case file, by applying a narrative analytic framework to a selection of products within the welfare records. These will be examined as examples of the way power dynamics were maintained within the welfare relationship, and the impact this had on the Cole whānau. 13 Chapter 2 : Historical Context This introductory chapter provides background to the case file. I begin with a description of the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, and the impact of settlement on Māori communities. Here I outline how the impact of dispossession and population decline in the nineteenth century reinforced narratives of Māori as a dying race. I also describe forms of collective resistance that emerged during this period as a challenge to settler domination. I then turn to the colonial imposition on the family sphere, where I contrast Māori childrearing practices and whānau support with those of the settler state that displaced it. The move towards nuclear family arrangements had a particular impact on women and children, isolating mothers from the extended families that had traditionally provided support. The chapter then proceeds with a discussion of the nascent Child Welfare Branch and its role in expanding the reach of the settler state into the homes of Māori whānau. It will describe the actions of state welfare officers in the early twentieth century, and the ways in which existing narratives of poverty and class became co-opted within a narrative of professional efficiency. I will conclude with a discussion of the negative impacts of state care on children and families, which draws on the findings of the recent Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State Care, to outline what we now recognise as harmful practices. 2.1 Colonisation and its Impact To understand the complexities and inter-generational impacts of the Cole whānau’s engagement with the state, it is important to locate the file historically, within the context of important social and political shifts facing Māori in the early twentieth century. This is because the file I am working from was not produced in a vacuum. Rather, it exemplifies many cases of state engagement with Māori that took place because of colonisation (Abuse in Care Research Team, 2020; Savage et al., 2021) 14 Historians have argued that the settlement of Aotearoa New Zealand by British colonisers was a traumatic and inherently violent process (Armitage, 1995; Binney et al., 1993; Walker, 2004). Colonisation entails the permanent settlement of territory by a group with the explicit aim of dominating resources and installing a regime of control (Veracini, 2010). Nineteenth century imperialism was driven by powerful racial ideologies, positioning the white race as superior to peoples of colour (Johnson & Pihama, 1994). The underlying, taken-for-granted assumptions of British superiority frequently entailed a commitment to bringing outsiders under colonial control, through violence both physical and symbolic (Armitage, 1995). In all fields of contact, coloniser aims of expansion were achieved via the denigration and replacement of indigenous social structures with settler institutions (Mikaere, 1994; Reid et al., 2017; Wolfe, 2006). In Aotearoa, the destructive expansion of the settler state in the nineteenth century saw the near destruction of many Māori communities through depopulation, land alienation and disenfranchisement (Walker, 2004). Of particular relevance to this research project was the displacement and denigration of traditional Māori systems that supported the care of children, in favour of dominant Western nuclear families. Māori collectivism, based on complex systems of iwi, hapū and whānau, was construed as antithetical to the colonial emphasis on individualism (Reid et al., 2017). The extended whānau, as with other roles in Māori society, would become reconstituted as self-reliant family units, capable of contributing to the economy of the state (Smith, 1992). One of the earliest impacts of colonisation on Māori was the rapid population decline that saw Māori become minorities in their homelands (Kukutai, 2011). In the years following contact with Pākehā, as the Māori population declined steeply, many in the Pākehā scientific community of the time began to voice concerns that Māori were a dying race (Dow, 1999). Introduced diseases, alcohol and muskets all contributed to the declining numbers and reduced life expectancy of Māori in the years following first contact (Binney, 1990a). 15 Nineteenth century popular scientific discourse served as validation of racist ideologies by attributing population decline to inherent, inferior tendencies of the Māori race (Dow, 1999). Although the rhetoric characterised Māori population decline as inevitable, most legislators believed that they had a moral obligation to “smooth down the dying pillow” (Stenhouse, 2022, p. 135). Within this narrative, Māori were framed as victims, and their lowly position in society as natural. The key to their recovery, it was proposed, was assimilation and the reinvention of Māori as brown-skinned European (Riddell, 2000). Even the most sympathetic framing portrayed Māori as powerless to enact their own recovery, and positioned the state as a paternalistic saviour (Walker, 2004). The Māori population, estimated to be around 100,000 in 1769, declined to an estimated low of 45,000 by 1901, before beginning a slow recovery (Binney et al., 1993; Dow, 1999; Riddell, 2000). Meanwhile, the settler population grew substantially, outnumbering Māori by the turn of the twentieth century. Settlers’ desire for land fuelled the redistribution of resources that resulted in iwi and hapū becoming alienated from their economic foundations, leaving hapū with fewer resources to support recovery. As the Māori population continued its decline, it was sometimes argued by Pākehā legislators that the half-caste Māori promised racial improvement (Riddell, 2000; Salesa, 2022). In common usage, the term “half-caste” was applied to almost anyone with mixed blood (Donne, 1927; Salesa, 2022). Context and stereotyping, rather than strict blood quantum, mediated the general understanding of Māori identities. In 1926, when the Cole siblings were made wards of the state, they were described in a memorandum from Superintendent John Beck as “half-caste Māoris [sic.]” (Child Welfare Branch, 1926-1948, p. 298). While the Child Welfare Branch did not typically keep records of the number of Māori and non-Māori in their care, references within the case files indicate that race-labelling could be used as short-hand to describe any number of ills. 16 That same year, the term “half-caste” was added as a census category for the first time, which introduced more precise definitions than were applied in common parlance. The increasing numbers of people identified as half-caste Māori also lent credence to the popular theory that Māori would eventually be absorbed within the Pākehā racialized population (Salesa, 2022). Donne, writing in 1927, commented that the Māori transition from “savage” to “Christian civilization” demonstrated the people’s intelligence and strong moral fibre (Donne, 1927). As Māori characteristics were widely denigrated, those who were of mixed parentage were sometimes seen as superior to their full-blooded Māori peers, as long as they live and behaved as Pākehā (Salesa, 2022). The widespread acceptance of such positions is evident in the Cole whānau file, as notions of racial inheritance were drawn on as explanatory frameworks for unwanted behaviours. Mass settlement required a steady provision of land, and Māori lands were redistributed to Pākehā ownership through forced confiscations, deceptive and coercive land sales and finally through legislative means (Cram, 2011). Māori resistance to land sales was met with violence on the part of the colonial government, who, under Governor George Grey, attempted to extend Crown control through a series of unjust wars in the Taranaki, Waikato and Bay of Plenty regions (Walker, 2004). Following the Land Wars, power over land sales was further consolidated with the introduction of the Native Land Courts, which served to bring Māori within the sphere of the colonial judicial system (Reid et al., 2017). The legislation brought Māori land titles under Crown control, which compromised the collective ownership of hapū and iwi (Binney, 1990b). The erosion of Māori collective resources through confiscations and acquisitions was intentional and justified through narratives of settler superiority. Attorney-General Henry Sewell commented in 1865 that the Land Court was intended to “destroy... the principle of communism which ran through the whole of their institutions... and which stood as a barrier 17 in the way of all attempts to amalgamate the Native race into our own social and political system” (cited inTaonui, 2012, p. 3). Massive land loss followed the introduction of the Act in 1865, and by 1910, just over 10% of Māori land remained in Māori hands (Cram, 2011). For Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa, these systematic policies had the cumulative effect of leaving the iwi “practically landless” by 1900 (New Zealand Government, 2022). The limited access to resources made some Māori communities increasingly reliant on Western systems to support their needs. This dismantling of social and economic structures was a deliberate and pervasive colonial action, that had a profound effect on communities’ ability to support their people (Walker, 2004). For Māori, the loss of whenua meant considerably more than the loss of economic stability. The connection with land represented a connection to whakapapa, which, when disrupted, served to erode the wellbeing of Māori for generations to come (Durie, 1997; Harris & Tipene, 2006; Jahnke, 1997). In the years following the Land Wars, a series of legal measures secured Pākehā domination and eroded Māori rights. The war provided the settler government with the opportunity to introduce legislation to acquire land, supposedly as retribution for rebellion against the Crown, although land was also taken from iwi who had remained loyal (Walker, 2004). Among these laws was the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863, which redefined large- scale land confiscations of Māori land as “settlement”, and in doing so created a new way of understanding colonial expansion (Jackson, 2004). Jackson (2004) argued that this use of such legal frameworks legitimated land theft and lent credence to the myth of Aotearoa New Zealand’s favourable race relations. Relatedly, to bolster the image of national unity, Māori representatives were invited into the settler parliament. The passage of the Māori Representation Act 1867 was seen as a pragmatic means of nullifying the power of Māori unity movements (Binney, 1990a; 18 Warbrick, 2019). This granted Māori men voting rights and introduced four Māori seats to parliament, which, as Walker (2004) has highlighted, were considerably fewer than the proportional entitlement of 20 seats. Māori representation would serve to support the dominant myth of New Zealand’s favourable race relations, and obscure the reality that the Māori representatives’ influence was limited by their minority status in Parliament (Walker, 2004). Māori resistance to the forces of colonisation took various forms. Māori recognised that unity would be vital to asserting autonomy, and from the 1850s, paths were forged to bring iwi together to assert Māori political rights (Binney et al., 2015). These movements infused British models of leadership with Māori understandings of tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) and mana motuhake (self-determination). The leaders of these movements did not see them as incompatible with Pākehā systems of governance, believing that they would work together. Wiremu Tamihana notably illustrated the concept of dual governance in relation to the Kīngitanga by thrusting two sticks into the ground, one to represent the governor and the other the Māori King, and across them, the ridgepole of law. He drew a circle around the sticks to represent the Queen, enclosing them all (Binney et al., 2015). By the 1890s, iwi were beginning to form their own parliamentary institutions. Two Māori parliaments met for the first time in 1892. These were King Tawhiao’s Kauhanganui, which was associated with Tainui iwi, and Kotahitanga, which was strong in the Wairarapa (Walker, 2004). My whānau’s tīpuna, Rangatira Hoani Rangi-taka-i-waho, was involved with the latter, and Papawai marae became known as the “Māori capital,” hosting two sittings of the Māori Parliament in 1897 and 1898 (Manatū Taonga - Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2011). Māori spiritual movements provided a further basis of resistance. These were led by influential prophets who often drew on Biblical narratives to rhetorically align Māori 19 experiences with the Old Testament tribes of Israel (Rangiwai, 2017). Spiritual movements, which included the Ringatū, Pai Mārire and Rātana faiths, provided narratives of hope in the midst of colonial oppression, often presenting Māori experiences as analogous to the Old Testament wanderings of God’s chosen people (Binney, 2015). They were political as well as spiritual (Rangiwai, 2017). For instance, the pacifist community of Parihaka, led by Te Whiti, famously resisted land sales, and was met with violent consequences when the Crown enacted its “final solution” by pillaging their homes and arresting their leaders (Walker, 2004). The political importance of Māori spiritual movements was further consolidated when, in 1935, the Rātana church cemented a liaison with the Labour Government as a means of advocating for recognition of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and seeking redress for land confiscations (Walker, 2004). 2.1.1 Colonial imposition on whānau Changes that took place in the traditional Māori whānau and collective structure were influenced by the settler preference for isolated nuclear families (Walker, 2004). Although the ramifications of these changes would become more noticeable after World War II, with increased Māori urbanisation, associated cultural shifts taking place as early the nineteenth century set the conditions for later policy changes that disrupted traditional whanau structures (Thomson, 1998). One such condition was the colonial preference for prescribed gender roles in marriage. The ideological positions imposed by the settler society on Māori emphasised the “cult of domesticity” and placed moral value on women’s domestic role (Smith, 1992). Female inferiority to men was taken-for-granted. The characterisation of women’s domestic labour conflicted with the more nuanced understanding of mana wāhine in Māori communities. Although both Pākehā and Māori women were the subject of the ideological positions, Māori and poorer Pākehā inevitably found themselves more constrained by them. 20 This was because upper and middle class Pākehā women sometimes had the ability to fulfil societally prescribed roles through philanthropic and professional organisations, which placed value on the supposedly innate moral instincts of well-bred women. In contrast, working- class women had fewer opportunities for self-determination, particularly as their husbands took possession of their earnings (Tennant, 2007). Hegemonic discourses doubly disadvantaged Māori women, by positioning them as inferior based on their gender and race (Johnson & Pihama, 1994). Such attitudes are illustrated by the views of one anonymous writer to a New South Wales newspaper in 1922, who noted in response to Southern Māori running a female candidate for election: The Māori woman can talk like an eternal gramophone, and she can use her fists. She is very often untruthful and always lazy. It seems from this parade of virtues that she’ll make a good politicianess! (Pantin, 1922). Although letters to newspapers do not necessarily capture the general mood of the nation, as an example of language in a mediated space they may serve to highlight what is allowable as public discourse (Gregory & Hutchins, 2004). In this case, the writer’s rhetoric taps into dominant narratives of Māori inferiority, that portray Māori as violent, lazy, and untrustworthy, as well as negative gendered stereotypes of wāhine Māori (Smith, 1992). This particular letter was met with a compelling rebuttal from Agnes Boyd (my grandmother’s maternal aunt), whose argument was published in the Dominion Post: “In writing of the Māori race… [the author should] study their history, and he will find there all the evidence necessary to disprove the statements” (Boyd, 1922). This invitation may serve as a reminder that for some Māori, the ability to call back to a rich history could provide a rhetorical buttress against racist and sexist discourse (Jenkins, 1992). However, it also demonstrates that the ability to confront the dominant negative framing of Māori ironically required the 21 speaker to engage with the language of the oppressor. Boyd benefited from an education afforded to a woman of high-rank, which had assumedly provided her with the linguistic capital necessary to engage in such debates (Ballara, 2017). For many Māori women, trained in Native Schools which focused on their potential as domestic labour, such debates were socially proscribed (Johnson & Pihama, 1994; Smith, 1993). The positioning of women as inferior had material effects on Māori women when legislative changes began to bring Māori whānau in line with the ideal settler nuclear family (Mikaere, 1994). The Native Land Act 1909 stipulated that Māori marriages were valid for some purposes only. Marriages that were guided by English common law principles redefined the nature of family and the role of women (Mikaere, 2003). Māori marriage customs protected the status and rights of women and served to consolidate whānau ties. In contrast, under nineteenth century common law, women became legal non-entities upon marriage. This was because of the legal fiction that marriage unified husband and wife as “one person” (Bradbury, 1995). Although property rights for married women would increase in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they continued to privilege husbands as economic providers, and protections for women against economic instability were often inadequate. The shift to western family systems also made women more vulnerable to abusive relationships. Mikaere (1994) notes that in contrast with English common law, which condoned the use of violence as a form of marital discipline, Māori communal structures enabled the protection of women and children. This was because the family unit did not exist in a private sphere, but rather was part of an interconnected community. Violence, when it did occur, was difficult to hide and the effects were felt in the wider community (Mikaere, 1994). Abuse was construed as an affront to the entire whānau and was dealt with collectively. Social control was a function of reciprocal community obligations, and 22 consequences for violence ensured the continued security of women and children (Dickson, 2006; Pihama, Cameron, et al., 2019). In contrast, the introduced settler fiction of family unity did not allow for the view of wives as separate entities, who could be the victims of marital abuse (Bradbury, 1995). Spousal abuse was viewed as a form of discipline, used by a husband to maintain control of his household (Mikaere, 2003). Such frameworks allowed few legal options for victims. Wives could apply to the court to have maintenance enforced, and from the late nineteenth century, they could seek a judicial separation on limited grounds. A newspaper report detailing Puiaki Cole’s 1920 court filing for a separation demonstrates the difficulties that many women faced with such a process. The magistrate ruled in her favour for maintenance costs, but opted to decline the separation order, as “he trusted the parties would come together again” ("Alleged cruelty: wife seeks separation," 1920). In prioritising family unity, it appears that the magistrate reflected the dominant ideological positions of his era (Garlick, 2012). The case once again exemplifies the extent to which such narratives had material, often harmful, effects on people’s lives. Changes to family structures and the clear delineation of familial roles also impacted negatively on parenting practices among Māori (McDonald, 1978; Mikaere, 1994). Child- rearing practices conducted on marae in te ao Māori were often a collective undertaking. Mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, and grandparents all had roles in the supportive care and education of children (Ritchie & Ritchie, 1970). Marriage consolidated kinship ties between whānau and hapū, expanding the range of social supports available to families. This was markedly different from the idealised Pākehā nuclear family that emerged with the industrial revolution, where the primary responsibility for child-rearing was in the hands of mothers (Mikaere, 1994; Ritchie & Ritchie, 1978). The idealised nuclear family was supported through policy positions which regulated child labour and education, and organisations such 23 as the Plunket Society, which oversaw the scientific order of the domestic sphere (Olssen & Levesque, 1978). Government institutions and legal systems expanded their reach to Māori parenting practices. This included oversight of whāngai adoptions, a practice whereby Māori children are raised by someone other than their birth parents, usually grandparents (Mikaere, 2003). Traditionally, these practices were contextualised within wider concepts of childcare, nested in a deep-rooted knowledge of whakapapa (Else, 1991). Whāngai was practiced within the Cole whānau, as exemplified by a Cole sibling, Dulcie, who was raised by maternal relatives, and by my maternal grandmother’s niece who described her experience in a family memoir: We were told Mum had given birth to 12 children, though sadly we lost two brothers in infancy. When I was born, my grandparents grew concerned because I was sickly, and they took me from my parents to raise me. They already had my half-sister and raised her as their own. She was from Mum’s previous relationship with a Pacific Island guy when she moved to the Hawke’s Bay, supposedly for schooling, but my strong-willed mum had other plans. My grandparents took the reins. (To'o, 2016, p. 4) This family story exemplifies the way whānau resources were drawn on to support parents and help provide children with adequate and nurturing care. The nature of the whāngai relationship was flexible, determined by the needs of the family (McRae et al., 2006). The writer, as an unwell infant, was nurtured until she was strong enough to return to her parents’ home, while her older half-sister was raised by her grandparents, an act that allowed a young mother to continue her education. The state’s response to whāngai adoptions encroached on these arrangements. From 1909, whāngai relationships had to be ordered through the Native Land Court. Whāngai adoptions were governed separately to settler 24 adoptions, and whāngai records remained open and public, even as mid-twentieth century policy positions began to favour closed adoption, and tight restrictions on birth records. Closed adoptions favoured a clean break for mother and child. In seeking to replace one family with another, the policy created a “legal fiction” by altering birth certificates and denying families access to their records (Else, 1991). By 1955, almost all adoptions were closed. The power of the courts was further consolidated in 1962, effectively introducing “one rule for all” and ending any remaining legal protections for Māori whāngai adoptions (Mikaere, 1994). This timeline demonstrates how incremental steps to replace whāngai with Western models of adoption served to delegitimise Māori parenting practices. The continuation of whāngai practices in Māori communities outside legally- protected frameworks demonstrates a point of resistance to social controls (Gabel, 2022). Nevertheless, for many Māori today, whāngai is no longer a practical option (McRae et al., 2006). 2.1.2 Othering of Māori This chapter has demonstrated that colonial violence was multi-modal. It eroded the social, economic, and political fabric of Māori society, but it also worked on a symbolic level by communicating meanings about settlement and conquest that justified the subjugation of Māori by the colonial state. Dominant narratives served to construct the identities of settler and tangata whenua in opposition with one another, and frame Māori as “other” (Ahuriri- Driscoll, 2024). Scholars have argued that the othering of Māori within dominant narrative characterisations has been contextualised by a process of political myth-making, whereby the legal and political apparatus of state were used to re-story Māori experiences and thereby legitimate acts of oppression (Jackson, 2004). Consequently, acts of cultural oppression were redefined to support a myth that New Zealand had relatively peaceful race relations. Instead of recognising the impacts of deliberate and pervasive imperial expansion, colonial violence 25 was reconstituted as anomalous, the causes individualised. Correspondingly, contemporary negative health and welfare statistics became associated not with systemic failures but rather individual deficits. Child poverty, for example, is often linked to deficient parenting, and Māori ill-health ascribed to natural decline (Reid, 2007). In this way, the myth endures and obscures the connection between colonisation and enduring inequities (Jackson, 2004). Increasingly, such narratives are being challenged and problematised by Māori scholars and Pākehā allies working in such diverse fields as health, law, and education (Bishop, 2019; Jackson, 2018; Mutu, 2019; Reid, 2007). Their work encourages greater recognition that, “every wrong has a context, and unless that is understood, no meaningful change can occur” (Jackson, 2018, p. 10). This scholarship problematises traditional narratives of deficit, while simultaneously shining a spotlight on the role that colonising environments play in Māori inequity (Reid et al., 2017). Colonising environments continue to result in the marginalisation of Māori. McIntosh (2019, p. 3) discusses the multiple expressions of marginality in Māori identities: Some can draw on the marginal experience as a site of resistance and use that location to challenge the status quo and to transform the marginal experience. This is usually a highly politicised identity where proponents can draw on significant cultural capital and an in-depth knowledge of both Māori and Western traditions. Others may acknowledge a marginal status but seek to redefine it under their own terms to allow them to develop a dynamic, distinctive, and authentic fusion identity. For others, marginalisation creates a forced identity. This is characterised by a marked and stigmatised marginalisation where deprivation due to social, economic, and political factors is entrenched and far- reaching. 26 Forced identities are more commonly associated with the intervention of the state in the lives of whānau, although, as McIntosh highlights, Māori are not passive in their acceptance of marginality, and often exercise their transformative capacity to resist the state’s “tales of terror” (Rappaport, 2000). The construction of indigenous identities as “other” in relation to dominant settler norms is a critical aspect of the colonial project (Ahuriri-Driscoll, 2024). The attribution of negative characteristics to indigenous peoples served to justify their subjugation. Furthermore, the widespread and repeated derogatory characterisations caused the internalisation of the self as a deficient “other,” which prompted acceptance and conformity with the colonial agenda. This resulted in indigenous people performing an imitation of affluent Pākehā citizenship ideals. This was fundamentally inadequate; assimilated identities were rarely able to accomplish equal standing in a structurally inequitable system. The Cole whānau were further marginalised by their position as members of an impoverished underclass. Tyler (2013) conceptualises the notion of social abjection as a violent and exclusionary social force which strips people in the margins of society of dignity. Social consensus converges upon objects of disgust, which serve to exclude certain groups of people from positions of social power. Descriptions of Herbert Cole draw on cultural understandings of the undeserving poor, by drawing on constructions of the “drunken waster” and “scrounger.” These figures exemplified the parasitic qualities of the undeserving poor and legitimated the negative responses by the welfare officers. Tyler describes the way processes of social abjection shape the people’s identities, contributing to the internalisation of social judgements that embody shame and self-loathing. Tracing the impacts of colonisation forward to the present-day paints a dismal picture. Māori are over-represented in almost every measure of inequity. There are disparities in health, education, incarceration, employment, and life expectancy (Bishop, 2019; Durie, 27 2001; Human Rights Commission, 2021; Jackson, 2018; Ministry of Health, 2022; Oranga Tamariki, 2020; Reid & Robson, 2006). Colonisation’s impacts, Reid et al. (2017) argue, are both cumulative and cascading. This means that as each generation faces new challenges, they must also deal with the consequences of oppressive policies weaponised against the previous generation. Māori subjection and subsequent status as an oppressed minority has been reproduced through various manifestations of the settler state (Smith, 1992), including, as this research demonstrates, the Child Welfare Branch of the Education Department. That colonisation causes harm to every continent it touches has led to the argument that it constitutes a present and enduring intergenerational trauma (Brave Heart & Deschenie, 2006; Duran, 2019; Moewaka Barnes & McCreanor, 2019; Pihama, Cameron, et al., 2019; Savage et al., 2021). 2.2 Child Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century Thomson (1998) has argued that our understanding of current welfare trends can be enriched by taking a long view of social policy. A lack of engagement with historical contexts has contributed to an incomplete understanding, one which either condemns or exalts the actions of past policymakers. Dalley (2022) elaborates on the importance of bringing early child welfare practices out of the “realm of myth” to better understand current trends in welfare provisions. Similarly, a clearer understanding of the ways that colonisation causes harm can be reached by tracing the effects of historical events, policies and practices on individuals (Reid et al., 2017). The close examination of the Cole case provides us the opportunity to view these impacts as interpreted by the welfare officers. This section focuses on key social and political shifts that led to the Child Welfare Act 1925 and outlines the extent to which these policy positions reflected changing attitudes towards the government’s role in the private lives of citizens. I then turn to a discussion of the way policy flowed into the practices of child welfare officers working for the Child Welfare Branch of the Education 28 Department. Throughout this inquiry I refer to the state as shorthand for a collection of governmental agencies and departments, most prominently the Child Welfare Branch, whose position was represented in the case notes. Labrum (2002) notes that the welfare state was compartmentalised and did not always work to the same end. Social historians refer to the “mixed economy of welfare” that comprised of central and local government, families and volunteer groups (Tennant, 2007). The stories contained within the file represent the commonalities as well as contradictions in the state’s approach to the Cole whānau. The excerpts I have focused on for this inquiry were, with few exceptions, authored by child welfare professionals. Social policy is broadly concerned with society’s attempts to deal with the wellbeing of its citizens through the equitable distribution of resources (Belgrave, 2004). The history of colonialism is woven into the fabric of Aotearoa’s welfare traditions, which evolved as a colonial experiment, and rooted in a settler economy which excluded and then subjugated Māori (Thomson, 1998). The earliest systems of colonial welfare were predicated on the dispossession of Māori, as they involved the redistribution of Māori economic resources for the benefit of the settler (Tennant, 2007). For the nineteenth century settlers, the state’s role in welfare provision was broadly perceived as supporting individual self-help by overseeing land acquisition for settlement (Dalley & Tennant, 2004; Garlick, 2012; Thomson, 1998). The colonists carried over some of the values of home, including Victorian sensibilities of thrift, self-help and family duty, and rejected British Poor Law provisions of rates-funded income protections, preferring to emphasise personal and familial responsibility (Garlick, 2012; Thomson, 1998). As the settler numbers increased, and the colonists claimed positions of power in society, these values became normalised and hegemonic (Veracini, 2010). As the settler population expanded throughout the nineteenth century, so, too, did settlers’ expectations of continued state assistance. Increasing settler demand was met with 29 reluctant, minimal state support, delivered through provincial boards (Thomson, 1998). The Victorian ethos divided poor into categories of deserving and underserving, attaching a moral requirement to the provision of charitable aid and scrutinising the choices of those in need (Garlick, 2012; Tennant, 2007). This construction allowed children to become the focus of philanthropy. As the victims of circumstances beyond their own control, neglected children were deserving of special protections. When church and private charity were overwhelmed, there were calls for central government to make provisions available for their care (Dalley, 1998). Nested within ideological principles of the deserving and undeserving poor were discourses which framed children as both victims and threats (Dalley, 1998). Child-saving movements, gaining momentum internationally, posited that an impoverished environment was a threat to children’s wellbeing and their prospects as law-abiding citizens. Reformers imagined a direct pathway between neglected child and criminal adult; anxieties encouraged actions aimed at the “adjustment” of family life. By this reasoning, the family unit itself became open to scrutiny. Families of vulnerable children were constructed in social policy and political rhetoric as malignant influences. It became the role of the state to ensure that suitable reforms took place to the family unit to ensure children became productive citizens. Social historians have argued that such a position did not necessarily imply that the state intended to replace the parents. Rather, as Labrum’s (2000) examination of preventative welfare suggests, many officers saw their role as supportive of the family unit. Nevertheless, the state’s evaluation of “good” homes and families was influenced by hegemonic ideas of nuclear families. The language of “reform” and “adjustment” characterised the work of the state in relation to more unruly families (Labrum, 2004b). The provision of a moral education and vocational training was justified as a humane investment in the state’s future prosperity. 30 Preventing “wastage” in a child’s life was the central philosophy of what would become the Child Branch of the Education Department (Garlick, 2012). Although institutional care through industrial schools and orphanages was the initial site of intervention, these fell out of favour as early as 1885. From then, it was policy to “bring up the children as members of respectable families” rather than “crowd them together in large institutions” ("Education: Industrial Schools and Orphanages," 1885, p. 13). This practice was commonly referred to as “boarding out” and was the precursor to modern foster care. Homes were almost uniformly Pākehā, and, for the Māori children who were boarded, became sites of assimilation. By the 1920s, boarding out had come to displace industrial schools and institutions as the primary location of state intervention (Garlick, 2012). Some institutionalisation remained, and the state continued to send children to church-led homes such as the Salvation Army’s Whatman Home in Masterton, within which one Cole sibling resided from the mid-1930s, but fostering was preferred in policy and practice. Placing children with foster families served economic and ideological purposes, and even though the number of children under state control rose in the decades after the turn of the century, by 1924 less than 6% of state wards, referred to in contemporaneous accounts as “inmates”, were housed in residence. Stays in state-run institutions, called Receiving Homes, were intentionally short, used primarily for evaluation and between placements in family homes (Dalley, 1998). The state’s records from the 1920s do not show how many Māori children were in care. Dalley (2022) suggests that policy positions leaned towards keeping Māori children in their own communities. The Cole case file represents an exception which demonstrates the flexible application of policy. The 1925 Child Welfare Act established the Child Welfare Branch of the Education Department under Superintendent John Beck, one of the most influential senior public servants of the early twentieth century (Garlick, 2012). He drafted the Act and drove the department’s philosophy of preventative care. The passage of the Act marked the culmination 31 of over a decade’s worth of work for Beck and his colleagues (Dalley, 1998). As superintendent until 1938, Beck was actively involved overseeing its operations, and was often called upon to advise on case work and help settle disputes (Garlick, 2012). As will be discussed in Chapter Four, it was on Beck’s advice that the Cole siblings were committed to the state, and it was Beck’s initial memorandum which set a precedent for the stories of the Cole whānau contained in the file. The introduction of children’s courts was a central tenet of the Child Welfare Act. Modelled on American juvenile court systems, the children’s courts were intended to support the reformation of children who came before the magistrate (Seymour, 1976). Welfare officers were installed as court officials and tasked with carrying out investigations and making recommendations. Children came before the courts on a range of charges, including crimes such as theft and cycling at night without a light (Dalley, 1998, p. 102). As Dalley (1998) notes, what constituted juvenile delinquency was highly contingent on social, political and economic contexts. The ethos of reform rather than retribution presented magistrates with new possibilities for penalties, which could include preventive measures such as a period of supervision by Child Welfare Officers, as well as committal to state care. The reconstitution of juvenile delinquency as a welfare issue expanded the role of the Child Welfare Branch. Approximately half of all cases that came before the court between 1925 and 1948 were passed on to the Child Welfare Branch (Dalley, 1998, p. 104). Over the period of time represented by the Cole case file, 1926 – 1948, the scope of welfare field work expanded significantly (Garlick, 2012). In addition to court-appointed supervision, the Branch was also responsible for the monitoring of adoptions and foster homes under the Infant Life Protection Act 1893, and supervision of state wards who were boarded out or placed in service. It also took responsibility for the oversight of illegitimate children and the monitoring of families after a marital breakdown (Dalley, 1998). Preventive 32 work furthermore allowed officers to work with children in their own homes, and thereby effecting change to both the child and family (Labrum, 2000). This work became central to the Child Welfare Branch’s ethos of targeting the “social field” (Garlick, 2012). In effect, the child became the conduit through which the institutions of state could increase their influence on family life. To accommodate this range of functions, the Branch created a systematised structure, comprised of fourteen district offices (Garlick, 2012). This structure provided the means of co-ordinating supplies and lent the Branch a degree of professional credibility that belied the lack of formal training in its workforce. This system created the context whereby welfare officers were encouraged to draw on dominant cultural narratives and explanatory frameworks to form judgements about the families within their purview. The workforce was predominantly comprised of Pākehā middle-class women, and supplemented by unpaid honorary officers in rural areas (Dalley, 1998). Officers worked with families who were frequently poor, and sometimes Māori, and the case files suggest that they were “othered”. Welfare officers were hired in part for the attributes that were believed to be inherent to their gender, and women with backgrounds in nursing or teaching were preferred candidates (Garlick, 2012). Individual field officers were encouraged to utilise personal discretion in dealing with issues in their district. For this, officers were expected to draw on their innate qualities and life experience. Case work was highly gendered, with women taking on more general duties relating to monitoring foster homes and adoptions, implementing adoptions and supervising young boys and girls in their homes, while a small number of male welfare officers supervised adolescent boys (Garlick, 2012). The functions and numbers of welfare officers increased considerably between 1925 and 1948. In 1925 there were twenty Child Welfare Officers gazetted. By the mid-1940s there were 100 employees working across thirty offices (Garlick, 2012; Labrum, 2004b). The 33 Child Welfare Branch expanded during World War II in response to concerns about the rise in juvenile crime. This change coincided with a more decentralised system, with each district appointing a male District Child Welfare Officer to oversee their region. This expansion, along with increasing Māori urbanisation, brought the welfare officers into greater contact with Māori communities. (Dalley, 1998). Although the children’s court did not keep ethnicity records for children and families, in 1941, Beck’s successor, Jim McClune, commented on the increasing number of Māori children coming before the court (Garlick, 2012). This marked the beginning of a trend that would see Māori overrepresented in child welfare systems throughout the twentieth century(Savage et al., 2021). 2.2.1 Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care Though the case file’s authors offer little evidence of the negative effects of state care, subsequent evidence has been brought forward by care survivors to show that significant harm was, and continues to be caused when children are uplifted by the state (Abuse in Care Research Team, 2020; Oranga Tamariki, 2020). In 2018, the New Zealand Government commissioned a Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate the historical abuse of children, young people and vulnerable adults in state and faith-based institutions (New Zealand Government, 2023). The inquiry was a comprehensive examination of the experiences of survivors of state and faith-based care from the 1950s to the late 1990s. Its findings are particularly pertinent to this present research, as the focus on survivor testimony offers a lens through which to view state’s story of the Cole siblings. In the absence of testimony from the Cole siblings themselves, the survivor accounts serve as powerful reminders that narrative silences in the records are equally meaningful in what they suggest about structural violence (Darroch, 2020; Fivush, 2009). The Commission of Inquiry’s interim report found widespread and ongoing abuse in both state and faith-based care settings. Abuse was defined broadly to include physical, 34 sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse as well as neglect and improper care that resulted in harm. The definition included conduct that caused serious harm regardless of whether it was accepted conduct at the time it was perpetrated, but acknowledged that much of the reported conduct would have been described as abusive at the time it was committed (Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry, 2020a). A central theme of the findings from the inquiry is the profound harm caused to the most vulnerable people in society by a system that should have offered them protection (Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry, 2020a). The inquiry was also clear that abuse in care settings continues to this day. The children placed in care often came from environments that were detrimental to their wellbeing, but their time in care left many of them in a worse state than when they were first removed from their homes. Survivor accounts detail a wide range of abusive behaviours, ranging from physical and sexual assault to cruel and inhumane punishment, the use of physical restraints, solitary confinement, and the punitive use of medical procedures such as electro-convulsive therapy, verbal abuse, and racial slurs (Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry, 2020a). Many survivors faced abuse across multiple care settings. Frequent relocation between foster homes and institutions exacerbated the impacts of abuse and made it difficult for children and young people to develop secure attachments. The commission acknowledged that the impacts were differentially experienced by Māori and Pacific people and differently-abled people, and commissioned research to examine the causes and impacts of Māori over-representation in care settings (Savage et al., 2021). The consequences of abuse were profound and long-lasting. The effects on individuals ranged from ongoing health difficulties, loss of identity and sense of belonging, loss of educational and employment opportunities, homelessness, incarceration, addiction, breakdown in family relationships, and the loss of cultural and spiritual identity (Abuse in 35 Care Royal Commission of Inquiry, 2020a) . The internalising of stigmatising narratives was evident in survivors’ stories. The survivors reported that the effects of their childhood abuse made it difficult to make connections and forge stable relationships. The impacts were also experienced across generations and within wider communities (Savage et al., 2021). Subsequent generations were affected as abuse had an impact on survivors’ parenting ability. One survivor noted that “the abuse itself had an ongoing impact on… what we expect from family relationships…I didn’t go to sports games and things because I didn’t know that was what a parent was supposed to do.” (Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry, 2020a, p. 93). There are similar anecdotes of my grandmother that suggest she also had to learn parenting expectations, sometimes by looking to the behaviours of her children’s friends’ mothers. This struggle can be understood as a reverberation of state care, sometimes referred to as inter-generational trauma (Savage et al., 2021). For Māori, this impact of abuse in care was particularly profound. Māori have been overrepresented in care for generations (Abuse in Care Research Team, 2020). This over- representation can be understood in the context of colonisation, which displaced collective capacity through the alienation of land and resources, and introduced denigrating narratives of Māori people and customs (Savage et al., 2021). The removal of Māori children and young people severed their connections to whakapapa and decimated whānau. The impacts of state care cascade out and are felt beyond the individual, realised in disconnected whānau, hapū and iwi. The report also found that, despite the identification of Māori over-representation as an issue as early as the 1960s, government responses have so far failed to stem the tide. Solutions have failed to adequately involve Māori in decision-making processes, and as a result state agencies have continued to implement harmful policies and practice. Some survivors’ accounts concern their access and response to the state’s records of their time in care. These documents are sometimes sources of trauma, or a mechanism for 36 confrontation and healing (Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry, 2020b). Some accounts note the inaccuracy, via omission, redaction, or tampering, of personal records. Some recalled that their records had been altered to omit any mention of abuse, or complaints from whānau regarding the state’s practices (Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry, 2020b). One survivor noted the profound frustration that the Ministry, “was allowed to hide behind its poor record-keeping and processes” (Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry, 2020a, p. 57). This has relevance to the Cole whānau case files, which appear at first glance to be comprehensive, but which omit to mention instances of cruelty or neglect which we know occurred due to the accounts of our whānau members. The Royal Commission demonstrates the way survivors’ trauma was sometimes exacerbated when they found themselves having to assert their truth against the (arguably deliberate) obfuscation caused by poor record-keeping. It is a reminder that the voices of survivors may be silenced through both narrative inclusions and omissions, as the power to represent events rested with the welfare professionals (Fivush, 2009). 2.3 The Context for this Thesis This current inquiry is informed by the work of academics in various fields, including history, social work, and psychology. The following section summarises relevant research in these fields that informs my understanding of the context for this research. I begin with a grounding in symbolic violence and class as evident in the case file documents produced by government agencies. I also outline contemporary findings concerning the harmful narratives utilised in the public sphere against lower socio-economic groups, including Māori and people who are welfare-involved. The theory of symbolic violence speaks to the unjust and stigmatising characterisation of lower socio-economic groups and welfare-involved persons (Hodgetts & Stolte, 2017). Symbolic violence, according to Bourdieu (1991) is when the institutional practices of the 37 state normalise the beliefs and values of the ruling group, so that they become widely accepted as truth, even by groups of people who occupy positions in the margins of society. The internalisation of harmful narratives by members of marginal groups allows the ruling class to maintain positions of power. On the whole, themes that emerge from the literature on this topic as it pertains to the welfare state highlight the narratives of self-responsibility, and the moralising of impoverishment. These narratives support the characterisation of welfare recipients as abject figures (Tyler, 2013). Narratives of poverty engender disgust, which serves to reinforce their Othering in social discourse and activates an increasingly punitive response. These narratives become hegemonic and stigmatising, and are internalised by people in poverty, resulting in feelings of shame (Swales et al., 2020). The work of Rappaport (2000) discussed previously considers the complex interaction between cultural, community and personal narratives in the stigmatisation and resistance of minority groups. Rappaport referred to stigmatising stories as “tales of terror”, which he described as dominant cultural narratives that story minority groups as “other” and construe difference as deficit. These are often communicated through stereotypical characterisations evident in shared cultural stories, sometimes coded and indirect, which are transmitted through various institutions. These stories are at once personal and idiosyncratic yet exist within a complex social and political climate. This context influenced the kinds of stories that were told about people in poverty, about Māori, and women. Tyler (2013) and Rappaport (2000) document case studies of groups who have been stigmatised by dominant narratives, to examine ways that individuals resist subjugation in various ways, including the crafting of counter- narratives which are shared by members of a community to support a positive self-identity. Rappaport refers to these as “tales of joy” and examines how people in stigmatised groups can thrive through the collaborative imagining of new stories. 38 The ways in which state institutional structures reproduce and legitimise harmful narratives was the focus on Galtung’s (1969) theories of structural violence. Galtung theorised that structural violence occurs when societal structures prevent certain groups from reaching their potential (Saleem et al., 2021). Accordingly, academics have argued that state welfare agencies, through their structures, processes and practices, constitute sites of violence as they limit the capacity for welfare-involved individuals to thrive (Hodgetts et al., 2014; Mik-Meyer & Villardsen, 2012; Thomas et al., 2020). Lyndon (2019) argued that pathologising and individualising discourses of poverty pervade social policy in the United Kingdom and that these limit the state’s responsiveness to structural pre-determinants of poverty. This was similarly documented in Starkey’s (2000) study of the “feckless mother” in post-war England, which documents the individualisation of poverty through the narrative of problem mothers, and subsequent limitations to the response to structural inequities. McGhee and Waterhouse’s (2017) case study of a welfare-involved-mother similarly highlights the way narratives of “putting children first” render mothers invisible. Various authors have drawn attention to stigmatising narratives of young Māori parents (Ware et al., 2017) and the way welfare dependency narratives produce policy positions aimed at controlling welfare recipients’ lives (Hodgetts et al., 2014; Jensen & Tyler, 2015; O'Brien, 2019). Others have examined the additional harm caused when these narratives become internalised by the very people whose lives are unduly targeted (Swales et al., 2020; Thomas et al., 2020). The application of concepts of symbolic violence to historical case records has most frequently been the domain of the historian. Of particular relevance to this present inquiry was the work of social historians in Aotearoa, especially Dalley’s (1998) work on child welfare services in the twentieth century and Labrum’s (2000) examination of the case files documenting New Zealand’s discretionary welfare provisions from 1920 to 1970. These, along with the work of international academics, have emphasised the contested nature of case 39 file documentation. As representations of state intervention in the lives of poor families, case files can be viewed as sites of contestation and resistance (Little, 1998), symbolic spaces within which power is wielded and harm is caused to people in marginalised groups (Labrum, 2000). Historical research has highlighted case files’ reproduction of dominant, often harmful narratives. The records were written by welfare officers for their supervisors, and so have the effect of reinforcing a shared set of assumptions, sometimes derogatory, about welfare recipients (Labrum, 2004b, p. 35). As predominantly middle-class Pākehā women, welfare officers occupied a more privileged position in comparison with recipients, and were able to utilise their linguistic capital in the framing of their clients’ lives (Gordon, 1988). Welfare officers sought to define the professionalism of the role while simultaneously reinforcing the “otherness” of the client, and in doing so were active in the replication of unequal societal power structures (Little, 1998). Welfare professionals undoubtedly had access to greater reservoirs of valued social and economic capital. As the producers of the welfare records, they had the power to represent the reality of their clients (Gordon, 1988). Through case notes, welfare officers constructed narratives, drawing on a range of textual genres, including letters, memorandum, service and boarding agreements, requests for sundry items, and correspondence with the police over unpaid maintenance costs. As gatekeepers of state assistance, their constructions had material impacts on clients’ ability to receive entitlements (Dalley, 1998; Labrum, 2000). For instance, welfare officers were called upon to make character judgements about their clients, and recommendations for material support, and this provided the context for personal biases to influence decision-making (Dalley, 1998). Labrum (2000) argues that welfare officers’ decisions regarding the way issues and individuals were constructed comprised a historical and social filter. She outlines exemplars of welfare practices which demonstrate the increasing scrutiny placed on welfare recipients 40 whereby the causes of their substandard living conditions were ascribed to individual moral failings, and an untidy home could be used as evidence of maternal degeneracy. In one example Labrum gives, the committal of children to state care was predicated on a woman’s unclean home and a demeanor which suggested to the case worker that she was insufficiently concerned with “self-help” (Labrum, 2000, pp. 140-142). As a product of the agency, the case file represents the narrative of the welfare officer, and the welfare recipient’s ability to offer a more complex construction of herself is therefore denied. In this way, institutions provided a means through which symbolic power was exercised, and social hierarchies maintained. Contemporary accounts of welfare stigma and over-representation of Māori in state care suggests the enduring nature of harmful narratives (Jensen & Tyler, 2015; Savage et al., 2021). Research on the relationship between the Child Welfare Branch and Māori during the 1920s and 30s is limited as the Branch did not compile relevant statistics. Dalley (2022) suggests that the work of the welfare services during this time was more flexible in relation to the needs of Māori than it would be in subsequent years, although she notes that some practices, however well intentioned, may have caused harm. Flexibility, likely provided the context for bias, exacerbated by the profession’s monoculturalism. As increasing numbers of Māori encountered welfare services, Dalley documents the prevalence of denigrating narratives of Māori as lazy and work averse. Racist stereotypes based on core beliefs in Māori inferiority underpinned scrutiny of Māori whānau, which contributed to their increasing representation in welfare systems (Savage et al., 2021; Walker, 2004). The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care found that Māori over-representation in care and criminal justice settings was the result of enduring structural and symbolic racism in state systems as a result of colonisation (Savage et al., 2021). The report points to assimilation 41 policies as integral to the erosion of traditional Māori support networks which set the context for economic disadvantage, and cultural alienation (Savage et al., 2021, p. 13). This thesis recognises that contemporary accounts of Māori over-representation in state care have a long history. It contributes the connection between historical case work and the current welfare landscape. By outlining a case of a single historical record, this inquiry aims to draw a connection between historical and contemporary case studies of welfare stigma and historical antecedents by examining the evidence of symbolic violence in the newly formed welfare organisation’s engagement with a Māori whānau. I propose that stigmatising narratives take on the guise of truth, and these create the context for the state’s engagement with whānau. Community stories are given legitimacy through policy and structures. Creating a more empowering social context requires targeting relevant narrative social fields as well as the legitimating political structures through policy reform. 2.4 Chapter Conclusion This chapter has outlined the social and historical background of child welfare intervention, and the complex multifaceted ways that Māori were harmed by the implementation of colonial systems in Aotearoa. It then zoomed in on the primary aims and practices of the Child Welfare Branch of the Education Department, and its infiltration into the domestic sphere. I have considered symbolic violence as it pertains to constructions of welfare dependency and the moralising of poverty. I then outlined the historical location of government case files as sites of contestation, whereby welfare recipients were characterized within the bounds of culturally informed narrative tropes. Finally, I examined how the work of state welfare came to be understood as hostile towards Māori, and recent efforts within state institutions to become more culturally responsive. The following chapter outlines the theoretical and methodological process through which the inquiry will proceed. 42 43 Chapter 3 : Methodology The follow chapter covers theory, methodology and interpretative procedures for the present inquiry. I begin with a discussion of Kaupapa Māori Theory (KMT), as the foundational interpretive framework for this study, before providing an