Inter-Marriage

Professor's Views On

PROFESSOR Ralph Piddington of the Department of Anthropo logy, Auckland University College, NZ, thinks that the blending of the Maori and European races would be a retrograde step —an “under-privi

leged and despised community” was how he expressed it.

He feels that the two races should live side by side, respecting each other’s views, but not intermarrying.

The professor apparently bases his theory on the fact that the rural Maori who drifts to the cities be comes an unskilled worker, but it is not the sort of theory we expect from anthropologists, and is directly opposed to the views of such men as Sir Peter Buck and Sir Apirana Ngata, both men of mixed descent who believed that in the future the Maori would gradually be absorbed by the European New Zealander and that it would not be a bad thing.

There has been nothing to suggest either in New Zealand or the Pacific Islands, that what the professor fear has happened, although there hai already been a century of inter marriage.

Almost invariably, the people a mixed descent strive for a highe; standard of living than their nativ 1 forebears and such unions have prc duced their fair quota of outstand ing men and women in commercial cultural and scientific fields.

There has been no proof of great grandfather’s theory that people a mixed blood inherited the faults a both parents.

As the professor was addressing group of Maori schoolteachers whe; he said all this, his remarks can bi interpreted in several ways. It ma: be that he cynically believes tha European civilisation has had it, am that any step away from simpll savagery is not only retrograde bu downright foolhardy.

And. in that case, the professa may well be right.