same sort of physical and emotional assurance as his Pakeha counterpart, but his responsible ‘kinship unit’ was often a wider one. His grandparents, his uncles and aunts, grand-uncles and grand-aunts shared, as of right, in the upbringing of the child. Even in the tribal situation generally, a keen sense of kinship gave the Maori child an assured sense of belonging. The Maori child in the past learned how to identify with his community at a much earlier age than does either the modern Maori or the Pakeha child.

New Needs and Goals Things that the child normally accepts automatically, tend to become irksome symbols of restrictions and subjection to the adolescent. Furthermore, new urges and new dimensions now begin to demand satisfaction on all planes—mental, physical and emotional. The need to have life explained becomes one of the dominant factors, as does also the need to satisfy other new appetites which emerge at puberty. At this time also, there arises a basic need to identify with others of like interests and urges. One of the adolescent's goals is to become emotionally involved in the lives and activities of others of like mind, in order to share in the security which can only come from the group. He also needs to masquerade his individual oddness in the oddness of the group, for indeed to the adolescent there is nothing so odd as to find childish patterns repugnant, and the accomplishments of adulthood beyond his reach.

Easier Among Primitive Peoples With more primitive peoples, the ways of coping with the period of adolescence were comparatively simple. For one thing, the group concept was developed to a very high order, for the sheer necessity to survive compelled them to band together in a group. In the group, the sense of kinship was the thread by which they maintained their identity, and for this purpose certain techniques were developed—hence the significance of the flawless ability found in the recitation of geneo-logical tables, regarded as a very accomplished art carrying with it a highly envied status. In this type of society the role of the individual was well defined, as was also the role of each of the sub-groups. Only the children were free of responsibility to the group. As soon as the child reached the age of adolescence he was taken over and absorbed into the tribal pattern. He would accompany the young men on all the peacetime forages and expeditions, learning by precept and example his responsibility to provide and to share. There was a sort of curriculum for adolescence, and the goal toward maturity was clearly marked by certain tests of accomplishment and bravery which defined for the adolescent the state of manhood. In the Maori world a great deal of influence from these primitive elements persisted in their changing patterns up until just before World War Two. Until then the Maori community was still fairly compact, and Maori social patterns were still centred around the marae, the hui and the tangi. But with the coming of a national crisis and the need to direct labour to the essential industries, the last bulwark of Maori society fell to the devastating onslaught of western civilisation and culture. With the calamity of World War Two, the Maori community became dispersed — his institutions redundant, and the pattern of tribal cohesion lost. Most tragic of all, the system of patriarchal leadership and authority was left without a constitution.

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