A whakapapa of trauma: Aaron Smale on what we have yet to learn about abuse in state care

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.