A whakapapa of trauma: The government has referenced the 28th Māori Battalion in its military-style academy for youth offenders. But, asks journalist Aaron Smale, did those soldiers fight and die so that generations of their mokopuna could be locked up as kids by the Crown, often with traumatic outcomes?
The first inkling I had that I had whānau in Ōtaki was when I was a young court reporter in Levin. I came across the whānau name on charge sheets. I would later discover that these names were from my grandmother’s brother, who had 13 kids. He served in C Company of the 28th Māori Battalion. I didn’t know this at the time I glanced at those charge sheets, and I didn’t know enough about my own history to have the confidence to make contact. At that stage, I had only the family’s name, and for most of my life up to that point, I didn’t even have that. Closed adoption does that. Cuts all the strands of relationships before they have even have a chance to be established.
Over the intervening years, I’ve had intermittent contact with that whānau, mainly at tangi. Three of the younger members ended up in Kohitere Boys’ Training Centre in Levin for short stints. Two of those ended up in a gang, and one died in gang violence. None of the other whānau have ended up in gangs.
I don’t know them well enough to tell the story of what went on there. But one of the cousins said her brother simply won’t talk about it. Knowing what I know from other survivors, I’ve got a pretty good idea. I’ve spent the past eight years covering the abuse of children in the custody of the state. On that journey, I regularly found that many of the children who ended up in the state’s welfare homes were the descendants of 28th Māori Battalion members.
The whole premise of the Māori Battalion and the argument that Sir Apirana Ngata made for its formation was that the Treaty of Waitangi carried with it obligations to serve the Crown in times of conflict. It would also prove that Māori were worthy of the equality of citizenship, which in practical terms was not a reality. Ngata titled his argument the price of citizenship.
Understandably, Tainui and Taranaki iwi were less than receptive to offering the flower of their youth to a Crown that had dishonoured the treaty in its aggression and confiscation. But Ngata also made the argument that the battalion should be formed along iwi lines, so Māori could serve as Māori and not be assimilated but demonstrate their strength and bravery to Pākehā New Zealand.
The Māori Battalion was the first time Māori had been publicly visible in such a prominent way in the 20th century, given the physical and cultural distance they lived from Pākehā society. The battalion did make a favourable impression on Pākehā, as they featured prominently in battles in North Africa, Crete and Monte Cassino. But Māori had heavy casualties in those battles. The cost of this bravery was epitomised in the awarding of the Victoria Cross, posthumously, to Ngāti Porou’s Te Moananui-a-Kiwa Ngārimu, who was killed in battle.
But that brief unity-in-patriotism was all well and good until those same Māori men came back to New Zealand.
The men were keen to scatter and get home, but Ngata took C Company very deliberately back to their people marae by marae. This harked back to the tikanga around warfare that regarded war as tapu because of its association with death and the need to release warriors from the grief and trauma of battle. That tapu needed to be lifted and noa, or some kind of normality, restored.
Many of those who joined the Māori Battalion were kids. There was quite a bit of fudging of ages and there’s a family legend that our uncles registered under the same name, which caused a bit of a problem when they held a roll call. Someone was telling porkies. Like their tipuna, the 28th were known for their mischief and insubordination, but it was also recognised that this was what made them so effective.
Although Pākehā soldiers had lost their mates in battle, the Māori Battalion soldiers were often losing cousins, brothers and uncles. So, when they returned, they were called on to marae with the wail of multiple karanga from kuia and wahine who had lost their men. Lined up were rows of photos of those men, with whānau sitting behind them. The loss and trauma that had been parked as they moved on to the next battle suddenly hit.
Ngata had advised them in his speech in Gisborne that the gate was open, implying there were greener pastures elsewhere. Despite his attempts to retain and develop their tribal lands, he recognised there was not enough to sustain them and their descendants. So, many migrated with their whānau to cities or towns, and they moved in next door to Pākehā. But this exposed the myth of New Zealand having the best race relations in the world. There was a general aversion and outright hostility in some quarters to Māori living in Pākehā neighbourhoods. Archives NZ has whole folders with names such as “Segregation” and “Race Relations” that document incidents all over the country where Pākehā contacted the Native Department (renamed the Department of Māori Affairs in 1947) to complain about Māori. The main concern was that the very presence of Māori devalued house prices.
The government itself was loath to provide Māori with the same government provisions that Pākehā enjoyed, such as ballot farms (which were often carved out of land taken from Māori), state housing, housing loans or child benefits. This would eventually morph into the stigmatisation of these state supports and they became racialised as something for brown people. Māori would be pushed into certain areas in what amounted to virtual segregation.
And amid the stresses of a new environment and economic pressures, the ghosts of war would come calling.
Whakapapa of trauma
There’s a persistent myth that Māori are somehow inherently violent, that they have some genetic or cultural predisposition to violence that was there before Pākehā arrived and that this has persisted into the present and must be suppressed.
But the leap from warriors to Once Were Warriors misses the trauma and violence that were brought home with the 28th Māori Battalion and the Pioneer Māori Battalion only a generation before them. The legal scholar Moana Jackson told me that many of the victims of the abuse in state custody were the children of Māori Battalion members. I have discovered the same.
One survivor told me how his father ended up in jail because of a horrific domestic violence incident. As a child, he then took to stealing to help the whānau survive, got caught and ended up in a state welfare institution where he learnt violence from strangers. His next stop was getting patched as a fully-fledged gang member. But he and many others in that gang had similar experiences and a hatred for their fathers. As kids, they didn’t understand where the eruptions of violence came from, they just knew they didn’t like it. But they were effectively picking up the tab for the price of citizenship.
If the price of citizenship was the trauma of war for the men of the 28th, the price for many of their children was trauma of a different kind. It was the violence and trauma inflicted by the state against tamariki Māori.
There is a direct whakapapa of trauma that runs through the 28th Māori Battalion, the state welfare institutions and into the nation’s prisons and gangs.
State intervention as colonisation
This week, the final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care was tabled in Parliament. Among the 16 volumes was one titled: Cauldron of Violence: Hokio Beach School and Kohitere Boys’ Training Centre – A case study of the State’s role in creating gangs and criminals.
In the report, Māori survivor Wiremu Waikari (Ngāti Porou) told the inquiry: “State intervention was another form of colonisation. The State had many ways of breaking down our whānau. We had just been through the Second World War, we had lost a lot of men, a lot of role models. I was a child living in a middle‑class family and I had never been touched by abuse, I had a good male role model in my life. Being placed into care meant the trajectory of my life changed drastically.”
In the report, he describes the violence and abuse that led to suicides: “I witnessed other boys at Kohitere harming themselves. There wasn’t anywhere for them to get help. Suicide became something that was normalised for me.
“It was the links I made in Hokio and Kohitere that led me to joining the Mongrel Mob when I was 16 years old. I loved it because I already knew them – I felt more at home with Mob members than I did with my own family.”
“In the 1960s and 1970s, gangs in New Zealand really kicked off because the boys’ homes were feeding them with disenfranchised young people who were not nurtured by Māori or the State. That is definitely where my time in State care pushed me, and hundreds of other unhappy Māori kids, who weren’t sure of themselves in any world.”
Only four days before the Royal Commission’s report landed, Minister for Children Karen Chhour and acting Prime Minister David Seymour hosted a media tour of the unit at a youth justice facility in Palmerston North that will be used for the government’s military-style academy pilot.
It was meant to be a cheery photo op. But it is essentially a jail. A well-appointed jail, but a jail nonetheless. A jail for children.
At one point, Seymour and Chhour marvelled at the cells. They marvelled at the new uniforms for the inmates that were shades of khaki and beige. They marvelled at the sturdy army boots with sturdy laces.
Then they started marvelling at photos of the 28th Māori Battalion hanging on the walls as staff at the facility waxed sentimental about the heritage of the battalion.
There was a sense of déjà vu. This place resembled, at least in function if not in exact form, the old Kohitere Boys’ Training Centre down the road in Levin. It is now derelict. But the locked cells in the old Kohitere pound were very similar in dimensions to the locked cells in this new version.
A few days earlier, Chhour had posted on social media when visiting Epuni in Lower Hutt that it was amazing what a new coat of paint can do. Those who ended up in Kohitere had often been through Epuni first. It was the site of abuse that was very similar, such as rape, violence and solitary confinement.
At one point, Seymour went and posed for photos beside an insignia of the 28th Māori Battalion. He instigated the photo.
I asked Seymour and Chhour at the media conference that followed whether they believed the soldiers of the 28th fought with distinction so their mokopuna could end up locked up in places like this. There was a heavy silence before Chhour gave an answer that wasn’t really an answer. Seymour said nothing.
Last year, the Independent Children’s Monitor reported that 529 children suffered abuse in the custody of the state, most of them more than once. A recent report about a youth justice facility in Auckland made a number of damning findings. One was that: “Several mokopuna require a high level of mental health support and kaimahi do not have the specialised training and knowledge required to meet their individual needs.”
I left the unit and walked out into the carpark in the rain, exhausted by anger. One of the other journalists asked me if I’d noticed that on the table where the uniforms were displayed there were neatly folded up belts, which would be issued to the 10 children – nine of whom are Māori – that would be locked up in cells. Along with sturdy army boots with long, sturdy laces.
Aaron Smale (Ngāti Porou) is a journalist specialising in te ao Māori issues. He has won major awards for his reporting on abuse in state and faith-based care institutions.
