Displaced as Well as Dispossessed

Te Ao Hou, June 1965, Page 8

Displaced as Well as Dispossessed The Maori now found himself not only dispossessed, but also displaced, and ill-equipped to adjust quickly to the foreign mode of life which was imposed upon him. Hard on the heels of all these forced external changes, there came an internal phenomenon which was to rock the old canoe to such an extent that the rocking has not decreased in momentum even now. This phenomenon was the great ‘population explosion’ which now hit the race, whose decline in numbers two generations earlier had been a matter for grave concern. As present history shows, the result today is that the Maori race is a race of young people, without sufficient numbers in the older age-group to create the balance required for adequate social and economic stability. The latest figures available to me would indicate that in a race of something like 180,000 people, sixty per cent are under the age of 21. Another important aspect of the situation of the Maori is that he belongs to a racially ‘non-effective’ minority group which lives and moves by permission of a ‘dominant group’ whose social and economic pattern has in the past been foreign, and therefore hostile to the background and experience of the Maori

in a modern situation.