From my university office, I look out on the main street of New Zealand’s largest city, a street full of faces representing a wealth of nationalities. Looking at this bustling multicultural reality, the future for diversity education in New Zealand seems exciting and positive. We are poised to build on strong traditions of tolerance of cultural difference based on recognition of our founding constitutional accord, the Treaty of Waitangi, signed between indigenous Maori chiefs and representatives of British people in 1840.

Originally a blueprint for bicultural relationship, the Treaty of Waitangi issued two forms of intercultural guarantee: assured equity in cultural decision-making, enabling Maori to retain control over those resources important to sustain their traditions, social world, and economic asset base; and a set of implicit relational goals and ethics (honor, good faith, mutual benefit, and compromise) that defined how each culture was to treat the other within their shared land.

History after 1840 followed the colonizing path encountered the world over. Maori were dispossessed of lands and resources, and social and economic ways of sustaining community were progressively eroded. Today, educational achievement for Maori mirrors that of many minority populations, associated with socio-economic poverty, health and justice challenges, and self-efficacy shortfalls in Maori youth. Recovery has been a slow, hard-fought journey that has depended significantly on moral commitment arising from European New Zealanders’ beliefs in liberal social justice and civil rights.

The Treaty of Waitangi is currently the focus of much public rancor, and the race relationship between Maori (15 percent of the population) and European New Zealanders (70 percent of the population) is significantly strained. National media, more intent on identifying excesses and racial disharmony than ensuring fair reportage, can misrepresent positive cultural renaissance as reflecting negative racial preference or racially uneven “special rights”. As a result, many European New Zealanders have become upset at affirmative action and funding policies favoring Maori. Recent poll results show a popular backlash against cultural inclusion, and the opposition political party has promised to repeal all race-based funding and legal supports if elected in 2005. Many New Zealanders are now pondering how to resolve the inter-racial tension in ways that preserve open doors for creative diversity, while restoring the unity needed to peacefully coexist.

Undoubtedly, the bicultural framework is overdue for integration with a multicultural reality that demands inclusion for other minority cultures, alongside Maori. For example, Pacific Island peoples living in New Zealand have only recently gained their own separate attention and funding for education development. In the meantime, substantial immigration has taken place, particularly from Asia, which has profoundly altered New Zealand’s ethnic demographics. European New Zealanders (and some Maori) may be more fearful of growing demands
for cultural inclusion than they are able to honor the bicultural progress.

Greater awareness is needed of the social and developmental gains made in building positive relations from recognition for minority people and mandatory consideration of their cultural and social goals. Many people have advanced their intercultural development by participating in professional and continuing education on the Treaty and Maori minority aspirations. Still more have expanded their multicultural experience by becoming involved in Maori arts, entertainment, sports, and cultural celebrations. In the process, we have created banks of intercultural capital that should serve us well in a multicultural future.

Community cohesion is another positive outcome, grown in activities created in response to affirmative actions that flow through to funding criteria and generate specific development projects. For example, immersion Maori language programs in preschool (“kohanga reo” or language nests) have established a strong basis for Maori medium education, fueling self esteem recovery and cultural pride in all generations, from preschoolers to Kaumatua (wisdom leader) elders. Elders are revered in Maori life and many are engaged in the enriched cultural life and in support of Maori education.

Given room to self-design, New Zealand’s universities have built individual responses to inclusion, but all make room available in policies, administrative and academic positions, and with structural responses such as Maori faculties or departments, and research centers dedicated to Maori research issues. Other responses include intercultural staff development, student support services for Maori students, Maori mentorship programs, and equity programs optimizing Maori student success.

These programs are just beginning to succeed. Young Maori are participating at relatively high rates in tertiary education (albeit largely at pre-graduate certificate and diploma levels or in ‘informal’ universities). Public science funding targets requiring research to respond to Maori inclusion is building a healthy knowledge economy in minority development issues, and supporting young Maori graduate endeavors. In 2004, New Zealand has close to 30 Maori doctoral graduates, with more in process. Twenty years ago, there were four.

Our race relationship has achieved many benefits on which we should continue to build.

The key word may be ‘relationship’. The importance of relationship to support minority student success is being borne out by research focused on teacher-student interaction. Staff development investments were designed to build teacher knowledge of the Treaty of Waitangi, Maori cultural values, and the goals of Maori students, to give teachers a strongerbase for their teaching and learning relationship with Maori.

Interim results show that healthy intercultural teacher-student relationships are reflected in greater retention rates for minority students, improved discipline and attendance, and higher pass rates. As university funding is soon to be partially dependent on those measures of teacher-student performance, all universities could benefit from increasing the skills of tertiary teachers to confidently engage with students within their own relevant cultural contexts.

A focus on intercultural relationship may make the best incremental gains for diversity inclusion in those decision making areas that are often the most difficult to regulate, where important decisions are made that rely on the personal commitment and discretion of the individual making them. Examples include university hiring choices, willingness to involve minority staff in collaborative projects, sharing opportunities with minority people, grants and funding decisions, and other discretionary choices that either show inclusion in action or result in its nonachievement. We know people make changes about what they believe about other cultures from engaging in experiences where they successfully relate to people within the other culture. These experiences occur on an individual level and are proven to create beneficial changes in the cognitive and affective orientations of the individual. Building individual competency to relate across cultures may encourage positive choices and actions within those private and work spaces where accountability is a matter of individual choice.

People know what harms human relationships even when they are struggling to locate positives. Focusing on the relational domain invites each educator, student, or university staff member into a process of selfdevelopment from a position of innate efficacy that can better support them to take up the challenges of unfamiliar intercultural territory.

Finally, Maori and European New Zealanders are attempting to locate a way forward over divisive power sharing and cultural inclusion issues. The appeal to relationship asks each person to consciously consider the impacts of how his or her actions on the ongoing interrelationships that we must sustain together. By acknowledging our interdependence, relational responsibility may enable us to honor each other’s rich cultural diversity for its value instead of counting it as a cost.