Reimagining what it means to be a gang

Gangs have an opportunity to redefine themselves as part of the Māori social movement, writes Denis O’Reilly, a lifetime member of Black Power.

 

The gang “patch ban” has created a discontinuity, and, within that, an opportunity for the membership of Aotearoa’s Indigenous gangs to reflect and reorient.

If the absence of patches means that gang members are less annoying to the public, then maybe they’ll be less annoying to each other. Indeed, members may well ask themselves what the patch was about anyway.

Those who are committed to crime as a lifestyle will no doubt continue their nefarious ways. That is, they’ll consolidate as organised crime groups. But others (and I would say the majority) might well choose to redefine themselves as part of a current Māori social movement.

Several factors are driving this possibility: The findings of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, the demography of our Indigenous gangs, and the leadership role of Māori women personified in Te Arikinui Nga wai hono i te po Paki.

In my daily work, I often use the theory proposed by psychologist Carl Jung that a troubled individual needs first to acknowledge that they have a problem, and then to see a viable resolution.

The Royal Commission’s Whanaketia report provides perhaps three generations of gang whānau with some sort of explanation as to why they are as they are. Knowing that they are a consequence of a stuffed-up system opens the door to healing and repair.

When the Indigenous gangs kicked off in Aotearoa, they were essentially a disenfranchised teenage peer group. David Lange commented at the time that the word “gang” was wrong: “They were bound together in some sort of comradeship or exuberance or rebellion, but it wasn’t that they were professional criminals.”

These days, the demography of the gang reflects that of Māori society in general and includes older (hopefully wiser) heads with a shared experience.

And women. Despite the misogynistic hyper-masculinity of gang membership, the influence of the kōhanga reo movement, kura kaupapa and wānanga Māori, programmes like E Tū whānau, and the impact of tribal identity, identity as Māori, and whānau membership, have allowed gang members to start to come in from the marginalised cold and pivot back to simply being Māori mums and dads.

And within that reality, the importance of the mother, of the whaea as leader, has become sacrosanct.

Next weekend, a relatively small group of us will gather in Te Arawa with the whānau pani of Reitu Noble Harris to conclude, by way of a hura kōhatu, the seven-year cycle of grief for our whānau member, friend and rōpū founder. It will be time to reflect and hopefully renew.

Reitu is credited with (or cursed for) founding and leading the Black Power gang in Aotearoa. This was in Te Whanganui-a-Tara in 1970. There are other rōpū foundation claimants, earlier stories from other places, but if leadership is determined by followship, then it was Reitu who we followed.

Founding Black Power in Aotearoa wasn’t a politically conscious act. It was a spontaneous declaration in a moment of conflict, but it led to a movement on the social periphery that adopted as its emblem Te Ringa Kati, the upraised fist — the anti-racist symbolism of the global Black Power movement.

At some level, a political consciousness had been sown in Reitu’s mind through the upraised fist of Black athletes at the 1968 Olympics, and, closer to home, by the kōrero of educated urban Māori leaders such as Syd Jackson in Ngā Tamatoa.

The rural to urban Māori diaspora had been well underway and the first generation of Māori rangatahi were clustering on the street. Mainstream commentators, Pākehā and Māori alike, were disturbed by the gathering rōpū of unemployed and out-of-school youth who congregated in groups and were viewed and described through the optic of American gangs.

Just as today social media promotes North American “gangsta” hyper-materialism and off-road dirt-bike pack hijinks, so, too, in that time, did Aotearoa’s rangatahi Māori pick up on the wearing of patches and hyper-masculine behaviour.

The late Dr Carl Bradley (Ngāti Hauiti, Clan Donald) explored this phenomenon in his book, Outlaw Bikers and Ancient Warbands: Hyper-Masculinity and Cultural Continuity. He argued that codes of honour, loyalty and bravery can be found in many male groups, such as the police, the military and sports teams. If we want to understand hyper-masculinity and face it as a society, then we need to recognise that our nation’s gangs reflect behaviour that has a very long tradition.

From another perspective, Robbie Shilliam, a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University, predicted that Aotearoa’s gangs could become political and that their formation was a form of civil disturbance — “a social movement of Māori resistance” against the genocidal effects of urbanisation and assimilation policies.

In the 1980s, Black Power’s political advisor was the late “Burma” Bill Maung Maung, who put it this way: “Black Power has got three things which are necessary for any political organisation to succeed. They’ve got organisation, discipline and courage. And with these three things, they should be able to set up — not a political party so much as a movement.”

However, then, just as today, there was an evolving moral panic about gangs, specifically Māori gangs. The views of supposed concerned citizens, and a call for law and order to be restored, were exaggerated and politicised, in effect scapegoating to blur significant social issues that remain unaddressed.

In 1980, Reitu Harris ran as a candidate for Matiu Rata’s Mana Motuhake, a Māori political party, bringing together 37 chapters as a collective voice. This signalled a desire among Aotearoa’s Indigenous street gangs to actively challenge colonisation and to build the practice of community self-sufficiency over dependency, and Māoriness as a positive mode of being within a social movement.

Reitu Harris died on Sunday, July 9, 2017, but the roopu that he founded and led has continued, grown, and matured. As I’ve stated, the focus has shifted away from “gangsta” towards whānau. At the time of Reitu’s death, the economy was humming, and I wrote this:

To memorialise Reitu, get a marketable skill and get a job! We’re in a building boom. If you can drive a machine, erect scaffold, wield a hammer, or do more highly skilled things, there are employers crying out for you. We have the numbers and are a potential nationwide workforce. If you want to be a gang member, then be a member of a work gang.

If we grow our construction skills, we then have the potential to come together and help each other build our own homes for our whānau. The horticultural industry has a desperate need for a labour force, particularly if it is self-organising. The hospitality industry needs people, too.

Why even entertain crime when, through a job or self-enterprise, you can earn a legitimate dollar? If it’s legitimate, you get to keep it! If eligible, make sure you are registered to vote and exercise that vote. Make sure three others do likewise. Exercise your rights and influence policy. Look at the policies of the various parties and ask yourself where they line up with Reitu’s values of “mana Māori motuhake”.

Remember too that every right has a responsibility, the responsibility of being a law-abiding citizen. Part of the answer to reversing the criminal policies that see Māori people in jail and returning to jail sits with us in our own behaviours and lifestyles. Control what we can and hammer the system over the balance.

There is a deep-seated fear among many tangata Tiriti, particularly new immigrants, especially those from South Africa and Zimbabwe, who see Indigenous peoples as “savages” and who believe that the incarceration of Indigenous men is required to keep the community safe. I often wonder if, at some visceral level, they see the gang members as Māori coming to collect the rent.

Reimagining what being a “gang” means is complex and requires rejecting the imposed criminal connotations, not only by voice but in action, placing whānau at the heart of lifestyle, and moving away from gangsterism.

Sociologist Robert Henry, talking about Latino communities in the US, mused that for a gang to become a social movement, it requires the involvement of radical intellectuals, the evolution of new leadership, anticolonial consciousness, avoiding parochial turf wars, and the political development of and demands of the female members.

Dare I wish, but I believe that those driving forces are currently in play among the Black Power gang, particularly the emergence of wāhine toa, the “Sisters of the Fist”, as a leadership group within the “Whānau of the Fist”.

In the years following Reitu’s death, by way of a series of wānanga held with “rangatira hou”, upcoming leaders — at Ngongotaha, at Tauranga Ika marae and Wai o Turi marae in Taranaki, and at Tarukenga marae in Rotorua — a fresh kōrero “Oranga Mana Ake 2070” began to develop for the Black Power gang. The values necessary to shift from gang to social movement were defined as:

Pono: Be honest and open with each other. Be sure of the validity of information. Only use highly trusted sources.

Kotahi: Despite any differences of opinion or belief stay united. Collaborative. Unified. Indivisible.

Whānau: Centre everything on the safety and wellbeing of our whānau. Stay interconnected. Nurture.

Manaaki: Put a priority on looking after those in need. Stay respectful, dedicated, and committed.

Puawai: Despite present difficulties focus on the future. Be the best we possibly can be. Relentlessly pursue excellence.

Ringa kaha: Be staunch, be courageous. Do whatever it is we have to do.

Each participating chapter was encouraged to develop an action plan to take them through to 2070. Essentially, the plan was to follow the objectives of being healthy, wealthy and wise. The action headings are:

Tinana. Be whānau focused. Have access to health services. Be better parents and partners. Maintain self-fitness and well-being.

Taonga. Be employed or be an employer. Be in a secure tenancy or in your own home. Be self-sufficient. Be entrepreneurial and involved in legitimate commerce. Have capital investments. Build a positive reputation in the community.

Mātauranga. In te ao Māori, this means being competent in te reo, tikanga conscious, and knowing your club whānau whakapapa as well as your toto whakapapa. And in te ao hurihuri (the changing modern world), it means being literate, numerate and qualified, and getting certified in your mahi.

It’s said that in an age of discontinuities, the only thing you can be certain of is that you can’t be certain. I don’t know what lies ahead of us, but I do know that if we put whānau at the centre of our lives, we will come through and be better for it.

 

Denis O’Reilly is a lifetime Black Power member. He lives at Waiohiki, Hawke’s Bay, where he chairs the Waiohiki Community Charitable Trust.

E-Tangata, 2024