Mfirst inkling that I had whānau in Ōtaki was when I was a young court reporter in Levin. I came across the whānau name on charge sheets. I would later discover that these names were from my grandmother's brother, who had 13 kids. He served in C Company of the 28th Māori Battalion. I didn't know this at the time I glanced at those charge sheets, and I didn't know enough about my own history to have the confidence to make contact. At that stage, I had only the family's name, and for most of my life up until that point, I didn't even have that. Closed adoption does that; cuts all the strands of relationships before they have even had a chance of being established.
Over the intervening years, I've had intermittent contact with that whānau, mainly at tangi. Three of the younger members ended up in Kohitere Boys' Training Centre in Levin for short stints. Two of those ended up in a gang, and one died in gang violence. None of the other whānau have ended up in gangs.
I don't know them well enough to tell the story of what went on there. But one of the cousins said her brother simply won't talk about it. Knowing what I know from other survivors, I've got a pretty good idea why. I've spent the past eight years covering the abuse of children in the custody of the state. On that journey, I regularly found that many of the children who ended up in the state's welfare homes were the descendants of 28th Māori Battalion members.
The whole premise of the Māori Battalion and the argument that Sir Apirana Ngata made for its formation was that the Treaty of Waitangi carried with it obligations to serve the Crown in times of conflict. It would also prove that Māori were worthy of the equality of citizenship, which in practical terms was not a reality. Ngata titled his argument the price of citizenship.
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