Tina Ngata

The recent rise in anti-Indian racism across Aotearoa is not new, patterns of racism tend to cycle through different non-white migrants every few years, one year targeting Chinese communities, the next Indian, the next from the African continent. Consistently throughout that time, Māori are also targeted, often along the same lines but with subtle differences. And every time, there are large portions of the targeted groups who participate in the targeting of others.

This isn’t a new thing. Inter-ethnic discrimination has been observed, and thought about, and commented on for a long time. If we look back to the history of modern racism, we can see that Europeans saw “difference” (like skin colour and beliefs) and coded it as being “lesser than”. Their construction of the “other” (ie non-European, non-Christian groups) was therefore always going to be “lesser than” themselves.

Liberational thinkers like Frantz Fanon wrote at length on the “colonial binary” in which the coloniser represents civilization, humanity, and value, and the colonised represents the opposite. He further noted that when people absorb this idea of a hierarchy where groups have the “right to oppress”, they can often act out their aggression on each other, because punching down, and across is so much easier than punching up. When you attack someone who is also seen as an enemy by the colonial oppressor, you are able to leverage all of that systemic colonial hate against your target. When we understand this dynamic, we can see it for what it truly is: the wound inflicted from the coloniser, discharged sideways towards the mutually colonised. The “sideways” aspect is how it gets its name: Lateral Racism.

While the script and context might vary, this is just as true when we are looking at an Indian politician being racist towards Māori, and is also true when we see Māori being racist towards non-white migrants – particularly those who come from colonised nations.

Stories between the mutually colonised are not often spoken of, for a number of reasons: the coloniser prefers to centre themselves; the coloniser fears solidarity amongst the colonised; and the colonial machine extracts a lot of energy from the colonised – which means the limited energy reserves tend towards uplifting our own or critiquing the coloniser rather than learning about, and building community with the mutually colonised.

But as I wrote about in my previous blog, in spite of many beautiful and inspiring stories of when we have come together in love and solidarity, we also have a long history of standing alongside white supremacists against non-white migrant New Zealanders.

One of the dominant racist narratives is the suggestion that migrants are “taking over” – and interestingly, this reliable racist trope goes back even further than the migrant communities themselves do. The first anti-Chinese league formed in Nelson in 1857, nine years before the first recorded Chinese settlers even arrived (it was really about white miners wanting to block Chinese miners from arriving in the goldfields as they had in Australia); it was swiftly joined by the Anti-Asiatic League and the White Race League. By the time the White New Zealand league started in Pukekohe, European race theory was already well-entrenched in the country, and even though little over 600 Indians were in the country at the time, it was still considered “too many”. Although it was framed in the language of a “takeover”, in Pukekohe in 1926, where the White New Zealand League started, there were only seventeen Indians and thirty Chinese in a population exceeding thirteen thousand.

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In 1898 politician and historian William Pember Reeves wrote:

“The average colonist regards a Mongolian with revulsion, a Negro with contempt, and looks on an Australian black as very near to a wild beast; but he likes the Maoris, and is sorry that they are dying out.”

The White New Zealand League leveraged off these ideas to recruit Māori into their project of a racially pure New Zealand.

The practice of recruiting Indigenous people into white supremacy is not new, or distinct to our history. Throughout history, and around the world, Indigenous peoples have been manipulated by colonisers into adopting their racist viewpoints. In so-called United States, Indigenous peoples were told that if they adopted European agricultural practices – including enslaved African labour – they would be granted the same rights as white settlers (which never eventuated).  The Belgians notoriously used divide and rule in Rwanda and Burundi to favour the minority Tutsi community, coding them as akin to Europeans racially superior to the majority Hutu, which eventually led to the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Likewise, Māori were spoken of as the “Aryans of the Pacific” and recruited into solidarity with the “White New Zealand” project.

Understanding how this tactic works requires us to understand the distinctiveness of how colonial racism is directed towards Indigenous people as opposed to migrant groups. Racism is rarely about imposing a racial hierarchy for its own sake, it is more often than not a tool for economic power. Migrants are racialised to restrict economic participation or to keep them at the bottom for the purposes of labour extraction. Indigenous peoples (including Māori) are racialised to absorb, assimilate, or eradicate as a distinct people who pose a standing challenge to the legitimacy of settler-colonial political authority and land-ownership.

Recruiting Māori into white supremacist hierarchies against other racialised groups reinforces the European racial order, indirectly justifying the ongoing acquisition of Māori land on the grounds that we were being improved by contact with European civilisation rather than harmed by it. It also undermined the basis for tino rangatiratanga by treating Māori as individuals capable of private property ownership rather than as collective peoples with territorial rights.

In effect, for over 150 years, Māori have been manipulated into European racism, as a distinct form of colonial assimilation, supporting a project that can only ever result in our own dispossession and eradication.

Of course, at no time is this more obvious than during election years, where the White New Zealand project is again advanced through triggering racist fear:

This year has already seen New Zealand First triggering fear over a “Butter Chicken Tsunami”, and ACT have now released their racist immigration policy, which includes compulsory English language requirements for work visas.

• The 2023 elections were run on anti-Māori campaigns, including a New Zealand First candidate labelling Māori a “disease” that the party will “cut out” and framing Māori co-governance as “apartheid”, meanwhile Winston Peters ran on an anti-Māori wards campaign.

  
  

• The 2020 General elections included a policy to “curb immigration” until Māori housing demand was met, incorrectly inferring that migrants were to blame for the housing crisis (as opposed to speculative housing markets, AirBnB conversions, and the gutting of social housing) and pitting Māori interests against migrant interests.

  
  

• The 2017 elections involved aggressive anti-immigration campaigns by New Zealand First, positioning migrants as a competing threat to employment, housing, and infrastructure, whilst also attacking Māori as beneficiaries and economic drains.

  
  

• The 2014 elections saw Winston peters again throwing migrants (this time, Chinese) under the bus as a threat to national identity and housing prices, alongside the regular narratives of Māori as criminal threats.

Looking across the elections, the most consistently racist party has been New Zealand First, of which the two most senior politicians are Māori – which makes lateral racism one of the strongest features of New Zealand electoral politics. It should come as no surprise that they are again relying on racist narratives this electoral year. It works well for them, and we certainly aren’t giving them a reason to stop.

If you want a deeper look at the crystal ball, Dr Harpreet Singh has provided the following table to outline how race-baiting narratives work in relation to migrant groups:

So Māori are recruited into the White New Zealand Project through racist ideas about migrants getting in the way of jobs, houses and access to services.

Meanwhile, migrants are being recruited into the White New Zealand Project through racist ideas about Māori being criminals and violent thugs.

And BOTH groups are being recruited into the White New Zealand Project through the likes of New Zealand First who, like clockwork, frame both migrants and Māori as threats to a White New Zealand national identity.

If there is any light in this tunnel, it is signalled by the fact that we also have a long history of standing in solidarity with each other. Māori in solidarity with Muslim communities after the Christchurch Mosque terrorist attacks; Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga showing up consistently for Māori and te Tiriti over the years; the MultiCultural Society support for Te Tiriti and Matike Mai; intergenerational Māori support for Palestine; Singh support for rural Māori communities in Tairāwhiti and South Aucklanders in need; the Springbok tour protests; Māori, Chinese and Indian solidarity through market garden communities; Māori solidarity with Pacific communities during the Dawn Raids; Māori solidarity with targeted Dalmatian and Chinese migrants going back to the 1800s. There is much to be proud of, and to build upon, but in order for us to reach our fullest potential, and stand in true solidarity with each other, we must remove the weapon of lateral race-baiting from the hands of power, and doing that requires us to face up to it, acknowledge its existence, and understand it.

If we fail to do so, we risk maintaining the project of White New Zealand, even on behalf of our own colonisers. That can never be called tino rangatiratanga.

Warning: This article contains extreme racist hate speech and acts.

Over the years I’ve been writing, much of my time on this blog has been spent talking about colonial racism against Māori and Indigenous peoples. Today I want to talk about anti-Indian racism, operating through all of us.

The haka happened, yes, but that was not all:

• There was also the graffiti in front of Papatoetoe Central School (that’s a school for five to eleven year olds, many of whom are Indian) saying “Kill All Indians”.
• A further call to kill all Indians was then spray-painted in a public space in Royal Oak
• MP Shane Jones declared that the NZ-Indian Free Trade Agreement would result in a “Butter Chicken Tsunami”
• Mayor Wayne Brown called an Indian RNZ staff member a “Muslim terrorist”

We can’t deny that these are all connected. The news did not really report on the incidents collectively (and even their individual reports did not get strong uptake in mainstream media) – and that in itself seems to speak to the normalising of anti-Indian hate in Aotearoa. When the haka and “butter chicken tsunami” was discussed in Māori spaces, though, what we saw was an outpouring of racism and gaslighting of the Indian community. In one moment, they were being told the haka was not about them (even though it clearly referenced their culture). In the next moment, they were being told that they were responsible for the words and actions of Parmjeet Parmar, that they should be doing more to shut her down, that there *are* too many of them over here, that they don’t “assimilate” enough into “New Zealand” culture, that they threaten our jobs, our access to housing, our national identity, that they needed to “toughen up” and take it, that this is their “FAFO” (f**k around, find out) moment. They were called an “imported problem”. And throughout it all, there were hundreds of likes, laughs, and loves of these extremely racist sentiments, from our own.

Even though many may assume that the harm begins and ends with the act or speech itself, for the affected communities, the ripples of harm keep hitting them as they watch the public comment over and over again with more racism against them.

Coincidentally, it was also ANZAC week, which is already a week of complex feelings for so many of us. Many of our tīpuna returned from the war completely jaded about the experience, regretted going, upon return were maltreated by the very country they believed they were putting their lives on the line for (and this remains the case even for today’s soldiers). For quite a few, it seems cruel that the price of citizenship is still demanded, even though the Crown itself does not uphold te Tiriti in the slightest. I have immense respect for the fact that many of our Pāpās were committed to the idea of going overseas to fight against violent racism and great sadness that in spite of that sacrifice, it is still all around us, today.

But even back then, anti-Indian racism was rampant in Aotearoa, and Indian soldiers were also maltreated by the nation they laid their lives down for. One of the earliest hate crimes against non-Māori was in 1920, when a group of Indian scrubcutters were surrounded by torch-wielding pākehā in Greytown, Wairarapa. That same year, the RSA had passed a resolution that the  ‘influx of Hindus and Chinese’ posed a threat to New Zealand, in spite of the fact that Indian soldiers fought for New Zealand alongside the Māori Pioneer Battalion.

As a Doctrine of Discovery researcher, it’s hard to miss the fact that the term “Hindus” was used as a racial slur against Indians. It’s a classic mark of the Doctrine of Discovery, that being non-Christian is what targets you as an enemy-of-Christ. It’s present in the very papal bulls which set the colonial project in motion:

“we grant to you by these present documents, with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be” (Dum Diversas 1452)

The Saracens were the Muslim. The pagans were anyone with a belief system tied to nature (ie Indigenous peoples). Indians became the intersection of these two categories of enemies of Christ. While 19th century racist scholars such as Max Müller referred to Hinduism as “nature worship” and placed it on a chain of existence below monotheistic (“single God”) religions, there was also a melding of Indians with the Middle East, in-part influenced through political developments such as the British partitioning of Pakistan and India, and in part also because the colonial gaze tends to meld all brown people together. Along this journey, the turban also grew to become a “Muslim” marker, regardless of the actual faith of the person wearing it. And so when Wayne Brown saw an Indian RNZ staff member wearing a turban and said “Security can’t be very tight if we’re being escorted by a Muslim terrorist”, he was speaking directly to a colonial fusion of Muslim and Indian people that goes back generations.

By 1926, with the support of Prime Minister Gordon Coates, the “White New Zealand League” was established to protect New Zealand from Chinese and Indian migrants, who apparently posed a threat to the racial integrity and economic prosperity of “White New Zealand”, and it found support among grower associations, labour organisations, local bodies, and the Returned Soldiers’ Association. Like many aspects of colonialism, these ideas were absorbed by Māori, and even though they were called the “White New Zealand League”, many Māori were co-opted into the “White New Zealand” movement.

Crucially, the White New Zealand League suggested that Indian and Chinese immigrants posed an existential threat to Māori communities, and in particular posed a sexual threat to wāhine Māori. This eventually led to the government establishing  a special committee to investigate and condemn intermingling of Māori with Chinese and Indian people.

By this time British officers and civil servants who had previously served in India, had already named New Zealand places Khyber Pass, Khandallah, Berhampore, Cashmere. A kind of memorium for the lands they just finished colonially plundering.

The coloniser would love you to believe that your colonisation was an isolated event, and that Indians are to blame for it. What the coloniser doesn’t want you to see is that colonialism is a single integrated global system in which the colonisation of one people was directly connected to the colonisation of others, including in India, what it doesn’t want you to know is that colonial domination is what drives migration – and what the coloniser is absolutely terrified of you doing, is standing together in unity against him.

This history of naming places after Indian sites of colonial plunder is in turn, is layered over another pertinent history – that the predecessor to the New Zealand Company, responsible for so much colonial land theft, is the British East India Company, both joint-stock-trading companies whose commercial purpose was colonial land-theft, and both receiving royal charters to do so (the East India Company in 1600, the New Zealand Company in 1841).

Chartered joint-stock companies such as the British East India Company became the blueprint for “corporate empire”: state-backed private entities exercising sovereign-like powers to organise extraction across territories. That’s exactly why corporations have more power than voting citizens these days. Prior to British colonialism, India was a textile trade-giant. Through colonialism, this model restructured a sophisticated Indian textile economy into a colonial supply chain in service of Britain, shifting production from high-value manufacturing to raw material extraction, and relocating profits to imperial centres.

This pattern became foundational to the global political economy. Whereas the Doctrine of Discovery created the concept of slave-destinies for particular races, its application in India became the basis of slave-labour which would be normalised in service of the global textile trade. This continues to shape contemporary textile industries, where production is outsourced to India or Bangladesh, value is centralised, and exploitation is a foundation stone of the entire economy. Many of your own favourite Māori clothing brands source their textiles from India, and while some (shoutout Aho Creative) openly speak to their commitment to work with ethical Indian suppliers, many do not. Shout out also to Misty Scurr for raising this awareness amongst our own.

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So when we speak about India as “whenua pōhara”, we must understand that term within the context a land that has been plundered by our own coloniser, a colonial brutality that includes the British Crown enforcing some 30 famines upon Indian people, to the point where it permanently changed Indian bodies for all of their uri.

We need to understand that colonial plunder of India and South Asia is ongoing, through a system that we, too, are complicit in. The global fashion industry is economically propped up by everyone’s silent support for Indian enslavement.  Nor is this confined to the textile industry. When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, plantation economies across the Caribbean and Pacific suddenly faced a labour shortage. Instead of ending exploitation, the system replaced enslaved Africans with “indentured” labourers from India (this ran concurrently with the practice of blackbirding across the Pacific, which saw large numbers of Pacific islanders illegally abducted, and trafficked into the plantation economy to replace liberated Black people). The indenture system carried Indians to Fiji, and one example of this history is The Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR Sugar) who needed labour for sugar plantations after enslavement of Africans was abolished, and initially they used blackbirded workers, but then the British-Fiji colonial government later shifted toward Indian indentured labour as a more “regulated” supply.

The “indentured” labour model, where they were promised pay, housing, and a return ticket home, but wound up more often than not being forced, underpaid or unpaid, confined to the plantation, violently abusive and their return home denied, came to underpin the model of labour utilised throughout the Pacific, and is still a common story told by Pacific workers in the horticultural industry in Aotearoa, today. Of course, as the global political economy took shape in the 20^th century, and New Zealand, leveraging off its colonial alliances, asserted itself as a regional bully in the Pacific region, extraction and exploitation came to characterise its approach to trade and politics across the Pacific region.

So when I look at the fact that today, research indicates that Indian, Asian and UAE people are the “least welcome” migrants here in Aotearoa, I can’t help but look at the intersections of anti-Blackness, anti-Asian racism and Islamophobia. I can’t help, as a Doctrine of Discovery researcher, but be aware of how being dark-skinned has operated as a signifier for slave-destinies, and it’s only through that fact that “dark-skinned” qualifies as an insult. I can’t help but be aware of how that intersection of anti-Black and anti-Asian racism has transmuted into our voluntary blindness for enslavement of Indian people in service of our fashion choices. I can’t help but see how this profoundly shaped our Pacific economies and labour practices.

I can’t help but look at the graffiti of “Kill all Indians” in Royal Oak and connect it to Destiny Church, who last year tore and stomped on religious flags belonging to the Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Palestinian communities. I can’t help but connect it to Islamophobia, to genocide in Gaza, and to the slaughter of Muslim prayer communities here in Otautahi (which we swore would never happen again, but are now charting a pathway to). I cannot help but see all of that within the fact that Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim are the “least welcome” religions in Aotearoa New Zealand.

I can’t NOT connect these two images

I cannot help but look at this same message painted in front of a school for five to eleven year olds just last week and think of those poor babies seeing that on the ground, and the fear it struck into their hearts. I can’t help but see this, and consider the work of Ara Alam-Simmons and other researchers who have tracked and documented the extreme racism that children from these communities experience every day in New Zealand schools.

I cannot help but view this in light of the fact that we know, not think but know that hate crime stems from hate speech. That it does not occur all by itself, but is a culmination of people degraded and abused for political and personal point-scoring, and dehumanised until their very lives become expendable.

I cannot help but connect that to the fact that the Doctrine of Discovery is based upon destroying everything that is most sacred to non-European, non-Christian communities, and always has been. Their ceremonies, dance, prayer, markings, and even their children.

I see all of this, and I cannot help but stand against it – because I understand, absolutely and completely, that the story of their oppression, is the story of my oppression too.

And to finish, I leave us with this beautiful composition from two of my favourite Māori poets, Abby Hauraki and Rangimārie Sophie Jolley

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