Paper Title
Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
children, colonial/imperial, gender, indigenous, motherhood
Abstract
Māori have a traditional customary practice known as whāngai, whereby the child is not raised by their birth parents but by another member of their family. An important element of whāngai is that the child always had knowledge of where they came from geographically and genealogically. However, it was inevitable that this practice would undergo some sort of transformation with the arrival of Europeans, regardless of whether this would be beneficial or detrimental to Māori society. The New Zealand 1955 Adoption Act introduced the closed stranger adoption whereby the existence of the child to the birth mother and the existence of the birth mother to the child would cease to exist. The child’s history thereby became that of their adoptive parents, what some may term “a false history”. This is significant for transracial adoptions as the Māori adoptee’s Māori heritage is denied. This paper explores the changes from a traditional practice established prior to the arrival of Europeans through to the development of adoption laws to the practice of adoption today. In particular, the affect of the adoption of Māori children by non-Māori couples (transracial adoption).
Keywords
adoption, transracial, whāngai, Māori
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Transracial Adoption - A New Zealand Perspective
Māori have a traditional customary practice known as whāngai, whereby the child is not raised by their birth parents but by another member of their family. An important element of whāngai is that the child always had knowledge of where they came from geographically and genealogically. However, it was inevitable that this practice would undergo some sort of transformation with the arrival of Europeans, regardless of whether this would be beneficial or detrimental to Māori society. The New Zealand 1955 Adoption Act introduced the closed stranger adoption whereby the existence of the child to the birth mother and the existence of the birth mother to the child would cease to exist. The child’s history thereby became that of their adoptive parents, what some may term “a false history”. This is significant for transracial adoptions as the Māori adoptee’s Māori heritage is denied. This paper explores the changes from a traditional practice established prior to the arrival of Europeans through to the development of adoption laws to the practice of adoption today. In particular, the affect of the adoption of Māori children by non-Māori couples (transracial adoption).