supporting tiriti-based curriculum delivery in mainstream early ...

opposed to the notion of biculturalism were generally Māori and those who were
optimistic about it were non-Māori.
The following critical review of the literature pertaining to definitions of
biculturalism starts generally but moves toward definitions specific to education,
including those relevant to early childhood. Of those advocating generally for
biculturalism two were international authors who were writing about a different
context. One group (La Fromboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 2000) defined bicultural
as being able to develop and maintain competency in both cultures. The other was
Banks (1988) who describes being bicultural as when a person is “as comfortable
within the adopted culture as he or she is within his or her primordial or first
culture” (p38).
Moving to definitions from Aotearoa New Zealand one that initially
resonated with me was from the Ministerial Advisory Committee (1988):
“understanding and sharing the values of another culture” (p. 19). However, I
realised that none of the above definitions pointed to the underlying political nature
of biculturalism. This political notion can be seen in the following definition of
bicultural that specifically denotes the ethnicity of the two peoples from the
Anglican Church Bicultural Commission (1985, as cited in Spoonley, 1995, p. 94),
which saw biculturalism as “the ambition of establishing Māori and Pākehā as
groups of equal standing rather than one being subjugated by the dominance of the
other.” 1
It is these notions of power, or the political nature of the concept of
biculturalism, that troubled Spoonley (1995), who suggested that biculturalism
should involve power sharing between Māori and the Crown, although he
cautioned that if this was not possible, then for Māori “the move to separatism
[would be] inevitable” (p.94). Furthermore, he claimed that a shift to tino
rangatiratanga (autonomy) would protect the communal interests of Māori. As
well, he considered that one of the difficulties with biculturalism remains that
Pākehā do not recognise their own ethnicity and biculturalism assumes they do.
Māori, who operate in both Māori and Pākehā domains, are already bicultural.
1 It should be noted that whilst the original cultures in Aotearoa New Zealand who signed Te Tiriti o
Waitangi were Māori and the Crown, which in this context represents all the ethnicities in Aotearoa New
Zealand other than Māori.
43