Intermarriage In The
p. 60 · Read in the full issue
Islands
Letter to the -Editor IN your issue of March, a Fijian reader, E. Raivoka, states that “any mis cegenation is criminal,” with regard to the intermarriage of Islanders and white persons. This appears to me a sweeping generalisation.
As one of the “accused,” and one who cheerfully pleads guilty in the first de gree, I would like to show a different view of this alleged “Pacific problem,” which here at Mangaia is no problem at all.
I assume that Fijian-Euronesians possess the same land rights as full blooded Fijians. If so, there should be no “half-caste problem.” Here at Mangaia, the child inherits the mother’s lands and has the same standing as both a Euro pean and a Maori. I can well imagine that a large, landless, unanchored half
caste community, keeping to itself as a group and perhaps despising the full blooded native as an inferior, is undesir able, both from native and Administra tion points of view. I have never seen such a group in the Cook Islands. I would say that it is not the racial mix ing, but the lack of “foundation,” in half-caste society, that is evil. As in dividuals, the Euronesians are no more “mongrels” than the “full-blooded” islanders. Half-castes with one white parent are usually very good types here; but even this, according to our Fijian critic, is so undesirable that the white man who marries a native girl should be deported.
Raivoka should surely be aware, with his obvious education and culture, that even the allegedly full-blooded native is not of pure Polynesian or Melanesian ancestry. The Fijians, like the Maori, are the product of racial blendings. The origin of the races was in the meeting of two distinct racial groups—Africans and Arabs, for example—by pure accident of navigation.
I must also disagree with the “PIM” editor’s suggestion that inter-marriage is, perhaps, “socially unwise.” Why is it?
We of Mangaia do not find this so.
The concluding editorial statement, that “natural law seems to offer no barrier whatever” to miscegenation is in accord with my own contention that Nature does not object to it, and there fore men should not call it a crime.
I am, etc.,
Edwin Gold.
Mangaia, May 5.
Mi*. R. L. Hartley, who has been appointed Agricultural Education Officer, Fiji, is due to sail from the United King dom on August 26.