John Roughan: Give Maori a sense of something to live for

This country is an unhappy family when Maori strife comes to light. We argue passionately about who and what is to blame for something as outrageous as the refusal of the Kahui clan to tell us who killed their babies.

But, like many a disturbed family, we don't want to face the underlying problem we don't know how to fix.

It is safer to seize on symptoms and argue about them: welfare is too easy, the economy is too harsh, it's all the fault of weak law, interfering lawyers, poor social monitoring, publicity that is putting undue pressure on the unsophisticated people ...

None of those adequately explains the depth of social defiance we have witnessed in the past two weeks.

It is possible that any household might close ranks to protect its members from the criminal consequences of a child's death.

But a poor household, or a large or young one, would have the greatest difficulty, you would think, maintaining a solid front among its members and acquaintances.

Consider how many people must know how these babies died. The young parents and their children spent their time between two houses, one of which was occupied by as many as a dozen people. Most of them probably have at least one or two other people they confide in.

Dozens of relatives were reported to have attended the tangi last Saturday. Could any of them have been left in the dark about what exactly happened and who was being protected?

It is practically impossible to attend a funeral and not hear oblique references to the cause of death. The subject hangs in the air and if anyone there doesn't know the details, many a fellow mourner will quietly fill them in.

Police have been applying their well-practised techniques of persuasion to the family for a fortnight. The case has been under the glare of public attention for all that long. The pressure to crack their conspiracy of silence could not be more intense.

By mid-week the police wanted the case out of the news, even though they were now openly calling it murder. The case could not be rushed, they said, realising no doubt they were up against more than the normal solidarity of grief.

These people are unemployed beneficiaries living in the urban squalor well described on the front of the Weekend Herald last Saturday.

Everything we have heard from those who have made contact with them suggests their lifestyle is much as Alan Duff described in Once Were Warriors.

They are sophisticated enough for 11 of them to have consulted lawyers since the investigation began, and they can afford the fees, apparently, when they pool their resources.

But they are not the educated and organised Maori we are accustomed to seeing in demonstrations of social defiance.

This is not Tame Iti harmlessly discharging a firearm at the flag as a Tuhoe welcome for the Waitangi Tribunal. These people are as dislocated from tribal authority and Treaty settlements as they are from the dominant social order.

They proved to be as immune to the efforts of Pita Sharples this week as they have been to appeals from the police. They are so far from the reach of iwi or organised urban Maori that even those Maori are tempted to dismiss the case as nothing more than common criminality.

Like every disturbed family, we agree only in denial of the truth. Liberal or conservative, we are anxious to agree that child abuse is universal and race has nothing to do with it. Race has everything to do with this case. Liberals who put one hand on their hearts, the other over their eyes and insist that there is no need to mention the ethnicity of those involved do nobody any good.

We are a family founded on a marriage of two races. We haven't always worked hard on it, and for a long time we didn't believe we needed to. Then we agreed that some things went wrong and we have tried to put them right.

But when this sort of thing happens, the task can seem too hard.

The Kahui case is an insight to the conditions of people who have no conscious stake in this country, no sense of belonging to it, trusting it and answering to its authority.

They seem to regard themselves as a sovereign family. The fate of their children is nobody else's business.

The economy is functioning well; there are jobs if they want them. Generous sums are given to them for the sake of their children, and health services were monitoring the progress of the babies as best as could reasonably be expected.

They lack nothing essential - except self-respect. A job could give them that, too, but they lack even the self-respect to want one.

The only explanation that makes any sense to me is an extremely unpopular one. Tariana Turia takes a political bashing every time she mentions it. Colonisation is psychological as much as, or even more than, it is political and territorial.

People dispossessed of land - their own place in the world - and self-determination, the source of everyone's pride, come to see themselves as the colonisers see them.

The psychological damage might be fixed only by a restoration of pride and their place in the world, which requires a certain self-determination.

That will be why Pita Sharples went to meet the Kahui family this week, and why the Maori Party, alone among parties in Parliament, did not take up an invitation from Maori Affairs Minister Parekura Horomia to discuss "family violence" in racially neutral terms.

The Maori Party has an opportunity to organise itself in a way that can give their people new political influence and recover slowly a sense of power and place.

Maybe it doesn't matter if the rest of us remain in denial. I don't suppose the Kahui household gives history a conscious thought but its consequences bear heavily on their lives. They probably think their babies hadn't much to live for. The truth we don't want to admit is that they were probably right.