Television seen as restriction on self-image, self-esteem

Press, 1 November 1984, Page 3

Television seen as restriction on self-image, self-esteem

Broadcasting was an invader in the battle of epic proportions being waged in the hearts and minds of Maoris, no less real for being invisible, according to a Maori psychologist, Ms Donna Awatere, at the Maori Summit conference yesterday. Young children spent more time in front of television sets than at school.

“In too many ways and for too many days the pakeha has taken possession of our minds through broadcasting as surely as if your brain were preserved in pickle and stuck in a bottle on the pakeha’s shelf,” she said.

Television had become a major way that children learned about their culture. The first message Maori children learned was that their culture did not exist.

That was the message they learned from the absence of Maori culture on television, Ms Awatere said. For every 360 minutes of non-Maori television, the Maori got one minute. Up until the age of 12, Maori children denied that they were Maori, and sometimes said they were pakeha. Last year, in Otara, 90 per cent of Maori children appearing before the Children’s Board did not even know their tribe.

“When growing minds are constantly exposed to the non-existence of their own people in such a critical area of cultural learning as television, the subliminal message their minds are receiving is that they are nothing, no-one, and they don’t belong,” she said.

Ms Awatere gave examples of what she says has happened since television began in New Zealand in 1959:

9 The suicide rate of young Maori men has risen six-fold. 9 Maori admissions to mental institutions have trebled.

9 Maori lung cancer and heart disease rates are the

highest in the world. 9 Maoris have developed a multi-drug abuse rate second to none.

“Maoris are constantly confronted with images of the pakeha world which restrict and limit their selfimage and self-esteem as Maoris,” Ms Awatere said. The onus of proof that this did not occur rested with the Broadcasting Corporation, to show that the absence of all things Maori on television did not lead directly and indirectly to the development of negative self-concepts by Maori children.

The call for a Maori broadcasting steering committee was adopted.