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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN RACE, ETHNICITY,
INDIGENEITY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Neo-Colonial Injustice
and the Mass
Imprisonment of
Indigenous Women
Edited by
Lily George · Adele N. Norris
Antje Deckert · Juan Tauri
Palgrave Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Indigeneity
and Criminal Justice
Series Editors
Chris Cunneen
University of Technology Sydney
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Katheryn Russell-Brown
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL, USA
Shaun L. Gabbidon
Penn State Harrisburg
Middletown, PA, USA
Steve Garner
School of Social Sciences
Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
This pioneering series brings much-needed attention to minority,
excluded, and marginalised perspectives in criminology, centred on the
topic of ‘race’ and the racialization of crime and criminal justice systems.
It draws on a range of theoretical approaches including critical race the-
ory, critical criminology, postcolonial theory, intersectional approaches
and Indigenous theory. The series seeks to challenge and broaden the
current discourse, debates and discussions within contemporary crimi-
nology as a whole, including drawing on the voices of Indigenous people
and those from the Global South which are often silenced in favour of
dominant white discourses in Criminology.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15777
Lily George • Adele N. Norris
Antje Deckert • Juan Tauri
Editors
Neo-Colonial
Injustice and the
Mass Imprisonment
of Indigenous
Women
Editors
Lily George Adele N. Norris
Victoria University of Wellington University of Waikato
Wellington, New Zealand Hamilton, New Zealand
Antje Deckert Juan Tauri

Auckland University of Technology University of Waikato
Auckland, New Zealand Hamilton, New Zealand
Palgrave Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Criminal Justice

ISBN 978-3-030-44566-9 ISBN 978-3-030-44567-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44567-6
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

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Acknowledgements
Tēnā koutou katoa; ngā mihi mahana kia koutou. This book emerges
from Aotearoa New Zealand through four people passionate about issues
relating to incarceration and Indigenous peoples; in this case, the mass
imprisonment of Indigenous women. Our stories here in Aotearoa—
while unique—are also similar to those of Indigenous people in the
United States, Canada and Australia. It made sense, then, to explore fur-
ther those similarities, while articulating their distinctive histories and
contemporary circumstances.
Many thanks to all contributors for your hard work in getting the
chapters written and to us in good time. It is often the way that Indigenous
academics and activists are very busy, having to satisfy obligations not
only to our professional organisations, but also to our people and com-
munities. Thanks are also given to our people and communities, there-
fore, who nurture and feed us in a myriad of ways, who teach us and help
us grow into our roles, including telling us to ‘back off’ when needed!
Thanks to those contributors who were courageously vulnerable in
sharing some of their own experiences of incarceration and interaction
with the criminal justice system. Using those understandings to support
others in prison and as critical voices, honours the efforts of our ancestors
to create a world in which we all belong.
v
vi Acknowledgements
Thanks also to the non-Indigenous contributors for honouring the

places and spaces of your Indigenous collaborators. Indigenous peoples
have fought valiantly for many generations to retain, reclaim and stand
firm in the knowledges of our peoples, yet many understand now that
working with other peoples who have the heart and the passion for the
massive work ahead of us is a necessity—and that we are able to do so on
our own terms.
We are indebted to the staff at Palgrave Macmillan for their patience
and guidance which has seen us through to publication, Liam Inscoe-
Jones in particular.
We especially thank our colleagues, families and friends who sup-
ported our work in many ways behind the scenes.
New Zealand Ngā mihi

Lily George
Adele N. Norris
Antje Deckert
Juan Tauri—Aotearoa
Praise for Neo-Colonial Injustice and the Mass
Imprisonment of Indigenous Women
“For many years there has been a significant gap in the academic literature about the
fastest growing segment of the prison population in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia
and North America - indigenous women. ‘Decolonising our Futures’ not just plugs
the gap, it confronts it. Indigenous writers and their non-indigenous peers provide a
searing analysis, as they describe and explain the mass imprisonment of indigenous
women, and then explore the tools of resistance and change necessary to combat the
reality of neo-colonial racism. It will be an uncomfortable read for many, but a neces-
sary one, offering new knowledge and powerful insights to those grappling with this
significant issue. Ignore it at your peril.”
—Sir Kim Workman, New Zealand criminal justice advocate
of the Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa iwi
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Lily George, Adele N. Norris, Antje Deckert, and Juan Tauri
2 Stigmatising Gang Narratives, Housing, and the Social

Policing of Māori Women 13
Cassandra Lewis, Adele N. Norris, Waimirirangi Heta-Cooper,
and Juan Tauri
3 The Relationship Between Restorative Justice and Prison

Abolition 35
Naomi Sayers
4 Colonial Policies and Indigenous Women in Canada 53

Dawn M. Smith
5 The Mass Incarceration of Indigenous Women in Canada:

A Colonial Tactic of Control and Assimilation 79
Olga Marques and Lisa Monchalin
ix
x Contents
6 Transcending Colonial Legacies: From Criminal Justice to

Indigenous Women’s Healing103
Thalia Anthony, Gemma Sentance, and Lorana Bartels
7 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women in Australian

Prisons133
Hilde Tubex and Dorinda Cox
8 Mana Wahine Leadership After Prison155

Helena Rattray-Te Mana and Te Atawhai Nayda Te Rangi
9 What Was My Crime? Being an American Indian Woman173

Stormy Ogden
10 Trauma, Healing, and Justice: Native Hawaiian Women in

Hawaii’s Criminal Justice System193
Toni Bissen
11 Prison as Destiny? Descent or Dissent?223

Tracey McIntosh and Maja Curcic
12 Te Piringa Poho: Healing, Potential and Transformation

for Māori Women239
Lily George and Elaine Ngamu
Index269
Notes on Contributors
Thalia Anthony is of Cypriot heritage, including from the colonised

region, and works on Gadigal land. She researches systemic racism in law
enforcement and consequences for Indigenous women. Her books
include Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment and Decolonising
Criminology. She collaborates with Aboriginal organisations in research
and activism.
Lorana Bartels is a first-generation Australian of Dutch and European
Jewish heritage who works on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. She
researches sentencing, corrections and the treatment of women and
Indigenous peoples in the Australian criminal justice system and works
with Indigenous people in academia and government and non-
government organisations.
Toni Bissen is an attorney and administrator with over 25 years of expe-
rience working in the community non-profit sector. She serves as the
Executive Director of the Pūʻā Foundation. Her professional focus is
addressing issues of trauma underlying the disproportionate representa-
tion of Native Hawaiian women in prison.
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
Dorinda Cox is an Aboriginal (Noongar) woman. She has skills and

experience across a broad range of areas including cultural-specific policy
analysis, coaching, mentoring and leadership development. She has spe-
cific knowledge and work experience in the family and domestic violence
and sexual assault sectors.
Maja Curcic is Slovenian and came to New Zealand to research coloni-
sation, neo-colonisation and Māori hyper-incarceration. Her recently
completed doctoral study examined the violence continuum in the lives
of those who experienced incarceration. The study investigated the ongo-
ing process of the making of Māori hyper-incarceration with its destruc-
tive social, cultural, economic and political consequences.
Antje Deckert is Senior Lecturer (Criminology) at Auckland University
of Technology. Her research examines academic and media crime dis-
courses and their interactions with Indigenous peoples and epistemolo-
gies. She is co-editor of both the Palgrave Handbook of Australian and
New Zealand Criminology, Crime and Justice (2017) and the peer-reviewed
journal Decolonization of Criminology and Justice.
Lily George (Te Kapotai/Ngāpuhi tribes) is Adjunct Research Fellow
with Victoria University of Wellington. She serves as Chair of the New
Zealand Ethics Committee. Her research interests include Māori youth
development, incarceration of Māori and Indigenous women, and she
specialises in Indigenous community-based health and wellbeing research.
Waimirirangi Heta-Cooper (Te Aupouri, Ngai Takoto, Ngati Ranginui)
is a research assistant and an undergraduate student studying a conjoint
in Law and Māori and Indigenous studies at the University of Waikato,
New Zealand.
Cassandra Lewis (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairoa) is a post-graduate stu-
dent, tutor and Research Assistant in Sociology and Psychology pro-
gramme at the University Waikato, New Zealand. Her research interests
include Indigenous precarity and the social policing of Indigenous
women within the context of securing housing.
Notes on Contributors xiii
Olga Marques is Assistant Professor (Criminology) at the Ontario Tech

University, ON, Canada. Her research interests include the construction,
policing and regulation of gendered, sexed and raced bodies, the inter-
relationships between gendered/sexed social norms, social control, and
resistance, and Indigenous experiences of criminal justice.
Tracey McIntosh (Ngāi Tūhoe) is Professor of Indigenous Studies and
Co-Head of the School of Māori Studies and Pacific Studies. Recent
research focuses on incarceration, poverty, inequality and social justice,
recognising those with lived experience of incarceration and marginalisa-
tion as experts of their own condition. Another strong interest is the
interface between research and policy.
Lisa Monchalin teaches in the Criminology Department at Kwantlen
Polytechnic University, BC, Canada. She is Algonquin, Métis, Huron
and Scottish. Driven by personal and family experiences, she is deter-
mined to reduce crime that affects Indigenous peoples through educa-
tion. She authored The Colonial Problem: An Indigenous Perspective on
Crime and Injustice in Canada (2016).
Elaine Ngamu (Ngati Porou ki Harataunga) is one of 11 children, the
mother of five with two stepsons, and has 26 grandchildren and two great
grandsons. She is of Irish as well as Māori descent. She has a Postgraduate
Diploma in Whānau Ora from Massey University, and is running Patua
te Ngāngara, a whānau-centred methamphetamine programme at Hoani
Waititi Marae, as well as supporting community reintegration and Youth
Court proceedings there.
Adele N. Norris is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy pro-
gramme in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Waikato,
Hamilton, New Zealand. Her scholarship engages Black feminist meth-
odologies to explore state-sanctioned violence against Black and
Brown bodies.
Stormy Ogden is a tribal citizen of the Kashia Pomo and direct descen-
dent of the Tule River Yokuts. She is a community organiser and speaker.
She helped to create Chumkawiwat—Words with wings sending Native
language material and other resources into prisons for Native women
and men.
xiv Notes on Contributors
Helena Rattray-Te Mana (Ngā Rauru tribe) is an emerging researcher

employed by Te Atawhai o Te Ao. She also manages research projects and
has co-authored works such as Traumatic brain injury of tangata ora
(Māori ex-prisoners), (2017), Reclaiming our people following imprisonment
(2017) and Māori women in prison (2015).
Naomi Sayers is an Anishnaabe-Kwe of the Garden River First Nation.
She is an Indigenous lawyer and Indigenous feminist. She is the author of
Kwe Today.
Gemma Sentance, doctoral candidate, is a Wiradjuri woman and
researcher at the University of Technology Sydney. She researches the
experiences of Indigenous women within the criminal justice system. In
2013, she was admitted to the Supreme Court of New South Wales as a
legal practitioner.
Dawn M. Smith is Nuu-chah-nulth from Ehattesaht. She grew up in
Nuu-chah-nulth and W̱SÁNEĆ with her late parents Clyde and Norma
Claxton. She is an educational developer for Indigenization and
Sustainability at Camosun College’s Centre for Excellence in Teaching
and Learning located in the territories of the LKWUNKEN (Victoria,
BC, Canada) speaking peoples.
Juan Tauri (Ngati Porou tribe) is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology and
Social Policy programme at the University of Waikato. Her research proj-
ects focus on a diverse range of topics, including youth gangs, domestic
violence, Indigenous experiences of prison, and the globalisation of
restorative justice, and is co-editor of Decolonization of Criminology and
Justice.
Te Atawhai Nayda Te Rangi (Ngāti Tūwharetoa and Ngāti Porou
tribes). The Aroha Trust, formed in 1977, is the only gang-associated
women’s Trust in Aotearoa. She contributed to Trust—A true story of
women and gangs (2009). Her thesis for a Masters degree in Applied
Indigenous Knowledge was titled He reo ko, he reo areare—The liberated
voice of wahine within a gang collective.
Notes on Contributors xv
Hilde Tubex is Associate Professor at the Law School of the University

of Western Australia. Her areas of expertise are comparative criminology
and penal policy, Indigenous peoples and the criminal legal system. She
has been involved in several research projects with a focus on Indigenous
overrepresentation in the criminal legal system.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Indigenous women as a share of all women imprisoned in

Australia, Canada, and New Zealand 10
Fig. 10.1 Three contextual parts and four component parts.
(Source: Pūʻā Foundation info-graphic brochure) 211
Fig. 10.2 Two systemic framework parts. (Source: Pūʻā Foundation
info-graphic brochure) 213
Fig. 12.1 Te Piringa Poho: Model of healing, potential and
transformation. © Lily George and Elaine Ngamu 259
xvii
List of Tables
Table 1.1 Scope of Indigenous women imprisonment in Australia,

Canada, New Zealand, and the United States 2
Table 1.2 Comparing Indigenous women with all women 9
Table 10.1 Current Pūʻā Foundation—programme categories and
projects214
Table 10.2 Evaluation results 218
xix
1
Introduction
Lily George, Adele N. Norris, Antje Deckert,
and Juan Tauri
Gordon (2011) states that “Policies of mass incarceration have been called
a ‘waste management prison’ approach … where the problem becomes
one of containment and storage, not of rehabilitation and preparation for
reintegration” (p. 5). Most people know that the United States’ incarcera-
tion rate is the highest in the world. Many are also aware that Indigenous
people are disproportionately incarcerated in the United States as well as
in Australia, Canada, and in Aotearoa New Zealand (Cunneen & Tauri,
2016) and that the incarceration of women, in general, is on the rise. Only
L. George (*)
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
A. N. Norris • J. Tauri
University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
e-mail: adele.norris@waikato.ac.nz; jtauri@waikato.ac.nz
A. Deckert
Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand
e-mail: antje.deckert@aut.ac.nz
© The Author(s) 2020 1

L. George et al. (eds.), Neo-Colonial Injustice and the Mass Imprisonment of Indigenous
Women, Palgrave Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Criminal Justice,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44567-6_1
2 L. George et al.
few people know, however, that Indigenous women represent the fastest-
growing segment of the prison population in all four countries, with the
incarceration rate for Indigenous women in Australia and New Zealand
being higher than that in the United States and Canada (see Table 1.1).
Māori imprisonment has steadily increased from 3% to over 50% since
the nineteenth century, and Māori women now make up over 60% of the
female prison population (George et al., 2014).
It has been over 20 years since Luana Ross (1998) published Inventing
the savage: The social construction of Native American criminality in which
she advanced the concept of neo-colonial racism to articulate the specific,
interwoven strategies of systematic denial of freedom and sovereignty
that neo-colonial societies use for the social control of Indigenous peo-
ples. Since Luana Ross’ seminal book was published, Indigenous women’s
imprisonment has increased sharply. Voices of Indigenous women detail-
ing specific ways settler colonialism exposes Indigenous women to a sys-
tem of state-sanctioned violence has been around for several decades,
Table 1.1 Scope of Indigenous women imprisonment in Australia, Canada, New

Zealand, and the United States
• 1 in 30 Australian women are Indigenous
• 1 in 20 Canadian women are Indigenous
• 1 in 6 New Zealand women are Indigenous
• 1 in 118 United States women are Indigenous
• 1 in 345 Australian Indigenous women are in prison
• 1 in 56 Canadian Indigenous women are in prison
• 1 in 334 New Zealand Indigenous women are in prison
• 1 in 242 United States Indigenous women are in prison
• 1 in 86 Australian Indigenous women are under correctional control
• 1 in 37 Canadian Indigenous women are under correctional control
• 1 in 61 New Zealand Indigenous women are under correctional control
• Australian Indigenous women are ten times more likely to be in prison than
non-Indigenous women
• Canadistian Indigenous women are nine times more likely to be in prison
than non-Indigenous women
• New Zealand Indigenous women are four times more likely to be in prison
• United States Indigenous women are three times more likely to be in prison
Note that it is not always possible to separate out statistics for the United States
as they are often compiled on a state-by-state basis, rather than a national tally
1 Introduction 3
speaking across diverse domains. Such voices are pertinent to elevating

the awareness of and advancing the discussion of high imprisonment
rates, violence and safety experienced and articulated by Indigenous
women, which remain largely invisible in national political discourses. As
Indigenous women’s voices and activism engage in strategies of resistance
and emancipation, it is the purpose of this volume to capture these voices
as they articulate the depth of systemic violence against Indigenous
women and the remarkable agency Indigenous women wield in the
struggle towards liberation.
Decolonising our futures: Neo-colonial criminal injustice and the mass
imprisonment of Indigenous women seeks to contribute to the decolonis-
ing, intersectional and comparative literature by addressing issues around
the mass incarceration of Indigenous women. As Deckert (2014) has
pointed out, a dearth of publications on the subject contributes “to the
ongoing marginalisation of Indigenous peoples” because “an inadequate
quantity of criminological discourse inhibits public attention to the social
problem of disproportionate incarceration rates” (p. 39). Furthermore,
Norris (2017) has noted that “the absence of a critical lens toward con-
temporary forms and experiences of racism undergirding the mass crimi-
nalisation of Indigenous people perpetuates a colour blindness that in
turn works to normalise mass female incarceration” (p. 2). Therefore, it is
both important and timely to examine the contemporary mechanisms
that drive the mass imprisonment of Indigenous women and to discuss
strategies for grappling with the realities of racism. Luana Ross and other
Indigenous scholars have recognised that a thorough examination of the
mechanisms that generate and perpetuate neo-colonial racism is required
to enable and sharpen resistance to racist practices and policies.
In this edited collection, Indigenous scholars—some jointly with non-
Indigenous peers—illuminate how neo-colonial societies continue to
deny many Indigenous peoples a life relatively free from state interference
as most citizens enjoy it. The book covers three main subject matters.
Firstly, it seeks to explain the recent surge in the incarceration of Indigenous
women in neo-colonial states. Secondly, it investigates implications that
the mass incarceration of Indigenous women has for their children, part-
ners, and whānau/mob/communities. Perhaps most importantly, the book
addresses activism, resistance and Indigenous strategies against the mass
4 L. George et al.
incarceration of Indigenous women. Over the course of the following 11

chapters, the authors explore how White-settler supremacy is exercised
and preserved through neo-colonial institutions, policies and laws, leading
to failures in social and criminal justice reform; the impact of women’s
incarceration on their children, partners, families, and communities; and
the tools of activism and resistance Indigenous peoples use to resist neo-
colonial marginalisation tactics to decolonise their lives and communities.
Indigenous academics and scholar-activists from Australia, Aotearoa New
Zealand and North America have contributed to this book.
In Chap. 2, Stigmatising Gang Narratives, Housing and Social Policing of
Māori Women, Cassandra Lewis, Adele Norris, Waimirirangi Heta-Cooper
and Juan Tauri investigate the negative stigmas that are used to dehuman-
ise and to limit, restrict and deny assistance to poor and racially margin-
alised populations, especially single mothers. This chapter closes a crucial
gap in the literature as scholars have examined racial social control with
regard to gangs, but how the stigma of gang affiliation influences access to
quality housing has been scantly examined in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Employing a discourse analysis, the authors examine parliamentary
speeches with regard to the Organised Crime Bill and Residential Tenancy
Amendment Bill (2009–2018) to explore how gangs are framed in hous-
ing-related political discourse. The findings reveal that language used by
policymakers constructs gangs as being associated largely with Indigenous
Māori through three main tactics: referencing “ethnic” gangs as the only
entity/focus of organised crime; omitting Pākehā/White gangs and white-
collar crime; and identifying areas/towns with high Māori populations as
in need of targeted social control. The authors argue that such framing
strategies fashion a criminalising narrative around Māori as gang members
and as inherently violent. This negative discourse permeates housing-
related political rhetoric, framing Māori as “bad” or “undesirable” tenants
enabling policymakers to stigmatise Māori as the “criminal other”. The
authors conclude that this motif carries severe implications with regard to
life chances of Māori women, especially as they relate to housing screening
practices and the ability to secure social housing.
Chapter 3, sole-authored by Naomi Sayers, bears the title The
Relationship Between Restorative Justice and Prison Abolition. The author
analyses Canada’s current restorative justice model and critiques the
1 Introduction 5
application of restorative justice in the lives of Indigenous people, espe-

cially Indigenous women. The chapter provides a different way to think
about restorative justice through the lens of prison abolition. The writing
includes autobiographical accounts and is based on the premise that prison
abolition is the only true restorative justice. The author writes both an
academic and legal analysis coupled with personal narratives describing
experiences in prisons. She comparatively discusses what restorative justice
meant for her as a criminalised Indigenous woman, in contrast to what it
means to her today as an Indigenous lawyer who is, to this day, still
impacted by the systemic criminalisation of Indigenous communities.
Chapter 4, Colonial Policies and Indigenous Women in Canada, is writ-
ten by Dawn Smith. She investigates the alarming Canadian prison sta-
tistics. The rate of incarcerated Indigenous women increased by 109%
from 2001 to 2012, a trend that continues upwards. This chapter explores
neo-colonial policies and legislation behind the mass incarceration of
Indigenous women in Canada. The author demonstrates that the crimes
associated with the incarceration of Indigenous women are largely
poverty-related such as breaches of probation, failure to appear in court,
and unpaid fines and theft. Moreover, racialisation renders incarcerated
Indigenous women susceptible to unfair treatment (e.g., experiences of
segregation, solitary confinement or denial of early release). Through sto-
ries and literature, the reader will gain a better understanding of the
urgent issues facing incarcerated Indigenous women. For example, most
of them are mothers to children under the age of 18 years who will likely
be placed in long-term foster care. The author demonstrates how the
vicious cycle of colonialism and oppression continues to dominate the
lives of Indigenous women, making them more likely to reoffend.
Chapter 5, The Mass Incarceration of Indigenous Women in Canada: A
Colonial Tactic of Control and Assimilation, also focuses on the Canadian
context. It is co-authored by Olga Marques and Lisa Monchalin. The lat-
ter is also the author of the recently published, groundbreaking book The
colonial problem: An Indigenous perspective on crime and injustice in Canada
(2016), which chronicles eras of colonial oppression Indigenous people
in Canada continue to struggle against that has manifested in the domi-
nant group’s attitudes towards crime and the “punishable”. In this chap-
ter, the authors argue that Indigenous women continue to be seen as a
6 L. George et al.
threat by the colonisers due to their power and prominence held in their
communities. Because of their central roles, Indigenous women have
been a target of the colonial agenda to eliminate Indigenous presence.
The authors outline how the criminal justice system in Canada became
one of the major apparatuses set up to assimilate and control Indigenous
presence. They argue that the mass incarceration of Indigenous women
constitutes an ongoing genocide and cannot be understood outside of the
context of the colonial and necro-political agenda. Prisons represent the
epitome of the colonial apparatus which has continually tried to disman-
tle Indigenous peoples’ communities and families. Yet, despite these
genocidal colonial tactics, Indigenous women remain, which serves to
show their strength and resilience.
Chapter 6, Transcending Colonial Legacies: From Criminal Justice to
Indigenous Women’s Healing, is co-authored by Australia-based Thalia
Anthony, Gemma Sentance and Lorana Bartels. In their chapter, the
authors explore how institutional inter-generational trauma is perpetu-
ated by criminal justice interventions into the lives of Indigenous women.
The authors illustrate how past and present colonial policies and practices
have shaped Indigenous women’s lives and resulted in disproportionate
incarceration across welfare and penal domains. They also assess the ways
in which the criminal justice system characterises trauma to problematise
and pathologise Indigenous women. Illustrations of healing, well-being
and self-determination models embedded in Indigenous women’s organ-
isations and services, lead the authors to call for a paradigm shift from
prisons to healing centres for Indigenous women.
Chapter 7, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women in Australian
Prisons, is also focused on the Australian context. Co-authored by Hilde
Tubex and Dorinda Cox, this chapter focuses on the specific social and
cultural obligations Aboriginal women have, which cannot be replaced by
others, resulting in gaps in the social structures of affected communities,
causing intergenerational trauma, which can lead to further and ongoing
contact with the criminal legal system. The authors provide an overview of
the fragmented official datasets available about Aboriginal women’s impris-
onment, which despite their fragmented nature, give an indication about
the reasons why so many Aboriginal women find themselves in prison and
are returning to prison. The chapter looks particularly at the seemingly
1 Introduction 7
rising violent behaviour among Aboriginal women considering the ongo-

ing effect of colonisation and its links to family violence and intergenera-
tional trauma. The authors argue that a shift of focus is necessary from
women as “offenders” to an understanding of the broader context in which
this behaviour takes place, which will enable us to develop grass-roots sup-
port networks addressing this concerning trend.
Chapter 8, Mana Wahine Leadership After Prison, co-authored by
Helena Rattray-Te Mana and Te Atawhai Nayda Te Rangi, argues that
despite serving time in prison, Māori women in Aotearoa New Zealand
cannot be excluded from becoming mana (prestige) wāhine (women)
leaders. This is a discussion that carves a passage through the additional
layers of ostracisation and stigmatisation that one Māori woman (Te
Rangi) encountered leading up to and into prison. It also highlights her
journey of restoration and healing after prison and where she fits within
mana wāhine theory and mana wāhine leadership. It is a story woven
from a personal narrative of the former prisoner and gang-affiliated
woman, Te Atawhai Nayda Te Rangi.
Like the previous chapter, Chap. 9, What Was My Crime? Being an
American Indian Woman, sole-authored by Stormy Ogden, is also based
on personal experiences with the criminal justice system. The chapter
begins with a poem along with personal stories that outline the ongoing
violence targeted towards American Indian women in prisons. For the
author, the violence and racism started at a young age with being called
“dirty half-breed” by her White mother. Stormy Ogden argues that
this—along with other violence in her life—contributed to her becoming
a prisoner. American Indian people have been incarcerated in different
forms of penitentiaries since the beginning of colonisation. The author
argues that, as the Bible and bottle were used to gain control over Indian
lands and deny Native sovereignty, prisons—in one form or another—
have been used to control Indian bodies. Prisons are instruments of rac-
ism and social control, constructed by a system whose purpose is to
isolate and dehumanise. It was under these conditions that the author
learned how to survive, how to fight against policies which deny
Indigenous people the right to pray and the right to identify as American
Indian. The chapter draws attention to new voices of resistance including
The Green Corn Collective: Indigenous women who created the feminist
8 L. George et al.
hashtag campaign JailBed that addresses the high rate of Native peoples
who continue to be incarcerated in the United States.
Chapter 10 is contributed by Toni Bissen. Her chapter, Trauma,
Healing and Justice: Native Hawaiian Women in Hawaii’s Criminal Justice
System, discusses community efforts to support women in, as well as those
exiting, prison that continued after the Trauma Informed Care Initiative
at the Women’s Community Correctional Center ended in 2012. Direct
and social incarceration costs and savings along with evaluative data anal-
ysis of three specific initiatives are also included.
Chapter 11, Prison as Destiny? Descent or Dissent? is written by Professor
Tracey McIntosh, the leading authority of female imprisonment in
Aotearoa New Zealand, in which she explores parallels in the struggles of
Indigenous peoples across settler states who have been systematically bru-
talised and marginalised by state policies and practices. In seeking to
understand patterns of confinement, incarceration and silencing, this
chapter implores readers to recognise incarcerated and formally incarcer-
ated women as experts of their own condition, which should ultimately
drive the platform to inform decarceration strategies that are not limited
to exploring new creative possibilities for sustained transformative change.
Chapter 12—Te Piringa Poho: Healing, Potential and Transformation
for Māori Women—is written by Lily George and Elaine Ngamu of
Aotearoa New Zealand and concludes this volume. In this chapter Lily
and Elaine explore the importance of research on Māori women’s experi-
ences of incarceration that privileges life narratives through a postdoc-
toral project. The chapter discusses the changes in the ways Māori women
were perceived, resulting in diminished and devalued roles in New
Zealand society. Historical trauma has resulted in a multitude of negative
responses, some of which have led Māori women on a pathway to prison.
Two frameworks for rehabilitation and reintegration programmes are
discussed—Te Piringa Poho (George and Ngamu) and Hokai Rangi
(Department of Corrections).
Table 1.2 and Fig. 1.1 depict more statistical information on
Indigenous women.1
1
Tables 1.1 and 1.2 and Fig. 1.1 compiled by Brent Commerer, University of Waikato, Hamilton,
New Zealand, 2020.
Table 1.2 Comparing Indigenous women with all women
Indigenous Indigenous
Population Indigenous All women as women All women Indigenous women
of Population women as Indigenous women share of all under under as share of all
Indigenous of all share of all women in in women in correctional correctional women under
women women women prison prison prison control control correctional control
Australia 399,952 12,187,868 3.30% 1158 3494 33.10% 4634 19,944 23.20%
Canada 860,265 17,488,485 4.90% 15,188 36,001 42.20% 23,028 67,704 34.00%
New 393,501 2,380,197 16.50% 1176 1821 64.60% 6399 11,652 54.90%
Zealand
United 1,402,254 166,049,288 0.80% 5775 231,000 2.50% na 1,215,000 na
States
Notes:
All figures are for the most recent year available
“Indigenous” defined by census agencies as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander in Australia, Aboriginal in Canada, Māori in New
Zealand, and American Indian or Alaskan Native in United States
“in prison” means served some time in prison during the most recent reporting year (Australia, Canada, New Zealand)
“under correctional control” includes prison, probation, parole, community service, and so on, in most recent reporting year
na = not available, because a reliable source not found for this data
Data sources:
Australia: Australian Bureau of Statistics, https://www.abs.gov.au/
Canada: Statistics Canada, https://www.statcan.gc.ca
New Zealand: Stats NZ Tatauranga Aotearoa, https://www.stats.govt.nz/
United States: US Department of Commerce, US Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/; US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice
Statistics, https://www.bjs.gov/; and Prison Policy Initiative, https://www.prisonpolicy.org
10 L. George et al.
Indigenous Women as a Share of All Women

70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Australia Canada New Zealand
In the national population In prison Under correctional control
Fig. 1.1 Indigenous women as a share of all women imprisoned in Australia,

Canada, and New Zealand
With most contributors embedded in their Indigenous communities,

the authors write from a community and experiential perspective as well
as through an academic lens—a feature that makes this book a compre-
hensive resource for scholars and students of criminology, sociology,
Indigenous studies, women and gender studies and related academic dis-
ciplines. It may also offer valuable insights to policymakers, policy ana-
lysts, criminal justice and law enforcement personnel, other criminal
justice practitioners and industry specialists, educational scholars, com-
munity activists and workers, historians as well as non-academic audi-
ences, offering new knowledge and insider insights both nationally and
internationally. The voices in this volume draw from a diversity of experi-
ences and come with their own expertise as racialised people in settler
states. As Michelle Alexander (2012) asserts in her book, The New Jim
Crow, “mass incarceration tends to be categorised as a criminal justice
issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue” (p. 9), the voices
in the volume effectively articulate the claim that incarceration for
Indigenous women is most likely a matter of the latter rather than
the former.
1 Introduction 11
References
Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colour-
blindness. New York, NY: New Press.
Cunneen, C., & Tauri, J. (2016). Indigenous criminology. Bristol, UK: Polity Press.
Deckert, A. (2014). Neo-colonial criminology: Quantifying silence. African
Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, 8(1), 39–63.
George, L., Ngamu, E., Sidwell, M., Hauraki, M., Martin-Fletcher, N., Ripia,
L., et al. (2014). Narratives of suffering and hope…. MAI Journal,
3(3), 183–196.
Gordon, L. (2011). Causes of and solutions to inter-generational crime: The final
report of the study of the children of prisoners. Christchurch, New Zealand:
Pillars Inc..
Monchalin, L. (2016). The colonial problem: An Indigenous perspective on crime
and injustice in Canada. Toronto, ON: The University of Toronto Press.
Norris, A. (2017). Are we really color-blind? The normalisation of mass female
incarceration. Race and Justice, 9(4), 454–478.
Ross, L. (1998). Inventing the savage: The social construction of Native American
criminality. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
2
Stigmatising Gang Narratives, Housing,
and the Social Policing of Māori Women
Cassandra Lewis, Adele N. Norris,
Waimirirangi Heta-Cooper, and Juan Tauri
Introduction
Internationally, including in New Zealand, homelessness, evictions, and
foreclosures are commonplace and even the hallmark of many cities and
small towns struggling to survive (Eaqub & Eaqub, 2015; Madden &
Marcuse, 2016; McNeill, 2016). The United Nations estimates that the
homeless population, depending on how homelessness is defined, could
be anywhere between 100 million to one billion people across the world
(Madden & Marcuse, 2016). Increasingly, discussions of rising housing
prices and cost of living dominate mainstream media and political dis-
courses (Eaqub & Eaqub, 2015; Madden & Marcuse, 2016; McNeill,
2016; Munro, 2018). After the 2008 global economic meltdown, the
term ‘housing crises’ emerged, drawing attention from reformers, activ-
ists, and academics. The global housing crises have gained considerable
C. Lewis • A. N. Norris (*) • W. Heta-Cooper • J. Tauri

University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
e-mail: adele.norris@waikato.ac.nz; jtauri@waikato.ac.nz
© The Author(s) 2020 13

L. George et al. (eds.), Neo-Colonial Injustice and the Mass Imprisonment of Indigenous
Women, Palgrave Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Criminal Justice,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44567-6_2
14 C. Lewis et al.
traction over the last decade, prompting new national conversations.

However, the idea of ‘crisis’ implies that inadequate or unaffordable hous-
ing is abnormal, a temporary departure from a well-functioning stan-
dard. For Indigenous, Black, and working-class people and communities,
the housing crisis is often the norm (Alexander, 2012; Madden &
Marcuse, 2016; Proulx, 2018; Ross, 1998; Smith, 2015; Walker, 2004).
Over-crowded and unhealthy dwellings have always persisted for the
oppressed and the dispossessed (Hemmons, 1996; Madden & Marcuse,
2016; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Ross, 1998; Smith, 2015; Walker,
2002, 2004). Controlling one’s housing is a way to control one’s labour,
free time, relationships/friendships, schools, and so on. Struggles over
housing are always, in part, struggles over autonomy and self-
determination (Madden & Marcuse, 2016). Where one lives can pre-
cisely influence the treatment one receives by the state and wider society
(Banivanua Mar, 2016; Bledsoe & Wright, 2019; Bonilla-Silva, 2000;
Hattery & Smith, 2018; Ross, 1998; Smith, 2015). As it is widely known
that residential oppression has been shaped by historical policies of exclu-
sion and racialised social control, it is not experienced uniformly (Bledsoe
& Wright, 2019; Madden & Marcuse, 2016; Ross, 1998; Smith, 2015).
Thus, the contemporary housing crisis cannot be untangled from the
legacy of exploitative historical events, such as colonisation.
Considerable scholarship on housing-related issues has increased glob-
ally over the past decade. Important to this discussion is the renewed
attention towards housing as an essential race-making institution and its
connection to the carceral state (Bonds, 2019; Inwood & Bonds, 2017).
Little work has been undertaken using critical discourse analysis (CDA)
to examine housing political discourse as it relates to the presence of stig-
matising narratives used to criminalise different segments of the popula-
tion, especially Indigenous people. This chapter sets the context for a
CDA of this issue by first providing a brief overview of the historical and
contemporary processes that set in motion unequal or restricted access to
housing. The focus then shifts to a discussion of the interrelated nature of
stigmatising narratives, social policing, and discriminatory housing prac-
tices. The findings section presents three key framing techniques. This
chapter concludes with a discussion of particularly powerful and salient
elements of the language used to frame tenants and housing issues that
2 Stigmatising Gang Narratives, Housing, and the Social… 15
likely impede or restrict access to housing, especially for Indigenous

women living precarious lives.
Power Relationships, Māori, and Housing

In New Zealand, the housing system intersects with stratification and
exclusion in complicated ways that are rooted in modern capitalism,
racial control, setter-colonialism, and White supremacy. For example, the
Settler Wars of the 1860s led to massive Māori (Indigenous New
Zealander) land appropriation. The Pākehā (New Zealander of European
descent) hegemony facilitated the enactment of a privatisation policy and
numerous land laws that created ‘a legal jungle within which Māori lost
themselves and were preyed on by its natural denizens, the land specula-
tors or their agents and shyster lawyers’ (Sinclair, 1980; as cited in Bonilla-
Silva, 2000, p. 201). At the end of the nineteenth century, the New
Zealand government introduced a series of educational and political
reforms to accelerate the civilization process of Māori, but the underlying
intent was to normalise their supremacy over Māori land and its people
(Banivanua Mar, 2016; Bonilla-Silva, 2000). Massive land appropriation
continued into the twentieth century. Regardless of increased urbanisa-
tion and the concomitant social advancements policymakers believed
would accrue (see The Hunn Report, 1961), by the mid-1960s many
Māori communities began to exhibit precarious social indices character-
istic of increased contact with institutions of social control (Tauri, 2016)
and engagement in low wage sectors of the labour market (O’Sullivan,
1999). The advent of neo-liberal social and economic policy by the third
Labour government in the 1980s saw Māori over-representation in nega-
tive social statistics across a range of policy portfolios solidify, especially
in relation to crime and victimisation, child care and protection contacts,
low educational attainment, and a range of housing-related issues such as
home ownership and homelessness (Marriott & Sim, 2015).
Groot, Hodgetts, Nikora, and Leggatt-Cook (2011) identify home-
lessness as a common theme experienced by Indigenous people world-
wide and specific to New Zealand. The authors link the over-representation
of Māori homelessness to the colonial project of propelling a significant
16 C. Lewis et al.
number of Māori into impoverished and over-crowded urban housing

plans in the immediate post-war era. It is also worth noting that Māori
were once favoured in government social housing policies (Walker, 2004;
Wanhalla, 2006) as colonial initiatives encouraged the urbanisation of
Māori to hasten their assimilation into Western ideals of the consumer-
citizen (Woods, 2002). It is documented that this ‘privilege’ soon changed.
By the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Māori began experiencing
racialised obstructions and restrictions in attaining social housing
(Murphy & Cloher, 1995).
Māori over-representation in working-class jobs and severe under-
representation in professional and managerial employment (Bonilla-
Silva, 2000) automatically place them in a precarious position to secure
housing. Neo-liberal reform of the welfare state and privatisation of social
housing during the 1990s–2000s further compound the issue as state-
owned housing stock quickly depleted and social housing was reconfig-
ured at market rates (Wanhalla, 2006). Māori families engaged in
precarious work/employment have continuously experienced scrutiny of
race-based policing that has resulted in extreme marginalisation. Poor
single mothers, often stereotyped as the ‘undeserving poor’, were particu-
larly vulnerable to being locked out of secure housing (Kingfisher, 1999).
Power relationships between existing class structure and society hinge
on housing (Madden & Marcuse, 2016). Given this, housing has always
been a central mechanism used for racial social control and race-based
policing and is thus inseparable from the criminalisation of Indigenous
people (Alexander, 2012; Andrai, McIntosh, & Coster, 2017; Ritchie,
2017; Ross, 1998; Smith, 2015). US scholars have long examined state-
condoned violence against Black and Brown people, interrogating the
relationship between housing and crime-control policies (Alexander,
2012; Bledsoe & Wright, 2019; Davis, 1997; Norris & Billings, 2017;
Provine, 2007; Roberts, 1993; Ross, 1998; Smith, 2015). While coloni-
sation occurred differently across nation states, similarities exist among
Indigenous peoples, including their experience of criminalisation, of
them as individuals, of their communities, and their cultural practices
(Cunneen & Tauri, 2016). Since the 1980s, housing and race have been
central themes in the narrative around the War on Drugs and gangs in
both the United States and New Zealand (Alexander, 2012; Andrai et al.,
2017; Hattery & Smith, 2018; Norris & Billings, 2017; Ritchie, 2017;
Ross, 1998). Locating crime and gang activity in urban areas, inner cities,
ghettos, housing projects, or rural areas with high minority populations
have been a consistent strategy among policymakers, police, and main-
stream criminology (Alexander, 2012; Bledsoe & Wright, 2019; Norris
& Billings, 2017). Residents from these areas, regardless of their disposi-
tion, are vulnerable to labels of being deviants, gang members, violent, or
morally corrupt. Factors driving high rates of imprisonment among
Indigenous people, to the extent that they have become the most incar-
cerated group of people in the world (Cunneen & Tauri, 2016), also
influence Indigenous people’s access to housing and proximity to the
criminal justice system.
tigmas, Social Policing,

S
Housing Discrimination
Policy issues are defined in a multitude of ways. Often policymakers rely
on story lines that emphasise one aspect of an issue over others, which
influences the appearance of social problems on the public agenda (Goetz,
2008). Framing, given its influential nature in determining policy alter-
natives, policy outcomes, and the connection between a problem and
solutions (Goetz, 2008), has been discussed broadly within housing-
related discourse. For example, Edward Goetz’s (2016) examination of
the framing of affordable housing in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and
Saint Paul, Minnesota, found that social housing advocacy groups strug-
gle with conveying the critical need for affordable housing to both poli-
cymakers and communities. Challenges mostly arise from deeply rooted
stigmas attached to poverty and the ’racial other’. Goetz (2016) notes that
advocates for the poor, as well as public officials responsible for affordable
housing programmes, are met immediately with negative reactions that
range from not-in-my-back-yard responses to offering stigma-laden nar-
ratives of low-income people that conjure images of crime, social decay,
and alcohol/drug abuse.
18 C. Lewis et al.
To encourage suburban communities to provide a full range of hous-

ing options, advocates navigate hostility by depicting beneficiaries as
White, employed in widely accepted jobs (such as teachers, police offi-
cers, firefighters, nurses, and nurses’ aides) and with young families
(Goetz, 2016). Strategies also include the use of senior citizens as benefi-
ciaries. The study found that substituting the language from affordable
housing, which conjured imagery of the racial other, poverty, and crime,
to lifecycle housing produced significantly different results wherein the lat-
ter received stronger support. Such strategies are very telling in that they
reveal the embedded nature of the association of affordable housing with
the ‘racial other’; in this case, Black, Indigenous peoples, and Latino pop-
ulations (Hanson, Hawley, & Taylor, 2011; Hattery & Smith, 2018). This
study also illustrates how deeply rooted stigmas attached to non-White
populations give rise to various types of social policing even before one
enters the housing market.
Social policing often refers to the use of the police force to control the
behaviour of Black and Brown people (e.g., by arrest, incarceration, mur-
der, etc.). The term also means the control, regulation, and surveillance
of Black bodies in terms of how Black people are allowed to be, where
they are allowed to go and when, and what choices Black people are
allowed to make (Hattery & Smith, 2018). The complex nature of the
social policing of Black and Brown bodies has always been a prominent
feature in housing discussions and policy (Hattery & Smith, 2018;
Madden & Marcuse, 2016; Ross, 1998). In a country like the United
States, property has always been intertwined with race. Anti-black rac-
ism, First Nation genocide, and White supremacy were foundational to
the housing system.
Symbolic policing, particularly in the case of housing, refers to an
aspect of policing that does not involve either law enforcement or the
criminal justice system (Hattery & Smith, 2018). The term symbolic
policing denotes strategies of surveillance and control extending far
beyond ‘the police’ and involves state agencies and agents across a range
of policy portfolios, including social security, labour market and employ-
ment, childcare and protection, and housing. Groups relegated to segre-
gated communities or excluded from securing housing, despite having
the resources to pay, experience a type of social restriction of movement
via a variety of systems and policies (Bledsoe & Wright, 2019; Bonilla-
Silva, 2006). For example, today in the United States, Black people are
denied available housing 35–75% of the time (Bonilla-Silva, 2006).
Discrimination in US states with large First Nation populations is even
higher. Discrimination against Indigenous renters ranges from 25.7% in
New Mexico to 33.3% in Minnesota, averaging 28.5% across the states
(Turner & Ross, 2003). Minorities are less likely to be shown apartments
as their White counterparts; are quoted higher rents; experience worse
housing conditions; and are more likely to be steered to specific (non-
White, affluent) neighbourhoods (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). Housing, social
policing, and symbolic policing intersect in complex ways. Communities
with high populations of Black and Brown people are over-policed and
experience rampant state-sanctioned violence (Alexander, 2012; Proulx,
2018; Ritchie, 2017).
However, racial discrimination and housing are far from new discus-
sions. A violence birthed in the establishments of colonisation and slav-
ery was not only a process of dehumanisation, but also the genesis of the
creation of cultural stereotypes that continue to undermine, control, and
restrict marginalised peoples (hooks, 1981; Norris & Billings, 2017;
Ritchie, 2017; Ross, 1998; Smith, 2015). Because it is illegal, today, to
outright deny housing based on race, it is imperative to interrogate con-
temporary forms of more covert racist practices that structures risk,
choices, and life chances.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s (2015) examination of the structure of new
racism in the United States, during a time of a so-called colour-blind and
post-racial era, looks at housing and the economy. Housing and residen-
tial segregation, nowadays, is almost as pronounced as in the past (Bledsoe
& Wright, 2019; Bonds, 2019; Massey & Denton, 1993) even though
some of the contemporary forms of segregation are not even captured by
the indices used (Bonilla-Silva, 2015). Bonilla-Silva (2015) notes that:
[S]egregation persists because discrimination in the housing and lending

markets remains. Blacks and Latinos experience discrimination in forms
such as steering by realtors, receiving a disproportional number of sub-
prime loans net of their credit worthiness, and being given differential
information about the availability of housing units. These practices
20 C. Lewis et al.
illustrate new style discrimination because all of them are hard to detect
and even harder to label “racial.” We know about all of them mostly because
of audit studies and not due to reports from the victims of discrimination.
In fact, most of the minority participants in these studies did not even
realise they had experienced discrimination until they compared notes with
their White counterparts. (p. 1362)
Bonilla-Silva (2015) illustrates that the steering practices listed above

are not only legal but are also difficult to detect. Even those who are vic-
tims of steering practices are oblivious to the racist intent.
While extensive research in the area of housing screening practices and
discrimination is emerging in New Zealand, several cases exist detailing
similar occurrences of discrimination in accessing social housing.
Housing, like in many other countries, is on the government agenda in
New Zealand and is widely discussed in mainstream media. Specific cases
of steering practices and discrimination do not receive the same attention
as housing affordability and the rising rate of homeless. For example, in
November 2018, the Bay of Plenty Times met with Donna Love, a
34-year-old single mother, to report how she was squeezed out of
Tauranga’s rental market because of her number of children. Comments
from emergency housing advocates not only substantiated Donna’s claims
but also confirmed that she is one of many being discriminated against by
selective landlords (‘Tauranga mum’, 2018). Despite having good refer-
ences, a full bond, and a good credit history, Donna was told she did not
fit the criteria, yet the requirements were never specified. As a result,
Donna moved her children into a tent in her mum’s backyard for a cou-
ple of nights. Donna explained that her decision to move to Tauranga was
to be near her mum to receive help with her children.
A few months later, also in Tauranga, Reremai Cameron, a Māori
woman, felt dehumanised in her search for housing. Inquiring about a
listing of a single room she found on Trade Me, Reremai stated that the
potential landlord asked in one text message, ‘Just reading your name, are
you Māori? If so I hope you are aware the rent would only cover you and
no friends or family to stay in the sleep out. We had a Māori in our home
before who had multiple family and friend visitors that is something we
will not tolerate’ (Bell, 2019). Both cases provide insight into specific
ways race, gender, and class play out in housing screening practices and
the power dynamics of securing housing in general.
he Criminalisation of Indigenous Peoples

T
and Housing
Indigenous people have the highest rates of incarceration in the world
(Cunneen & Tauri, 2017; McIntosh & Workman, 2017). Roughly 15%
of New Zealand’s total population is Māori, which also comprises over
half of the country’s prison population (Cunneen & Tauri, 2017; Deckert,
2014). Māori women are the highest incarcerated group, making up 62%
of the female prison population and 57% of women on community sen-
tences (Bevan & Wehipeihana, 2015). Mechanisms influencing Māori
women’s rate of imprisonment undoubtedly influence their access to
housing.
It is important, therefore, to emphasise the historical criminalisation of
Indigenous peoples (Agozino, 2018; Kitossa, 2012; Ross, 1998; Smith,
2015; Tauri, 2014; Walker, 2002). Indigenous and Black scholars have
identified specific ways stereotypes and the creation of controlling images
have permeated mainstream discourses and societal perceptions so much
so that race or ethnicity do not have to be identified for one to conjure
the image of the ‘racial other’ as criminal and/or violent (Bull, 2017;
Collins, 2004; hooks, 1981; Norris & Billings, 2017; Ritchie, 2017;
Ross, 1998; Welch, 2007). Ample research exists detailing specific ideo-
logical and political tactics employed at all levels of society to criminalise
Black and Indigenous peoples while at the same time excluding or exon-
erating White people from criminalising and deficit narratives (Alexander,
2012; Norris & Billings, 2017; Norris & Lipsey, 2018; Quince, 2017;
Walker, 2002).
Social housing, in particular, has remained a site for the regulation of
tenants’ behaviour (McNeill, 2016). Historically marginalised people
have always been relegated to social housing in some form—locked out
of education, housing, and economic markets—thus, vulnerable to
22 C. Lewis et al.
stereotypes, social policing, and criminalisation (Bonilla-Silva, 2000;

McNeill, 2016; Norris & Billings, 2017; Proulx, 2018; Ross, 1998;
Shilliam, 2015). It is well established that negative stigmas are used to
dehumanise and to limit, restrict, and deny assistance to the poor, espe-
cially poor single mothers. While Indigenous scholars have examined
racial social control especially with regard to gangs, how the stigma of
gang affiliation influences access to quality housing has not received
scholarly attention. As housing is a key issue on the government agenda,
the process by which property speculators, landlords, and rental agents
screen potential tenants based on preconceived characteristics is of criti-
cal importance and is under-researched. The framing of ‘gangs’ and indi-
viduals perceived as ‘gang affiliates’ in housing discourse likely influence
the general perceptions of the ‘good’ versus the ‘bad’ tenant. Because
social housing policies are set and implemented at the national, regional,
and local levels and influenced by private, public, and non-profit realms,
as well as by liberals and conservatives, political rhetoric can lend itself to
providing insight into housing screening practices. Employing a critical
discourse analysis to examine parliamentary debates (Hansard) about the
Organised Crime Bill and Residential Tenancies Bill from 2009–2018, this
project examines how gangs enter and are framed in housing-related
political discourse.
Methodology
Hansard is the official record of the New Zealand parliament that includes
debates and events on the floor of the House. It is the ‘verbatim record’
of debates being reported in direct speech (Slembrouck, 1992). In order
to explore the socio-political-cultural context in which discussions of
crime and housing occur, an examination of Hansard parliamentary
debates was deemed ideal. This space allows for an interrogation of the
relationship between language use and ideology to get a sense of power,
control, conflict, and dominance. In doing so, one also gains an idea of
the distribution of social and physical resources.
To examine how gangs enter and are framed in housing-related politi-
cal discourse, New Zealand’s parliamentary database (accessed through
www.parliament.nz/en/) was consulted. After filtering for Hansard

speeches, the Organised Crime Bill (two readings) and Residential Tenancy
Amendment Bill (three readings) were retrieved. Given the aim to uncover
the language around organised crime, a content analysis was deemed
most appropriate. Keywords and phrases related to ‘criminal activity’,
‘threat’, and ‘violence’ provided the initial set of codes. From this point,
emergent themes and subthemes were identified. The codes and themes
identified in the Organised Crime Bill then served as the initial codes for
the second component of the study, which examined the Residential
Tenancy Bill.
Findings
In this section, we discuss the emergent themes from analysis of parlia-
mentary speeches, as recorded in Hansard, starting with the Gangs and
Organised Crime Bill, followed by consideration of statements related to
the Residential Tenancy Amendment Bill.
Gangs and the Organised Crime Bill
The first component of the analysis examined two readings from the
Organised Crime Bill in 2009, consisting of 38 speeches and 25,940
words in total. The keywords gang(s), criminal, corporate companies/
corporations, white-collar crime/criminals, Māori, and Pākehā/European/
White were part of the initial search. From this stage, subthemes emerged
such as political parties and iwi (tribes). For example, while political par-
ties/groups and companies/corporations were never singled out as par-
ticipants in organised crimes, one iwi in particular, Tuhoe, emerged via
speeches as a distinct threat to community safety. More specifically,
Tuhoe’s political activism was conflated with gang activity, thus violent.
Strategically linking Tuhoe with gang-like behaviour justified their need
for suppression. The framing of Tuhoe as ‘violent’, and behaviour of its
members as ‘gang like’ and requiring suppression, needs to be analysed
within the context of the ‘terror raids’ carried out by New Zealand Police
24 C. Lewis et al.
in October 2007. Ostensibly undertaken due to supposed ‘terrorism-like’

conduct by members of Tuhoe, armed police descended on Tuhoe lands
and arrested eight individuals who were charged under the Suppression
of Terrorism Act 2002 (Sluka, 2010). Despite the fact that the terrorism-
related charges were eventually dismissed, the Tuhoe were subsequently
problematised in discourse related to the Bill. Corporate crime’ only sur-
faced once to introduce corporate crime into the discussion, but the rhet-
oric immediately shifted to gangs and/or gang activity. ‘White collar
crime’ received very little attention being mentioned only three times.
Conversely, ‘gang(s)’ emerged 363 times, which was almost exclusively
associated with ‘Māori’, which emerged 157 times.
‘Pākehā/European/White’ received hardly any references and only
emerged indirectly from one speaker with six references to the Hells
Angels (a predominately Pākehā/White gang). Given this, ‘gangs’,
‘Māori’, and ‘crime/criminal activity’ emerged as primary themes and
were discussed relationally. Police emerged as a secondary theme given
their proximity to gangs/gang activity. Mentioned 157 times, police were
brought into the discussion only in association with an expansion of gang
surveillance. ‘Youth’ and ‘violent crime’ also surfaced as secondary themes
linked to gang activity. The former was discussed in terms of being perpe-
trators of violent crimes as gang members and also susceptible to gang
affiliation if not given the proper intervention. The latter, ‘violent crime’,
was linked only to gang activity. Thus, eradicating violent crime meant
eradicating gangs.
Residential Tenancy Amendment Bill
Emergent themes from the Gangs and Organised Crime Bill served as the
initial codes used to examine parliamentary speeches about the Residential
Tenancy Amendment Bill (2009–2016), which consisted of three readings
and 57,800 words. Significant attention was devoted to the housing cri-
ses that gave rise to a myriad of social problems in its wake. Keywords
such as ‘rentals/rental property’ surfaced 205 times, mostly when articu-
lating unaffordability, inefficient housing, and excessive power bills.
Affordability of heating residential houses emerged in association with
poverty, illnesses, and children. While secondary, gangs emerged in a

similar fashion as found in the Gangs and Organised Crime Bill. Gang(s)
specifically emerged in the discussion of state housing, violence/destruc-
tion, Māori, low-income, and locations with high minority populations
(e.g., South Auckland, Manukau East, Mangere, Porirua, and Otara).
These discussions also centred women as victims of gang violence or as
gang associates with the potential to introduce criminal activity into
housing. White/Pākehā/European never emerged. Violence and destruc-
tion of property were associated primarily with Māori and only occurring
in low-income areas. Drug use emerged but only in reference to gang
activity and low-income pockets/neighbourhoods. These rhetorical tac-
tics worked to exonerate Pākehā/European/White and middle-class pop-
ulations from deviant labels, violent activity, and crime and drug use.
Through the process of omission, the White middle-class population is
constructed as the ‘ideal’ or ‘good’ tenant.
Discussion
Through processes similar to what Schneider and Ingram (1993) detail as
social construction of target populations, gangs were used to frame racial/
ethnic groups as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ tenants. For example, the blatant omis-
sion of Pākehā/Europeans/White exonerates the dominant racial/ethnic
group from association with crime, gang activity, and violence. Pākehā
are, thus, excluded from stigmatising narratives, which in turn, influence
access to housing, even when they are associated and engaged with crimi-
nal activity. Through this omission, Pākehā assumed a default position
within the legislative and policy context of ‘government’ as morally supe-
rior and ‘worthy’ (of state assistance and support). Moreover, this process
also constructed Pākehā as the group in need of protection with the
power to precisely define from whom and what they need protection
from (e.g., Māori and gangs). In this case, gangs (more precisely, Māori
gangs) are presented as a threat to the broader social order.
Similarly, white-collar crime and political organisations were excluded
from the discussion of criminality and criminal activity. Concealing
white-collar criminal activity from public scrutiny, political and public
26 C. Lewis et al.
discourses offer a type of protectionism that undoubtedly intersects with

race (White) and social class (upper-middle class). Techniques used to
frame organised crime or criminal activity centred Māori by relying heav-
ily on individual accounts, sensationalised by political actors and racially
dominant groups, which Harrison and Sanders (2016) identify as poi-
gnant strategies that successfully frame the ‘irresponsible poor’, the ‘fail-
ing family’, or the deviant perpetrators of riotous acts. Groups falling into
the ‘undeserving’ category are particularly vulnerable to facing socio-
economic disadvantages, media condemnation, and declining public sec-
tor support, which often leads to a ‘downward spiral of condition[s] and
process[es] of what might be called relative dispossession’ (Harrison &
Sanders, 2016, p. 9).
In their discussion of drivers of popular support for increased social
control of low-income and minority racial groups, Harrison and Sanders
(2016) emphasise unbalanced press reporting that plays upon, rather
than discourages, negative perceptions of ‘less-deserving’ people, which,
in turn, strengthens fear and intra-class or intra-group hostilities:
In this context, ideas about misbehaviour appear to overlap with concepts

of the underserving, and it is difficult to separate hostile perceptions of
behavioural, ‘characteristics’ from assumptions linked to intra-class demar-
cations, ethnicity, gender, disability and other differentiations. (p. 7)
Very much like Goetz’s (2008) analysis of the framing of affordable

housing in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota,
our research demonstrates the often nefarious nature of the process
through which policy and legislation are developed in New Zealand’s
Parliament. Legislation and policy resulting from the framing exercises of
government can and does impact people’s lives, sometimes in negative
ways. The framing exercises associated with the Organised Crime and
Residential Tenancy Bill’s highlight a number of significant issues for those
working to alleviate the precarious lives lived by many Māori, especially
Māori women. Many of these issues align with Goetz’s findings, includ-
ing the dominance of policy discussion by politicians wedded to their
Party’s ideological constructions of social problems, which also aligned
with the silencing of ‘the Other’. In the case of this study, the deployment
of rhetorical devices, via the use of gangs and gang members, were aimed
at the criminalisation of Māori, and their negative representation as ‘vio-
lent’, ‘bad tenants’, and living in predominantly ‘poor’, deprived
communities.
For Māori women, their framing in the parliamentary debates about
both bills, centred on their ‘associations’ with gangs and gang members,
especially as partners or ex-partners of gang members. The seemingly
‘positive’ rhetoric regarding Māori women’s victimisation at the hands of
gang members is tempered by their framing as a potential source of gang-
related issues for officials responsible for overseeing social housing. Those
partnering with gang members were framed as potentially ‘bringing
crime in’ to the social housing context through their intimate relations
with male gang members, who were themselves framed as the violent,
criminal brown men. But even those Māori women seeking social hous-
ing assistance as part of a strategy to escape relationships with gang mem-
bers are equally framed as a potential source of crime and social disruption
as a result of their ‘previous (gang) association. This point highlights the
power of the framing process, and of the master status conferred upon
groups like Māori women that often results from it. The master status of
“gang associate”’ is a status that carries with it the potential to exacerbate
(or create) barriers to accessing government assistance like social housing.
Conclusion
An examination of the framing of gangs in housing-related political dis-
course offers some insight into complex power dynamics driving relative
dispossession with regard to restricted access to housing, which are diffi-
cult to detect. The way gangs are framed in the Organised Crime Bill
racialised gangs as non-White through the use of coded language, colour-
blind strategies (e.g., naming towns/cities with large populations of
Māori and Pacific Islanders and excluding Pākehā/European/White from
crime-related discussions). These strategies worked in tandem to socially
construct Māori as a threat warranting government intervention.
Consequently, stigmatising narratives not only entered housing-related
political rhetoric, but also set the stage for discussions of exclusionary
28 C. Lewis et al.
practices. The Organised Crime Bill provided the foundation to socially

construct Māori as the ‘bad tenant’ rendering them vulnerable to social
policing and screening practices that possibly block access to social hous-
ing. While framing strategies, in the case of organised crime and criminal
activity worked to conjure imagery of Māori and/or gangs in society’s
consciousness without explicitly mentioning either, the strategies also
facilitated selectivity (e.g., target population) when extending criminali-
sation to a specific segment of the population (e.g., Māori).
Māori women are particularly susceptible to the stigmatising narrative
of gang affiliation, especially if they reside in areas designated as gang ter-
ritory, which are primarily associated with poor working-class communi-
ties and social housing. Because Māori women represent the highest
group imprisoned, the status of ‘ex-prisoner’ will bear more harshly on
Māori women, especially those with children, who will likely face obsta-
cles to secure employment (Alexinas, 2008; Pool & Baxendine, 2006).
Therefore, it is imperative that the social ramifications of the growth of an
imprisoned population and the consequence of high numbers of ex-
prisoners are brought into contemporary discussions of housing and
especially of access to social housing.
Through the use of controlling images or stigmatising narratives,
Indigenous people are continuously surveilled and punished, not only by
police but also by wider society (e.g., landlords and property speculators).
Therefore, future research is needed to further expand the discussion
regarding specific ways the stigma of gang affiliation transpires in the
power dynamics between the landlords/rental agents and potential ten-
ants to help identify particular forms of discrimination that hinder Māori,
and especially Māori women from accessing social housing. Moreover, a
critical examination of the tactics and strategies used to mask housing
discriminatory practices will be useful to interrogate levels of deprivation
experienced by certain segments of the population that likely influence
their proximity to the criminal justice system. Lastly, it is imperative that
research be carried out to identify strategies and tools marginalised peo-
ple use to resist marginalisation tactics and rental screening practices.
Centring the voices of those most affected is of paramount importance to
inform public policy and academic enquiry.
Glossary
Pākehā New Zealander of European descent.
Māori Indigenous New Zealander.
Tūhoe A Māori tribe of New Zealand.
Iwi Tribe, nation, extended kinship group and is often a large group of people
descended from a common ancestor.
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which should have melted a heart of flint, was powerless to allay
their ill-temper.
If well-meaning counsellors could be persuaded that there are
phenomena upon which they are not all qualified to give advice, they
might perhaps forbear to send delegations of children to the White
House. This is a popular diversion, and one which is much to be
deplored. In the hour of our utmost depression, when our rights as a
free nation were denied us, and the lives of our citizens were
imperilled on land and sea, a number of children were sent to Mr.
Wilson, to ask him not to go to war. It was as though they had asked
him not to play games on Sunday, or not to put Christmas candles in
his windows. Three years later, another deputation of innocents
marched past the White House, bearing banners with severely
worded directions from their mothers as to how the President (then a
very ill man) should conduct himself. The language used was of
reprehensible rudeness. The exhortations themselves appeared to
be irrelevant. “American women demand that anarchy in the White
House be stopped!” puzzled the onlookers, who wondered what was
happening in that sad abode of pain, what women these were who
knew so much about it, and why a children’s crusade had been
organized for the control of our foreign and domestic policies.
The last query is the easiest answered. Picketing is a survival of
the childish instinct in the human heart. It represents the play-spirit
about which modern educators talk so glibly, and which we are
bidden to cherish and preserve. A society of “American Women
Pickets” (delightful phrase!) is out to enjoy itself, and its pleasures
are as simple as they are satisfying. To parade the streets, to proffer
impertinent instructions, to be stared at by passers-by, and to elude
the law which seeks to abate public nuisances—what better sport
could be asked either for little boys and girls, or for Peter Pans
valiantly refusing to mature? Mr. Harding was pursued in his day by
picketing children, and Mr. Coolidge has probably the same pleasure
awaiting him. Even the tomb at Mount Vernon has been surrounded
by malcontents, bearing banners with the inscription, “Washington,
Thou Art Truly Dead!” To which the mighty shade, who in his day had
heard too often the sound and fury of importunate counsels, and
who, because he would not hearken, had been abused, like “a Nero,
a defaulter and a pickpocket,” might well have answered from the
safety and dignity of the tomb, “Deo gratias!”
When a private citizen calls at the White House, to “frankly advise”
a modification of the peace treaty; when a private citizen writes to
the American Bar Association, to “frankly advise” this distinguished
body of men to forbear from any discussion of public affairs at their
annual meeting; when a private citizeness writes to the Secretary of
War to “frankly advise” that he should treat the slacker of to-day as
he would treat the hero of to-morrow, we begin to realize how far the
individual American is prepared to dry-nurse the Nation. Every land
has its torch-bearers, but nowhere else do they all profess to carry
the sacred fire. It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of
mind is unfavourable to preachment. We can hardly conceive a
delegation of little French girls sent to tell M. Millerand what their
mothers think of him. Even England shows herself at times impatient
of her monitors. “Mr. Norman Angell is very cross,” observed a British
reviewer dryly. “Europe is behaving in her old mad way without
having previously consulted him.”
“Causes are the proper subject of history,” says Mr. Brownell, “and
characteristics are the proper subject of criticism.” It may be that
much of our criticism is beside the mark, because we disregard the
weight of history. Our fresh enthusiasm for small nations is
dependent upon their docility, and upon their respect for boundary
lines which the big nations have painstakingly defined. That a
boundary which has been fought over for centuries should be more
provocative of dispute than a claim staked off in Montana does not
occur to an American who has little interest in events that antedate
the Declaration of Independence. Countries, small, weak and
incredibly old, whose sons are untaught and unfed, appear to be
eager for supplies and insensible to moral leadership. We recognize
these characteristics, and resent or deplore them according to our
dispositions; but for an explanation of the causes—which might
prove enlightening—we must go further back than Americans care to
travel.
“I seldom consult others, and am seldom attended to; and I know
no concern, either public or private, that has been mended or
bettered by my advice.” So wrote Montaigne placidly in the great
days of disputation, when men counselled the doubtful with sword
and gun, reasoning in platoons, and correcting theological errors
with the all-powerful argument of arms. Few men were then guilty of
intolerance, and fewer still understood with Montaigne and Burton
the irreclaimable obstinacy of convictions. There reigned a profound
confidence in intellectual and physical coercion. It was the opinion of
John Donne, poet and pietist, that Satan was deeply indebted to the
counsels of Saint Ignatius Loyola, which is a higher claim for the
intelligence of that great churchman than Catholics have ever
advanced. Milton, whose ardent and compelling mind could not
conceive of tolerance, failed to comprehend that Puritanism was out
of accord with the main currents of English thought and temper. He
not only assumed that his enemies were in the wrong, says Sir
Leslie Stephen, “but he often seemed to expect that they would grant
so obvious an assertion.”
This sounds modern. It even sounds American. We are so
confident that we are showing the way, we have been told so
repeatedly that what we show is the way, that we cannot understand
the reluctance of our neighbours to follow it. There is a curious game
played by educators, which consists in sending questionnaires to
some hundreds, or some thousands, of school-children, and
tabulating their replies for the enlightenment of the adult public. The
precise purport of this game has never been defined; but its
popularity impels us to envy the leisure that educators seem to
enjoy. A few years ago twelve hundred and fourteen little
Californians were asked if they made collections of any kind, and if
so, what did they collect? The answers were such as might have
been expected, with one exception. A small and innocently ironic boy
wrote that he collected “bits of advice.” His hoard was the only one
that piqued curiosity; but, as in the case of Isacke Bucke and the
quarrelsome couple of Plymouth, we were left to our own
conjectures.
The fourth “Spiritual Work of Mercy” is “To comfort the sorrowful.”
How gentle and persuasive it sounds after its somewhat contentious
predecessors; how sure its appeal; how gracious and reanimating its
principle! The sorrowful are, after all, far in excess of the doubtful;
they do not have to be assailed; their sad faces are turned toward
us, their sad hearts beat responsively to ours. The eddying drifts of
counsel are loud with disputation; but the great tides of human
emotion ebb and flow in obedience to forces that work in silence.
“The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,

Moves all the labouring surges of the world.”
Are Americans a Timid People?
As the hare is timid—no! They have made good their fighting
record in war. They have proved themselves over and over again to
be tranquilly courageous in moments of acute peril. They have faced
“their duty and their death” as composedly as Englishmen; and
nobler comparison there is none. The sinking of the Titanic offered
but one opportunity out of many for the display of a quality which is
apt to be described in superlatives; but which is, nevertheless, an
inherent principle of manhood. The protective instinct is strong in the
native American. He does not prate about the sacredness of human
life, because he knows, consciously or unconsciously, that the most
sacred thing in life is the will to surrender it unfalteringly.
Of what then are Americans afraid, and what form does their
timidity take? Mr. Harold Stearns puts the case coarsely and strongly
when he affirms that our moral code resolves itself into fear of what
people may say. With a profound and bitter distaste for things as
they are, he bids us beware lest we confuse “the reformistic
tendencies of our national life—Pollyanna optimism, prohibition, blue
laws, clericalism, home and foreign missions, exaggerated
reverence for women, with anything a civilized man can legitimately
call moral idealism.... These manifestations are the fine flower of
timidity, and fear, and ignorance.”
Mr. Stearns is a robust writer. His antagonists, if he has any, need
never fear the sharp thrust of an understatement. He recognizes the
tyranny of opinion in the United States; but he does not do full justice
to its serio-comic aspects, to the part it plays in trivial as well as in
august affairs, to the nervousness of our regard, to the absurdities of
our subordination. There are successful newspapers and periodicals
whose editors and contributors walk a chalked path, shunning facts,
ignoring issues, avoiding the two things which spell life for all of us—
men and customs—and triumphantly presenting a non-existent world
to unobservant readers. Henry Adams said that the magazine-made
female has not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam;
but our first father’s experience, while intimate and conclusive, was
necessarily narrow. We have evolved a magazine-made universe,
unfamiliar to the eyes of the earth-dweller, and unrelated to his soul.
When this country was pronounced to be too democratic for
liberty, the epigram came as close to the truth as epigrams are ever
permitted to come. Democracies have been systematically praised
because we stand committed to democratic tenets, and have no
desire to foul our own roost. It is granted that equality, rather than
freedom, is their animating principle. It is granted also that they are
sometimes unfortunate in their representatives; that their legislative
bodies are neither intelligent nor disinterested, and that their public
service is apt to be distinguished for its incapacity. But with so much
vigour and proficiency manifested every day in private ventures, we
feel they can afford a fair share of departmental incompetence. The
tremendous reserves of will and manhood, the incredible
insufficiency of direction, which Mr. Wells remarked in democratic
England when confronted by an overwhelming crisis, were equally
apparent in the United States. It would seem as though a high
average of individual force and intelligence failed to offer material for
leadership.
The English, however, unlike Americans, refuse to survey with
unconcern the spectacle of chaotic officialdom. They are a fault-
finding people, and have expressed their dissatisfaction since the
days of King John and the Magna Carta. They were no more
encouraged to find fault than were other European commonalties
that kept silence, or spoke in whispers. The Plantagenets were a
high-handed race. The hot-tempered Tudors resented any opinions
their subjects might form. Elizabeth had no more loyal servant than
the unlucky John Stubbs, who lost his right hand for the doubtful
pleasure of writing the “Gaping Gulf.” Any other woman would have
been touched when the culprit, raising his hat with his left hand
which had been mercifully spared, cried aloud, “God save the
Queen!” Not so the great Elizabeth. Stubbs had expressed his views
upon her proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou, and it was no
business of his to have views, much less to give them utterance;
while his intimation that, at forty-six, she was unlikely to bear children
was the most unpardonable truth he could have spoken.
The Stuarts, with the exception of the second Charles, were as
resentful of candour as were the Tudors. “I hope,” said James the
First to his Commons, “that I shall hear no more about liberty of
speech.” The Hanoverians heartily disliked British frankness
because they heartily disliked their unruly British subjects. George
the Third had all Elizabeth’s irascibility without her power to indulge
it. And Victoria was not much behind either of them—witness her
indignation at the “Greville Memoirs,” “an insult to royalty,” and her
regret that the publishers were not open to prosecution.
It was no use. Nothing could keep the Englishman from speaking
his mind. With him it was not only “What is there that a man dare not
do?” but “What is there that a man dare not say?” Many a time he
paid more for the privilege than it was worth; but he handed it down
to his sons, who took care that it was not lost through disuse. When
Sorbière visited England in 1663, he was amazed to find the
“common people” discussing public affairs in taverns and inns,
recalling the glories as well as the discomforts of Cromwell’s day,
and grumbling over the taxes. “They do not forbear saying what they
think of the king himself.” In the “Memoirs” of the publisher, John
Murray, there is an amusing letter from the Persian envoy, Mirza Abul
Hassan, dated 1824, and expressing his opinion of a government
which permitted such unrestrained liberty. Englishmen “do what they
like, say what they like, write what they like in their newspapers,”
comments the Oriental with bewildered but affectionate contempt.
“How far do you think it safe to go in defying your sovereign?” asked
Madame de Pompadour of John Wilkes, when that notorious plain-
speaker had taken refuge in Paris from his incensed king and
exasperated creditors. “That, Madame,” said the member from
Aylesbury, “is what I am trying to find out.”
In our day the indifference of the British Government to what used
to be called “treasonable utterances” has in it a galling element of
contempt. Not that the utterances are invariably contemptible. Far
from it. Blighting truths as well as extravagant senilities may still be
heard in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square. But the orators might be
addressing their audiences in classic Greek for any token the
London bobby gives of listening or comprehending. “Words are the
daughters of earth; deeds are the sons of Heaven.” The bobby has
never heard this grandiloquent definition; but he divides them as
clearly in his own mind into hot air and disorderly conduct, and he
takes his measures accordingly.
In the United States, as in all countries which enjoy a
representative government, censure and praise run in familiar
grooves. The party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity
in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but
greed and animosity in the party which is out. This antagonism is
duly reflected by the press; and the job of arriving at a correct
conclusion is left to the future historian. As an instance of the fashion
in which history can be sidetracked by politics, the reader is referred
to the portraits of Andrew Jackson as drawn by Mr. Beveridge in his
“Life of John Marshall,” and by Mr. Bowers in his “Party Battles of the
Jackson Period.”
The first lesson taught us by the Great War was that we got
nowhere in political leading-strings, and that none of our accustomed
formulas covered this strange upheaval. It was like trying to make a
correct survey of land which was being daily cracked by
earthquakes. Our national timidity entrenched itself behind a wilful
disregard of facts. It was content to view the conflict as a catastrophe
for which nobody, or everybody, was to blame. Our national
intrepidity manifested itself from the outset in a sense of human
responsibility, in a bitter denial of our right to ignorance or
indifference. The timidity was not an actual fear of getting hurt; the
intrepidity was not insensitiveness to danger. What tore our Nation
asunder was the question of accepting or evading a challenge which
had—so we at first thought—only a spiritual significance.
In one of Birmingham’s most genially nonsensical stories, “The
Island Mystery,” there is an American gentleman named Donovan.
He is rich, elderly, good-tempered, brave, kind and humorous; as
blameless in his private life as King Arthur, as corrupt politically and
financially as Tweed or Fiske; a buyer of men’s souls in the market-
place, a gentle, profound and invulnerable cynic. To him a young
Irishman sets forth the value of certain things well worth the
surrender of life; but the old American smiles away such a primitive
mode of reckoning. The salient article of his creed is that nothing
should be paid for in blood that can be bought for money; and that,
as every man has his price, money, if there is enough of it, will buy
the world. He is never betrayed, however, into a callous word, being
mindful always of the phraseology of the press and platform; and the
reader is made to understand that long acquaintance with such
phraseology has brought him close to believing his own pretences.
“In the Middle West where I was raised,” he observes mildly, “we
don’t think guns and shooting the proper way of settling national
differences. We’ve advanced beyond those ideas. We’re a civilized
people, especially in the dry States, where university education is
common, and the influence of women permeates elections. We’ve
attained a nobler outlook upon life.” It reads like a humorous
illustration of Mr. Stearns’s unhumorous invectives.
Sociologists are wont to point to the American public as a
remarkable instance of the herd mind—a mind not to be utterly
despised. It makes for solidity, if not for enlightenment. It is the most
economical way of thinking; it saves trouble and it saves noise. So
acute an observer as Lord Chesterfield set store by it as unlikely to
disturb the peace of society; so practical a statesman as Sir Robert
Walpole found it the best substratum upon which to rear the fabric of
constitutional government. It is most satisfactory and most popular
when void of all sentiment save such as can be expressed by a
carnation on Mother’s Day, or by the social activities of an Old Home
Week. Strong emotions are as admittedly insubordinate as strong
convictions. “A world full of patriots,” sighs the peace-loving
Honourable Bertrand Russell, “may be a world full of strife.” This is
true. A single patriot has been known to breed strife in plenty. Who
can measure the blood poured out in the cause that Wallace led, the
“sacred” human lives sacrificed at his behest, the devastations that
marked his victories and defeats? And all that came of such
regrettable disturbances were a gallows at Smithfield, a name that
shines like a star in the murk of history, and a deathless impulse to
freedom in the hearts of a brave people.
The herd mind is essentially and inevitably a timid mind. Mr.
Sinclair Lewis has analyzed it with relentless acumen in his amazing
novel, “Babbitt.” The worthy citizen who gives his name to the story
has reached middle age without any crying need to think for himself.
His church and his newspaper have supplied his religious and
political creeds. If there are any gaps left in his mind, they are filled
up at his business club, or at his “lodge,” that kindly institution
designed to give “the swaddled American husband” a chance to
escape from home one night in the week. Church, newspaper, club
and lodge afford a supply of ready-made phrases which pass muster
for principles as well as for conversation.
Yet stirring sluggishly in Babbitt’s blood are a spirit of revolt, a
regard for justice, and a love of freedom. He does not want to join
the Good Citizens’ League, and he refuses to be coerced into
membership. He does not like the word “Vigilante,” or the thing it
represents. His own sane instinct rejects the tyranny of the
conservative rich and of the anarchical poor. He dimly respects
Seneca Doane and Professor Brockbank when he sees them
marching in the strikers’ parade. “Nothing in it for them, not a cent!”
But his distaste for the strikers themselves, for any body of men who
obstruct the pleasant ways of prosperity, remains unchanged. In the
end—and it is an end which comes quickly—he finds that the one
thing unendurable to his soul is isolation. Cut off from the thought
currents of his group, he is chilled, lonely, and beset by a vague
uneasiness. He yields, and he yields without a pang, glad to get
back into the warm familiar atmosphere of class complacency, of
smugness, of “safety first”; glad to sacrifice a wavering idealism and
a purposeless independence for the solid substance of smooth living
and conformity to his neighbours’ point of view.
The curious thing about Mr. Lewis’s analysis is that back of the
contempt he strives to awaken in our souls is a suspicion that
Babbitt’s herd mind, the mind of many thousands of Americans, is,
on the whole, a safe mind for the country. It will not raise us to any
intellectual or spiritual heights, but neither will it plunge us into ruin. It
is not making trouble for itself, or for the rest of the world. In its dull,
imperfect way it represents the static forces of society. Sudden and
violent change is hostile to its spirit. It may be trusted to create a
certain measure of commercial prosperity, to provide work for
workers, and safety for securities. It is not without regard for
education, and it delights in practical science—the science which
speeds transit, or which collects, preserves and distributes the
noises of the world. It permits artists and authors to earn their daily
bread, which is as much as artists and authors have any business to
expect, and which is a very precious privilege. In revolutionary
Russia, the intelligentsia were the first to starve, an unpleasant
reminder of possibilities.
What Mr. Lewis implies is that, outside of the herd mind he is
considering, may be found understanding and a sense of fair play.
But this is an unwarranted assumption. The intelligence of the
country—and of the world—is a limited quantity; and fair play is less
characteristic of groups than of individuals. Katharine Fullerton
Gerould, in an immensely discontented paper entitled “The Land of
the Free,” presents the reverse of Mr. Lewis’s medal. She contends
that, as a people, we have “learned fear,” and that, while England
has kept the traditions of freedom (a point on which Mr. Chesterton
vehemently disagrees with her), we are content with its rhetoric. But
she finds us terrorized by labour as well as by capital, by reformers
and theorists as well as by the unbudging conservative. Fanatics,
she says, are no longer negligible. They have learned how to control
votes by organizing ignorance and hysteria. “In company with your
most intimate friends you may lift amused eyebrows over the
Fundamentalists, over the anti-cigarette organization, over the film
censors, over the people who wish to shape our foreign policy in the
interests of Methodism, over the people who wish to cut ‘The
Merchant of Venice’ out of school editions of Shakespeare. But it is
only in company with your most intimate friends that you can do this.
If you do it in public, you are going to be persecuted. You are sure, at
the very least, to be called ‘un-American.’”
It is a bearable misfortune to be called un-American, because the
phrase still waits analysis. The only sure way to escape it is by
stepping warily—as in an egg-dance—among the complicated
interests sacred to democracies. The agile egg-dancer, aware that
there is nothing in the world so sensitive as a voter (Shelley’s
coddled plant was a hardy annual by comparison), discountenances
plain speech on any subject, as liable to awaken antagonism. There
is no telling whom it may hit, and there is no calculating the return
blows. “To covet the truth is a very distinguished passion,” observes
Santayana. It has burned in the bosom of man, but not in the
corporate bosoms of municipalities and legislative bodies. A world of
vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force
of candour.
The plain-speaker may, for example, offend the Jews; and nothing
can be more manifestly unwise than to give umbrage to a people,
thin-skinned, powerful and clannish, who hold the purse-strings of
the country. Look what happened to Sargent’s fresco in the Boston
Library, which angered the Synagogue it inadequately represented.
Or he may offend the Irish, who control wards, and councils, and
local elections; and who, being always prompt to retaliate, are best
kept in a good humour. Or he may offend either the Methodists or
the Roman Catholics, powerful factors in politics, both of them, and
capable of dealing knock-down blows. A presidential election was
once lost and won through an unpardonable affront to Catholicism;
and are we not now drinking soda-fountain beverages in obedience
to the mandates of religious bodies, of which the Methodists are the
most closely organized and aggressive?
It is well to consider these things, and the American press does
very soberly and seriously consider them. The Boston “Transcript”
ventured, it is true, to protest against the ruling of the Navy
Department which gave to Jewish seamen of the ancient faith three
days’ leave of absence, from the thirty-first of March, 1923, to the
second of April, with such “additional time” as was practicable, that
they might attend the rites of the Synagogue; while Gentile seamen
of the Christian faith enjoyed no such religious privileges. The
newspapers in general, however, discreetly avoided this issue. “Life”
pointed out with a chuckle that the people who disapproved of
President Lowell’s decision to exclude negroes from the Harvard
Freshman dormitories “rose up and slammed him”; while the people
who approved were “less vocal.” When Rear Admiral Sims said
disconcertingly: “The Kentucky is not a battleship at all. She is the
worst crime in naval construction ever perpetrated by the white
race”; even those reviewers who admitted that the Admiral knew a
battleship when he saw one, were more ready to soften his words
than to uphold them.
The negro is a man and a brother. He is also a voter, and as such
merits consideration. There is no more popular appeal throughout
the length and breadth of the North than that of fairness to the
coloured citizen. Volumes have been written about his rights; but
who save President Roosevelt ever linked responsibilities with rights,
duties with deliverance? Who, at least, save President Roosevelt
ever paused in the midst of a scathing denunciation of the crime of
lynching (a stain on the Nation’s honour and a blight on the Nation’s
rectitude) to remind the black man that his part of the contract was to
deliver up the felon to justice, that his duty to his country, his race,
and his manhood was to refuse all sanctuary to crime? A few years
ago an acute negro policeman in Philadelphia recognized and
trapped a negro criminal. For this he received his full measure of
commendation; but he also received threatening letters from other
negroes whose simple conception of a policeman’s part was the
giving of shelter and protection to offenders of his own race.
The nastiest bit of hypocrisy ever put forward by wrong-doers was
the cant of the early slave-dealers about Christianity and the
negroes’ souls. The slaves were Christianized by thousands, and
took kindly to their new creed; but their spiritual welfare was not a
controlling factor in the commerce which supplied the Southern
States with labour. That four fifths of the labourers were better off in
America than they would have been in Africa was a circumstance
equally unfit to be offered as a palliative by civilized men. The
inherent injustice of slavery lay too deep for vindication. But now that
the great wrong has been righted (and that three hundred thousand
white men laid down their lives in the righting is a fact which
deserves to be remembered), now that the American negroes are
free, Christian, educated, and privileged (like artists and authors) to
earn their daily bread, they cannot candidly regret that their remote
ancestors had not been left unmolested on the coast of Guinea.
They have their grievances; but they are the most fortunate of their
race. The debt the white men owed them has been paid. There is left
a mutual dependence on the law, a mutual obligation of self-imposed
decency of behaviour from which not even voters are exempt.
Timidity is superimposed upon certain classes of men who are
either tied up with red tape, like teachers, soldiers and sailors, or
unduly dependent upon other men, like legislators, and like clerics in
those churches which are strong enough to control the
insubordinations of the pulpit. Of all these classes, legislators are the
worst off, because their dependence is the most ignoble and
disastrous. So long as a future election is the controlling influence in
their lives, they have no alternative but to truckle to any compact
body of voters that bullies them into subjection. So long as they take
for their slogan, “We aim to please,” they must pay out their
manhood for the privilege of pleasing. In 1923 Senator Borah
charged Congress with “organized cowardice” in the matter of the
soldiers’ bonus. It was a borrowed phrase neatly refitted. The
spectacle of a body of lawmakers doubling and turning like a hare in
its efforts to satisfy the servicemen without annoying the taxpayer
struck the Senator—and others—as the kind of exaggerated
subjection which paves the way to anarchy.
Timidity was as alien to the soul of Henry Adams as it is alien to
the soul of Admiral Sims. He was not a man who skirted the hard
places on the road, or who was so busy keeping both feet on the
ground that he feared to take a step. But he was conscious of the
inquisitorial spirit which is part of the righteousness of America, and
which keeps watch and ward over all the schooling of the country.
“Education,” he wrote, “like politics, is a rough affair, and every
instructor has to shut his eyes and hold his tongue as though he
were a priest.”
The policy of shutting one’s eyes and holding one’s tongue is
highly esteemed in all professions, and in all departments of public
service. The man who can hear black called white without fussily
suggesting that perhaps it is only grey; the man who evades
responsibility, and eschews inside criticism (like the criticism of a
battleship by an admiral); the man who never tells an unpalatable
truth “at the wrong time” (the right time has yet to be discovered), is
the man whose success in life is fairly well assured. There is an
optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral
laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates
unworthiness. The first belongs to brave and lonely men; the second
is the endearing quality of men whose sagging energy and cautious
content can be trusted to make no trouble for their kind.
The plain-speaking of soldiers and sailors is reprobated and
punished, but their discretion is less conspicuously rewarded. They
are expected to be undeviatingly brave in the field and at sea; but
timorous and heedful when not engaged in fighting their country’s
enemies. They are at a disadvantage in times of peace, strait-
jacketed by rules and regulations, regarded with suspicion by
sociologists, with hostility by pacifists, with jealousy by politicians. A
grateful Republic dismisses the men who fought for her, and
cherishes her army of office-holders. When General Wood and
Admiral Sims spoke some unpleasant truths, nobody ventured to call
these truths lies; but everybody said that General Wood and Admiral
Sims were not the proper persons to speak them. As the proper
persons to speak them never would have spoken them, the country
would have been spared the discomfort of listening, and the
“common quiet,” which is mankind’s concern, would have been
undisturbed.
So far, then, is Mr. Harold Stearns right in accusing us as a nation
of timidity. So far, then, is Mrs. Gerould right in accusing us of
exaggerated prudence. That something akin to timidity has crept into
the hearts of Englishmen, who are fortified by a long tradition of
freedom and common sense, is evidenced by the title given to two
recent volumes of scholarly, and by no means revolutionary, papers,
“Outspoken Essays.” Frankness must be at a discount when it
becomes self-conscious, and constitutes a claim to regard. The early
essayists were fairly outspoken without calling anybody’s attention to
the fact. The contributors to those great and grim “Reviews” which so
long held the public ear were outspoken to the verge of brutality. A
comfortless candour was their long suit. Never before in the history
of English letters has this quality been so rare as to be formally
adopted and proclaimed.
Santayana, analyzing the essentials of independence, comes to
the discouraging conclusion that liberty of speech and liberty to elect
our lawmakers do not materially help us to live after our own minds.
This he holds to be the only positive and worthwhile form of freedom.
He aims high. Very few of us can live after our own minds, because
the tyranny of opinion is reënforced by the tyranny of circumstance.
But none of us can hope to live after our own minds unless we are
free to speak our own minds; to speak them, not only in the company
of friends (which is all Mrs. Gerould grants us), but openly in the
market-place; and not with a blast of defiance, but calmly as in the
exercise of an unquestioned prerogative. Under no other
circumstance is it possible to say anything of value or of distinction.
Under no other circumstance can we enjoy the luxury of self-respect.
There is an occasional affectation of courage and candour on the
part of those who know they are striking a popular note; but to dare
to be unpopular, “in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble
word,” is to hold fast to the principles which speeded the Mayflower
to Plymouth Rock, and Penn to the shores of the Delaware.
The Happiness of Writing an
Autobiography
Mr. Edmund Gosse, commenting on the lack of literary curiosity in
the early years of the seventeenth century, ascribes it to a growing
desire for real knowledge, to an increasing seriousness of mind. Men
read travels, history, philosophy, theology. “There were interesting
people to be met with, but there were no Boswells. Sir Aston
Cokayne mentions that he knew all the men of his time, and could
have written their lives, had it been worth his while. Instead of doing
this, the exasperating creature wrote bad epigrams and dreary tragi-
comedies.”
A century later, when literary curiosity had in some measure
revived, Sir Walter Scott, losing his temper over Richard
Cumberland’s “Memoirs,” wrote of their author in the “Quarterly
Review”: “He has pandered to the public lust for personal anecdote
by publishing his own life, and the private history of his
acquaintances.”
A better illustration of La Fontaine’s wisest fable, “The Miller, his
Son, and the Ass,” could not anywhere be found. The only way to
please everybody is to have no ass; that is, to print nothing, and
leave the world at peace. But as authorship is a trade by which men
seek to live, they must in some way get their beast to market, and be
criticized accordingly.
It is probable that the increasing vogue of biography, the amazing
output of books about men and women of meagre attainments and
flickering celebrity, sets the modern autobiographer at work.
“For now the dentist cannot die,

And leave his forceps as of old,
But round him, ere his clay be cold,
Is spun the vast biography.”
The astute dentist says very sensibly: “If there is any money to be
made out of me, why not make it myself? If there is any gossip to be
told about me, why not tell it myself? If modesty restrains me from
praising myself as highly as I should expect a biographer to praise
me, prudence dictates the ignoring of circumstances which an
indiscreet biographer might drag into the light. I am, to say the least,
as safe in my own hands as I should be in anybody else’s; and I
shall, moreover, enjoy the pleasure dearest to the heart of man, the
pleasure of talking about myself in the terms that suit me best.”
Perhaps it is this open-hearted enjoyment which communicates
itself to the reader, if he has a generous disposition, and likes to see
other people have a good time. Even the titles of certain
autobiographical works are saturated with self-appreciation. We can
see the august simper with which a great lady in the days of Charles
the Second headed her manuscript: “A True Relation of the Birth,
Breeding and Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.
Written by Herself.” Mr. Theodore Dreiser’s “A Book About Myself”
sounds like nothing but a loud human purr. The intimate wording of
“Margot Asquith, An Autobiography,” gives the key to all the cheerful
confidences that follow. Never before or since has any book been so
much relished by its author. She makes no foolish pretence of
concealing the pleasure that it gives her; but passes on with radiant
satisfaction from episode to episode, extracting from each in turn its
full and flattering significance. The volumes are as devoid of
revelations as of reticence. If at times they resemble the dance of the
seven veils, the reader is invariably reassured when the last veil has
been whisked aside, and he sees there is nothing behind it.
The happiness of writing an autobiography which is going to be
published and read is a simple and comprehensible emotion. Before
books were invented, men carved on stone something of a
vainglorious nature about themselves, and expected their subjects,
or their neighbours, to decipher it. But there is a deeper and subtler
gratification in writing an autobiography which seeks no immediate
public, and contents itself with the expression of a profound and
indulged egotism. Marie Bashkirtseff has been reproached for
making the world her father confessor; but the reproach seems
hardly justified in view of the fact that the “Journal,” although “meant
to be read,” was never thrust by its author upon readers, and was
not published until six years after her death. She was, although
barely out of girlhood, as complex as Mrs. Asquith is simple and
robust. She possessed, moreover, genuine intellectual and artistic
gifts. The immensity of her self-love and self-pity (she could be more
sorry for her own troubles than anybody who ever lived) steeped her
pages in an ignoble emotionalism. She was often unhappy; but she
revelled in her unhappiness, and summoned the Almighty to give it
his serious attention. Her overmastering interest in herself made
writing about herself a secret and passionate delight.
There must always be a different standard for the confessions
which, like Rousseau’s, are made voluntarily to the world, and the
confessions which, like Mr. Pepys’s, are disinterred by the world from
the caches where the confessants concealed them. Not content with
writing in a cipher, which must have been a deal of trouble, the great
diarist confided his most shameless passages to the additional cover
of Spanish, French, Greek and Latin, thus piquing the curiosity of a
public which likes nothing better than to penetrate secrets and rifle
tombs. He had been dead one hundred and twenty-two years before
the first part of his diary was printed. Fifty years later, it was
considerably enlarged. One hundred and ninety years after the
garrulous Secretary of the Admiralty had passed into the eternal
silences, the record of his life (of that portion of it which he deemed
worth recording) was given unreservedly to English readers. The
“Diary” is what it is because of the manner of the writing. Mr. Lang
says that of all who have gossiped about themselves, Pepys alone
tells the truth. Naturally. If one does not tell the truth in a Greek
cipher, when shall the truth be told?
The severe strictures passed by George Eliot upon
autobiographies are directed against scandal-mongering no less
than against personal outpourings. She could have had the English-
speaking world for a confidant had she consented to confide to it; but
nothing was less to her liking. She objected to “volunteered and
picked confessions,” as in their nature insincere, and also as
conveying, directly or indirectly, accusations against others. Her
natural impulse was to veil her own soul—which was often sick and
sore—from scrutiny; and, being a person of limited sympathies, she
begrudged her neighbour the privilege of exhibiting his soul, sores
and all, to the public. The struggle of human nature “to bury its
lowest faculties,” over which she cast unbroken silence, is what the
egotist wants to reveal, and the public wants to observe. When
Nietzsche says debonairly of himself, “I have had no experience of
religious difficulties, and have never known what it was to feel sinful,”
the statement, though probably untrue, creates at once an
atmosphere of flatness. It is what Walt Whitman ardently admired in
beasts—
“They do not lie awake in the dark, and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.”
Next to the pleasure of writing lovingly about ourselves—but not

comparable to it—is the pleasure of writing unlovingly about our
fellows. Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor. I think
that the last years of Saint-Simon, those sad impoverished years
when he lived forgotten by his world, must have been tremendously
cheered by the certainty that, sooner or later, the public would read
his memoirs. Nobody knows with what patient labour, and from what
devious sources he collected his material; but we can all divine the
secret zest with which he penned his brilliant, malicious,
sympathetic, truth-telling pages. Thirty years after his death some of
these pages crept cautiously into print; but a full hundred years had
passed before the whole text was given to the world. Perhaps the
dying French gentleman anticipated no earlier resurrection for his
buried manuscript; but he knew his nation and he knew his work.
The nation and the work were bound to meet.
A somewhat similar satisfaction must have stolen into the heart of
Charles Greville when he wrote the last pages of his diary, and laid it
aside for future publication. Nineteenth-century England presented
none of the restrictions common to eighteenth-century France; and
ten years after Greville’s death the first instalment of the ever-
famous “Memoirs” exploded like a bomb in the serried ranks of
British official and fashionable life. It shook, not the security, but the
complacency of the Queen on her throne. It was an intelligent and
impartial picture of the times; and there is nothing that people like
less than to be intelligently and impartially described. Moreover, the
writer was no anonymous critic whose words came unweighted by
authority, no mere man of letters whom men of affairs could ignore.
He had lived in the heart of administrative England, and he knew
whereof he spoke.
Lord Hervey’s memoirs are not autobiographical at all: they are
historical, like the memoirs of Sully, and Jean de Joinville, and
Philippe de Comines. They are very properly entitled “Memoirs of the
Reign of George the Second,” and what their author did not know
about that interesting reign (as seen from the angle of the Court) was
not worth the knowing. Historians have made free use of his
material; and some of those to whom it has been most valuable, like
Thackeray, have harshly depreciated the chronicler. Dr. Jowett, in a
moment of cynical misgiving, said that every amusing story must of
necessity be unkind, untrue, or immoral. Hervey’s stories are not
untrue, and not often immoral; but they are unkind. What did he see
about him of which he could consistently write with kindness? His
sharpest thrusts have a careless quality which redeems them from
the charge of vindictiveness. When he says of Frederick, Prince of
Wales, “He was as false as his capacity would allow him to be,” it
sounds like an observation passed with casual unconcern upon a
natural phenomenon which had chanced to come under his notice.
Sully was a maker of history as well as a writer of history. He had
no taste and no time for self-analysis, and, like Joinville, he had the
rare good fortune to serve a master whom he sincerely loved and
admired. Comines also admired his master, but he did not love him.
Nobody has yet been put on record as loving Louis the Eleventh. All
these men wrote with candour and acumen. No pleasure which they
can have taken in compiling their memoirs can equal, or even
approach, the pleasure with which we read them. Their accuracy is
the accuracy of the observer, not of the antiquarian. “In my opinion,”
writes Comines, “you who lived in the age when these affairs were
transacted have no need to be informed of the exact hours when
everything was done.” “I now make known to my readers,” observes
Joinville composedly, “that all they shall find in this book which I have
declared I have seen and known, is true, and what they ought most
firmly to believe. As for such things as I have mentioned as hearsay,
they may understand them as they please.”
These excursions into the diversified region of the memoir lead us
away from the straight and narrow path of the autobiography. These
saunterings along the pleasant byways of history distract us from the
consideration of the human soul, as shown us by its too ecstatic
possessor. We know as much as we need to know about the souls of
Lord Hervey, and Sully, and of the Sire de Joinville, which was really
a beautiful article; but we know a great deal more about the souls of
George the Second, and Henry of Navarre, and of Saint Louis,
shining starlike through the centuries. What we gain is better worth
having than what we lose.
When we read the true autobiography, as that of Benvenuto
Cellini, we see the august men of the period assume a secondary
place, a shadowy significance. They patronize the artist or imprison
him, according to their bent. They give him purses of five hundred
ducats when they are complacent, and they banish him from their
very limited domains when he kills somebody whom they prefer to
keep alive. But not for one moment is our attention distracted from
the narrator himself to these rude arbiters of fate. He makes it plain
to us from the start that he is penning his autobiography in a spirit of
composed enjoyment, and because he deems it “incumbent upon
upright men who have performed anything noble or praiseworthy to
record with their own hand the events of their lives.” He tells us in
detail how it pleased God that he should come into the world; and he
tells us of all that he has done to make God’s action in the matter a
source of regret, as well as of satisfaction, to others. Those true
words of Frederick the Great, “On peut apprendre de bonnes choses
d’un scélérat,” are singularly applicable to this particular rascal. It is
as difficult to find standards by which to appraise his worth as it is to
find rules by which to test his accuracy. Just as it has been said of
Rousseau, that even in the very ecstasy of truth-telling he does not
tell the truth, so it may be said of Cellini, that even in the very
ecstasy of lying he does not wholly lie.
It is characteristic of a simpler age than the one we live in now that
autobiographers sang their own praises candidly and lustily. Cellini
puts graceful eulogies of himself into the mouths of his
contemporaries, which is one way, and a very good way, of getting
them said. The Duchesse de Montpensier (La Grande
Mademoiselle) goes a step further, and assures us that the Creator
is sympathetically aware of her merits and importance. “I may say
without vanity that just Heaven would not bestow such a woman as I
am upon a man who was unworthy of her.” Wilhelmina, Margravine
of Baireuth, and sister of Frederick the Great, writes with composure:
“Happily my good disposition was stronger than the bad example of
my governess”; and, as the testimony of the governess was not
taken, Wilhelmina’s carries the day.
This directness contrasts pleasantly with the more involved, and
possibly more judicious, methods employed by memoir-writers like
Richard Lovell Edgeworth, father of the immortal Maria, and by
autobiographers like Harriet Martineau. Mr. Edgeworth, recounting
his first experience of married life, says with conscious nobility: “I felt
the inconvenience of an early and hasty marriage; and though I
heartily repented of my folly, I determined to bear with fortitude and
temper the evil I had brought upon myself.”
Miss Martineau, whose voluminous work is ranked by Anna
Robeson Burr as among the great autobiographies of the world,
does not condescend to naïveté; but she never forgets, or permits
her reader to forget, what a superior person she is. When Miss Aiken
ventures to congratulate her upon her “success” in London society,
she loftily repudiates the word. Success implies endeavour, and she
(Harriet Martineau) has “nothing to strive for in any such direction.”
When she sails for the United States, it is with the avowed purpose
of “self-discipline.” She has become “too much accustomed to
luxury,” and seeks for wholesome hardships. It sounds a trifle far-
fetched. Byron—an incomparable traveller—admits that folks who go
“a-pleasuring” in the world must not ask for comfort; but even Byron
did not visit the East in order to be uncomfortable. He was not
hunting a corrective for St. James Street and Piccadilly.
There is no finer example in the world of the happiness of writing
an autobiography than that afforded us by Miss Martineau. Her book
is a real book, not an ephemeral piece of self-flattery. Her enjoyment
of it is so intense that it impedes her progress. She cannot get on
with her narrative because of the delight of lingering. Every
circumstance of an uneventful childhood invites her attention. Other
little girls cry now and then. Mothers and nurserymaids are aware of
this fact. Other little girls hate to get up in the morning. Other little
girls are occasionally impertinent to their parents. But no one else
has ever recorded these details with such serious and sympathetic
concern. A petulant word from an older sister (most of us have lived
through something of the kind) made her resolve “never to tell
anybody anything again.” This resolution was broken. She has told
everybody everything, and the telling must have given her days, and
weeks, and months of undiluted pleasure.
Miss Martineau’s life was in the main a successful one. It is natural
that she should have liked to think about it, and write about it. But
Mrs. Oliphant, a far more brilliant woman, was overburdened,
overworked, always anxious, and often very unhappy. Arthur Young
was a melancholy, disgruntled man, at odds with himself, his
surroundings, and the world. The painter, Haydon, lived through
years so harassed by poverty, so untempered by discretion, so
embittered by disappointments, that his tragic suicide was the only
thing which could have brought his manifold miseries to an end. Yet
Mrs. Oliphant took comfort in setting forth her difficulties, and in
expressing a reasonable self-pity. Arthur Young relieved his mind by
a well-worked-out system of intensive grumbling. Even Haydon
seems to have sought and found a dreary solace in the recital of his
woes. The fragment of autobiography is painful to read, but was
evidently the one poor consolation of its writer’s life.
That George Sand’s “Histoire de Ma Vie” afforded its author more
than her proper share of contentment is evidenced by its length, and
by the relish which is stamped on every page. Sir Leslie Stephen
pronounced it the best autobiography he had ever read. It seems to
have delighted him as Rousseau’s “Confessions” delighted
Emerson; which goes to prove that intellectual kinship need not
necessarily be accompanied by any similarity of taste. “If we would
really know our hearts,” says Bishop Wilson, “let us impartially
review our actions.” George Sand and Rousseau reviewed their
actions with the fondest solicitude; but were biased in their own
favour. Gibbon reviewed his actions, and such emotions as he was
aware of, with an impartiality that staggers us; but his heart, at no
time an intrusive organ, gave him little concern. Franklin, with whom
truth-telling was never an “ecstasy,” but a natural process like
breathing and eating, reviewed his actions candidly, if not altogether
impartially, and left the record without boast, or apology, or the
reticence dictated by taste, to the judgment of coming generations.
He was a busy man, engaged, like Sully, in making history on a large
scale. It pleased him, not only to write his recollections, but to
bequeath them, as he bequeathed so much else, to the young nation
that he loved. He never sought to patent his inventions. He never
sought to publish his autobiography. His large outlook embraced the
future, and America was his residuary legatee.
John Wesley kept a journal for fifty-five years. This is one of the
most amazing facts in the history of letters. He was beyond
comparison the hardest worker of his day. John Stuart Mill, who
knew too much and did too much for any one man, also wrote an
autobiography, which the reading world has been content to ignore.
But Mill’s failing health compelled him sometimes to rest. Wesley
never rested. It is estimated that for over thirty years he rode, on an
average, eight thousand miles a year. He preached in his lifetime full
thirty thousand sermons—an overwhelming and relentless figure. He
wrestled with lagging Churchmen of the Establishment no less than
with zealous Antinomians, Swedenborgians, Necessitarians,
Anabaptists and Quakers. Other records of human endeavour read
like the idling of a summer day alongside of his supernatural
activities. Yet so great is the compulsion of the born diarist to confide
to the world the history of his thoughts and deeds that Wesley found
time—or took time—to write, in a minute, cryptic short-hand, a diary
which fills seven large volumes. He not only wanted to do this; he
had to do it. The narrative, now bald and itemized, now stirring and
spirited, now poignant and terrible, was part of himself. He might
have said of it more truly than Walt Whitman said of “Leaves of
Grass,” that whoever laid hold upon the book laid hold upon a man.
To ask that the autobiographer should “know himself as a realist,
and deal with himself as an artist,” is one way of demanding
perfection. Realists are plentiful, and their ranks are freshly recruited
every year. Artists are rare, and grow always rarer in an age which
lacks the freedom, the serenity, the sense of proportion, essential to
their development. It has happened from time to time that a single
powerful and sustained emotion has forced from a reticent nature an
unreserved and illuminating disclosure. Newman’s “Apologia pro Vita
sua” was written with an avowed purpose—to make clear the
sincerity of his religious life, and to refute a charge of deceitfulness.
The stern coercion which gave it birth, and which carried it to a
triumphant close, was remote from any sense of enjoyment save
such as might be found in clarity of thought and distinction of
workmanship. The thrust of truth in this fragment of autobiography
has carried it far; but it is not by truth alone that a book lives. It is not
by simple veracity that minds “deeply moralized, discriminating and
sad” have charmed, and will always charm, the few austere thinkers
and fastidious critics whom a standardized world has spared.
The pleasure derived by ordinary readers from memoirs and
reminiscences is twofold. It is the pleasure of acquiring agreeable
information in an agreeable way, and it is, more rarely, the pleasure
of a direct and penetrating mental stimulus. “The Education of Henry
Adams” has so filtered through the intelligent public mind that
echoes of it are still to be heard in serious lectures and flippant after-
dinner speeches. We can, if we are adroit borrowers, set up
intellectual shop-keeping on Mr. Adams’s stock-in-trade. We can
deal out over our own counters his essentially marketable wares.
The simpler delight afforded us by such a charming book as
Frederick Locker’s “Confidences,” which is not confidential at all; or
by John Murray’s well-bred “Memoirs of a Publisher”; or by Lord
Broughton’s “Recollections of a Long Life,” is easy to estimate. We
could ill spare Lord Broughton’s volumes, both because he tells us
things we do not learn elsewhere, and because of his illuminating
common sense. The world of authorship has of late years so
occupied itself with Lord Byron that we wince at the sound of his
name. But if we really want to know him, we must still turn to
Broughton for the knowledge. The account of Byron’s wedding in the
“Recollections” is as unforgettable as the account of Byron’s funeral
in Moore’s diffuse and rambling “Memoirs.” It is in such narratives
that the eye-witness eclipses, and must forever eclipse, the most
acute and penetrating investigator. Biographers cannot stand as
Broughton stood at the door of Seaham, when the ill-mated couple
drove away to certain misery: “I felt as if I had buried a friend.”
Historians cannot stand as John Evelyn stood on the Strand, when
the second Charles entered London: “I beheld him and blessed
God!” Or at Gravesend, seven years later, when the Dutch fleet lay
at the mouth of the Thames: “A dreadful spectacle as ever
Englishmen saw, and a dishonour never to be wiped off!”
Ever since that most readable book, “An Apology for the Life of Mr.
Colley Cibber, Comedian,” was given to the English world, actors
and playwrights have been indefatigable autobiographers. They may
write about themselves alone, as did Macready, or about themselves
and the world, after the fashion of Frances Kemble. They may be
amusing, like Ellen Terry, or discursive, like Augustus Thomas, or
casual, like John Drew. But they fall into line, and tell us what
dramas they wrote, what companies they managed, what parts they
played, and when and where they played them, together with any
scraps of theatrical gossip they may be fortunate enough to recollect.
All, at least, except the once celebrated Mrs. Inchbald. She
recollected so much that the publisher, Phillips, offered her a
thousand pounds for her manuscript; and her confessor, a wise and
nameless Catholic priest, persuaded her to burn it unread. Yet there
are people so perversely minded as to disapprove of auricular
confession.
The golden age of the autobiographer has come, perhaps to stay.
Mr. Howells, observant and sympathetic, welcomed its dawning, and
the fullness of its promise. He was of the opinion that this form of
composition represented “the supreme Christian contribution to
literature”; and, while admitting that there were bad as well as good
specimens of the art, he stoutly maintained that one more
autobiography, however indifferent, was better than one less—a
disputable point.
The question which confronts the reading public is this: “How far
should the law of kindness, which we all profess to follow, influence
us in allowing to our fellow creatures the happiness of writing books
about themselves?” There is no use saying that it would be
impossible to stop them. Nothing in the way of inhibitions is
impossible to the United States. “There is no country,” says the
observant Santayana, “in which people live under more powerful
compulsions.”
Americans have so far been inclined to tolerate the vanity of the
autobiography, because mankind is naturally vain, and to forgive its
dullness, because life is frequently dull. Moreover, they are well
disposed towards any form of art or letters that lays claim to the
quality of truth; and it is generally conceded that a man knows
himself better than others know him. He does not know, and he
never can know, how he appears to his acquaintances. The sound of
his own voice, the light in his own eye, his accent, his mannerisms,
his laugh, the sensations, pleasurable or otherwise, which he
produces by his presence—these things, apparent to every casual
observer, are unfamiliar to him. But his naturel (a word too
expressive for translation) which others must estimate by the help of
circumstantial evidence, he can, if he be honest, know and judge.
This, at least, is the theory on which rest the lucidity of art and the
weight of conscience. Yet George Sand, who was given to self-
inspection, self-analysis and self-applause, admitted the dimness of
her inward vision. “The study of the human heart,” she wrote, “is of
such a nature, that the more we are absorbed by it, the less clearly
do we see.”
Strayed Sympathies
It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking
kindness for any unpopular person than to give way to perfect
raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices.—
Robert Louis Stevenson.
It is not only more instructive—it is more enlivening. The
conventionalities of criticism (moral, not literary, criticism) pass from
mouth to mouth, and from pen to pen, until the iterations of the press
are crystallized in encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries. And
from such verdicts there is no appeal. Their laboured impartiality,
their systematic adjustments, their careful avoidance of intuition,
produce in the public mind a level sameness of misunderstanding.
Many sensible people think this a good result. Even a man who did
his own thinking, and maintained his own intellectual free-hold, like
Mr. Bagehot, knew and upheld the value of ruts. He was well aware
how far a little intelligence can be made to go, unless it aspires to
originality. Therefore he grumbled at the paradoxes which were
somewhat of a novelty in his day, but which are out-worn in ours, at
the making over of virtue into vice, and of vice into something more
inspiriting than virtue. “We have palliations of Tiberius, eulogies on
Henry the Eighth, devotional exercises to Cromwell, and fulsome
adulations of the first Napoleon.”
That was a half-century ago. To-day, Tiberius is not so much out of
favour as out of mind; Mr. Froude was the last man really interested
in the moral status of Henry the Eighth; Mr. Wells has given us his
word for it that Napoleon was a very ordinary person; and the
English people have erected a statue of Cromwell close to the
Houses of Parliament, by way of reminding him (in his appointed
place) of the survival of representative government. The twentieth
century does not lean to extravagant partialities. Its trend is to
disparagement, to searchlights, to that lavish and ironic candour
which no man’s reputation can survive.
When Mr. Lytton Strachey reversed Mr. Stevenson’s suggestion,
and chose, as subject-matter of a book, four people of whom the
world had heard little but good, who had been praised and
reverenced beyond their deserts, but for whom he cherished a secret
and cold hostility, he experimented successfully with the latent
uncharitableness of men’s minds. The brilliancy with which the four
essays were written, the keenness of each assault, the charm and
persuasiveness of the style, delighted even the uncensorious. The
business of a biographer, said the author in a very engaging preface,
is to maintain his own freedom of spirit, and lay bare events as he
understands them, “dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior
intentions.”
It sounds fair and square; but the fact remains that Mr. Strachey
disliked Manning, despised Arnold, had little sympathy with Gordon,
and no great fancy for Florence Nightingale. It must be remembered
also that in three cases out of four he was dealing with persons of
stubborn character and compelling will, as far removed from
irreproachable excellence as from criminality. Of such, much
criticism may be offered; but the only way to keep an open outlook is
to ask, “What was their life’s job?” “How well did they do it?” Men
and women who have a pressing job on hand (Florence Nightingale
was all job) cannot afford to cultivate the minor virtues. They move
with an irresistible impulse to their goal. It is a curious fact that Mr.
Strachey is never so illuminating as when he turns his back upon
these forceful and disconcerting personages, and dallies with their
more amenable contemporaries. What he writes about Gordon we
should be glad to forget; what he writes about Sir Evelyn Baring and
Lord Hartington we hope to remember while we live.
The popularity of “Eminent Victorians” inspired a host of followers.
Critics began to look about them for other vulnerable reputations. Mr.
J. A. Strahan, stepping back from Victoria to Anne, made the happy
discovery that Addison had been systematically overpraised, and
that every side of his character was open to assault. The result of
this perspicuity is a damning denunciation of a man whom his
contemporaries liked and esteemed, and concerning whom we have
been content to take the word of those who knew him. He may have

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Neo-Colonial Injustice and the Mass

Imprisonment of Indigenous Women

More information about this series at

Antje Deckert Juan Tauri

Palgrave Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Criminal Justice

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover illustration: GettyImages-471115570​

Thanks also to the non-Indigenous contributors for honouring the

New Zealand Ngā mihi

2 Stigmatising Gang Narratives, Housing, and the Social

3 The Relationship Between Restorative Justice and Prison

4 Colonial Policies and Indigenous Women in Canada 53

5 The Mass Incarceration of Indigenous Women in Canada:

6 Transcending Colonial Legacies: From Criminal Justice to

7 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women in Australian

8 Mana Wahine Leadership After Prison155

9 What Was My Crime? Being an American Indian Woman173

10 Trauma, Healing, and Justice: Native Hawaiian Women in

11 Prison as Destiny? Descent or Dissent?223

12 Te Piringa Poho: Healing, Potential and Transformation

Thalia Anthony is of Cypriot heritage, including from the colonised

Dorinda Cox is an Aboriginal (Noongar) woman. She has skills and

Olga Marques is Assistant Professor (Criminology) at the Ontario Tech

Helena Rattray-Te Mana (Ngā Rauru tribe) is an emerging researcher

Hilde Tubex is Associate Professor at the Law School of the University

Fig. 1.1 Indigenous women as a share of all women imprisoned in

Table 1.1 Scope of Indigenous women imprisonment in Australia,

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Table 1.1 Scope of Indigenous women imprisonment in Australia, Canada, New

speaking across diverse domains. Such voices are pertinent to elevating

incarceration of Indigenous women. Over the course of the following 11

application of restorative justice in the lives of Indigenous people, espe-

rising violent behaviour among Aboriginal women considering the ongo-

Indigenous Women as a Share of All Women

Fig. 1.1 Indigenous women as a share of all women imprisoned in Australia,

With most contributors embedded in their Indigenous communities,

C. Lewis • A. N. Norris (*) • W. Heta-Cooper • J. Tauri

© The Author(s) 2020 13

traction over the last decade, prompting new national conversations.

likely impede or restrict access to housing, especially for Indigenous

Power Relationships, Māori, and Housing

number of Māori into impoverished and over-crowded urban housing

 tigmas, Social Policing,

To encourage suburban communities to provide a full range of hous-

[S]egregation persists because discrimination in the housing and lending

Bonilla-Silva (2015) illustrates that the steering practices listed above

 he Criminalisation of Indigenous Peoples

stereotypes, social policing, and criminalisation (Bonilla-Silva, 2000;

www.parliament.nz/en/) was consulted. After filtering for Hansard

Gangs and the Organised Crime Bill

in October 2007. Ostensibly undertaken due to supposed ‘terrorism-like’

Residential Tenancy Amendment Bill

poverty, illnesses, and children. While secondary, gangs emerged in a

discourses offer a type of protectionism that undoubtedly intersects with

In this context, ideas about misbehaviour appear to overlap with concepts

Very much like Goetz’s (2008) analysis of the framing of affordable

practices. The Organised Crime Bill provided the foundation to socially

“The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,

“For now the dentist cannot die,

Next to the pleasure of writing lovingly about ourselves—but not

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Cover illustration: GettyImages-471115570

2 Stigmatising Gang Narratives, Housing, and the Social

3 The Relationship Between Restorative Justice and Prison

4 Colonial Policies and Indigenous Women in Canada 53

5 The Mass Incarceration of Indigenous Women in Canada:

6 Transcending Colonial Legacies: From Criminal Justice to

7 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women in Australian

8 Mana Wahine Leadership After Prison155

9 What Was My Crime? Being an American Indian Woman173

10 Trauma, Healing, and Justice: Native Hawaiian Women in

11 Prison as Destiny? Descent or Dissent?223

12 Te Piringa Poho: Healing, Potential and Transformation

Power Relationships, Māori, and Housing

tigmas, Social Policing,

he Criminalisation of Indigenous Peoples

Gangs and the Organised Crime Bill

Residential Tenancy Amendment Bill