September 18, 2013
History mapped in interracial marriages
The author of a book on interracial marriage in New Zealand says acceptance of the practice is a measure of racial harmony.
Angela Wanhalla from Kai Tahu says Matters of the Heart tracks changing attitudes from the earliest days of European settlement to the 1970s.
She says unlike some other countries, interracial marriage has never been illegal, and it has happened consistently throughout our history.
But after the wars of the 1860s, Pakeha society became far less positive about such relationships as they saw Maori as an inferior race.
"Interracial relationships are seen to be a form of degradation and immoral. This is particularly the case if you are a white woman who married outside your family and community and had a cross-cultural relationship, so racial ideas and the hardening of racial attitudes takes place in the second half of the 19th century, and that has a flow on into the 20th century as well. People don’t want to claim any Maori ancestry. They start to hide it," Dr Wanhalla says.
The radical Maori politics of the 1970s and 80s and the emergence of treaty settlements means people are now far more likely to acknowledge their Maori whakapapa.
Matters of the Heart is published by Auckland University Press.
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