Judge Joe Williams on te reo Māori and synthesizing the law of Aotearoa

It is a personal portrait: also a portrait of a nation. For starters, just his words:

” When I was a child, I was raised with my cousins: my kuia, koroua raised a whole generation of us … I was raised with my cousins ​​as if they were my brothers and sisters. And I was well aware of the fact that we were not treated the same as my fellow Pākehā.

It was very obvious to me from a young age that being dark was not a good thing.

There were little things. You walk into a store, they look at you. We were going to a place to buy something important: like a piece of furniture, not just the dairy, and I was just a little boy, 10 or 11 years old, something like that, and I noticed the way the people who worked in the store treated us , compared to others.

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This is like a child … I could say it, we all could.

I think he internalized within me the idea that he was not very good, and that if he needed to be very good he needed to be different from what he was. I needed to minimize my upbringing and maximize the vanillaization of my education.

My home was my home, a very poor Maori home. My kuia and koroua, when I was 10 years old, were retired, with almost no money. So my house was a relationship train station and all that kind of stuff, and there was no money. Whereas, being a bright kid, my classmates were sort of lower-middle-class white kids. And they smelled of success, and they [my whānau] it did not.

And to a growing boy it was obvious as hell.

So I tried to fit in and I couldn’t, and that was very difficult. I got a scholarship to go to Lindisfarne College in Hastings … and that was worse, because you were with the children of the doctors, the dentists, the lawyers, the children of the farmers and so on, and yet your home was a station train. . Poor and tough.

And every minute of every day they remind you that that is success, and that is not so. ”

Supreme Court Justice Joe Williams grew aware of the conflicts inherent within Project Aotearoa, our growing nation, every day.

It comes from an iwi named Ngāti Pūkenga. It was once described, he says with a smile, as a “small but bellicose tribe” by a native lands court judge in the 1870s.

I asked him about the integration of the Maori kaupapa, tikanga, into the modern legal system. Then I asked him about te reo Māori, how he felt about gaining fluency in college.

Of course, as the Maori son of a farm worker, who will hopefully never set foot on a farm again, he should have known that the second question is what makes sense of the first.

For me, the need to reconcile worlds in competition, and yes, racism, manifests itself on a personal level, between people and even within the law itself.

Justice Williams was raised by his great-uncle and great-aunt, who moved to Hastings to work in a freezing factory before he was born.

His great-uncle was fluent in Maori, but didn’t use it much. “He belonged to that generation who believed that if you want to progress, you must be as Pākehā as you can, because his experience as a Maori of the jungle was that this was a disadvantage, not an advantage.”

It wasn’t until Williams went to the University of Victoria in the early 1980s that he decided to study Maori, then law.

“I learned the inmate of the joy that the world finally makes sense. And I learned the law out of optimism that if I was the agent for the destruction of my koroua’s mana, I could also be the agent for the reconstruction of the mana of his mokopuna and his great mokopuna, and this is how I got here, really. . “

Justice Williams was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2019, the first Maori person to sit there.

We used to think that our law was a modern antipodean version of the laws carried here in 1840, what he calls “Cook’s law.”

“But that is no longer washed away, because Kupe’s law has entered the room.”

Kupe was the explorer who, according to many iwi, discovered Aotearoa.

Cook’s system, Judge Williams says, is based on the idea of ​​”the dignity and autonomy of the individual.” A person’s relationship with the planet is expressed in terms of property rights, and her economic and social well-being is controlled by the law of contract.

Tikanga Māori at first glance would appear to be the opposite, he says.

“It recognizes the dignity and autonomy of the individual. But only as part of a group. “

It emphasizes community values, called whanaungatanga, the law of kinship, so that rights and obligations are defined by virtue of blood relationships, he says. This whanaungatanga extends to the world, rivers and land.

The difference between property rights in a river and kinship with a river is that one gives you the right to use it, unless there is a parliamentary law that says you cannot; the other imposes obligations because it is your relationship.

Judge Williams says there is danger in an approach that only considers property rights, individuality over all, and contract-controlled relationships.

But the legal system doesn’t necessarily have to be binary, he says. The tikanga approach has started to capture people’s interest in Aotearoa.

“Interestingly, I think where we are getting to is that Tikanga seems to be civilizing the most barbarous aspects of Enlightenment individualization. Put it that way. “

The challenge is “to integrate, synthesize, weave the best of these two systems into something that is bigger and better than each one individually.”

Today there is hardly any government operation that does not have a Maori aspect, in which Maori Tikanga is involved in its operation.

Judge Williams says he understands that there is now a proposal for mainstream universities to include compulsory education in Tikanga in their law degree and a separate Maori law degree.

Their perception is that the majority of Waikato students are now Maori, making up “maybe 20%, 25%” in Auckland and Victoria.

The increasing inclusion of Maori tikanga in the law did not come about by any revolutionary means, he says.

“He came into the room because Parliament has said so … it is extremely difficult to be an effective lawyer these days if you do not have the basic knowledge of tikanga.

The judges themselves “do not want to be instruments of racial oppression.”

“They do not do it”.

However, the situation remains quite bleak for Maori and the law, he says. “There are still, as you know, too many Maori who are being clients of the criminal justice system or the child welfare system.”

“Picking up those pieces and gluing them back together in a kind of cohesive look” is not going to happen overnight.

Part of that is incorporating the idea that the inmate is something for everyone, he says. Something everyone can be proud of.

Language makes you a better person, he says, and it’s something you should be proud of, not something you should get rid of.