John taught me how to move away from aid and on to development, where people become the subject of their own liberation.
John Curnow taught us the value of examining the words, particularly in church documents. Church people use a lot of intention in those, government departments too. They all come out of that agency of persuasion. They don’t use guns, they don’t use that hard army to come down on us, but they do it through schools, they do it through the pulpit. Those are the two main ways. Even through Girl Guides—they do their Māori culture badge, they perpetuate all those innocuous middle-class values. It’s what Pākehā society is built on—the Plunket, the schools and all those supporting institutions, thousands of them. Most of them have no understanding of how institutional structures work, particularly churches and schools.
John gave us a process too where we could conduct our thoughts in an orderly way. We had all this passion and this fire burning in our belly but it needed some framework, some structure. His first step was telling our story—‘the significant turning point in your life.’
We put together a Māori conscientisation workshop in the Eighties—that was the first stage. Then I was able to adapt what John Curnow had done and become much freer. John said, ‘I tried to get people to work from aid to development. It’s not just giving money or a tractor when there is a typhoon. It’s a bit more than that.’ That didn’t go down well with the church. Then Mānuka Hēnare and others began working with students on a simplified praxis model called ‘See, Judge and Act.’
There was a priest called Father Dennehy who—after the First World War—met with small groups of mostly students and workers, and they asked, ‘What’s happening? What are some of the causes?’ and ‘What can we do?’ You had to do an action. So it was a simplified version of praxis—reflect and choose a situation, an experience, an issue you are involved in a parish, in your community, a justice issue. Analyse it. Look at the factors that influence it, the nature of the persons, evaluate it from a Christian perspective and try to reach a conclusion about what action to take. Denounce what is wrong. Announce the values of the kingdom and stand in solidarity. John Curnow went to Paulo Freire when he was here. John had a very strong intellectual base, which in a way we didn’t—we knew more by gut feeling. We just knew because we lived it in our bare bones. But he taught us so much. All of these questions rang a
2 Concepts from Cri2cal Theory
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Sister Makareta Tawaroa
bell. ‘Who are the poor and why are they poor?’ Spiritual reading and other things that we had in our training—everything rang a bell. When we had groups—mostly Māori women—they could identify with the double oppression of being women, and being black, and being poor. The feminisation of poverty—mostly brown faces. While we didn’t know the words we certainly had experience of that.
John said to us, ‘I didn’t understand. I went over South Africa and the blacks were in jail. I went over to America and by and large they were either Hispanics or blacks. I go over to Australia and it is all Aborigines—no wonder it’s Māori people here. There is a systemic pattern that pervades this all. John used to say, ‘Good theory comes out of good practice. Unless we ask hard questions and name issues we get nowhere. The truth has to be spoken.’ That is so right.
John set out for us a simple process, that didn’t exist before the Eighties, which helps make sense of experiences by putting them in a broader picture. I think everyone can do it. Ask ,‘Who are the poor? Why are they poor? Who benefits?’ You need know no more than that. And just let people come.
Another key question that John asked was, ‘Where do we get our information from?’ Wherever he went he challenged what people said with, ‘Where did you get that information from?’
SOURCE
Sister Makareta Tawaroa, Freire at the flaxroots: analysis and action in Aotearoa (Auckland Workers Educational Association)
© Sister Makareta Tawaroa, 2014: Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand License. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/nz/ for full information.