72 Maranga Mai! Church schools Between 1840 and 1879, the Crown introduced multiple consecutive legislative measures on Māori schooling including the Education Ordinance (1847); the Native Schools Act (1858); the Native Schools Act (1867); and the Native Schools Amendment Act (1871). The cumulative effect of these measures sought to indoctrinate Māori into a way of life centred on the supremacy of British rule, European norms and white privilege: Māori were to be the underclass in colonial society. This was the Crown’s attempt to reduce us to second-class citizens on our own lands, in front of our own maunga, by our own awa – reduced as a people (Smith, 2021). Assimilation was central to colonial schooling. The Education Ordinance (1847) provided subsidies for church schools subject to the proviso “that instruction was conducted in English and te reo Māori excluded from the curriculum”. The shift away from the mission school approach of teaching in te reo marked the inception of the colonial oppression of te reo. The overt emphasis on a physically-centred curriculum was designed to prepare Māori for life as a labouring underclass brown proletariat (Walker, 2016, p. 23). As school inspector Henry Taylor remarked in 1862: I do not advocate for the Natives under present circumstances a refined education or high mental culture: it would be inconsistent if we take into account the position they are likely to hold for many years to come in the social scale, and inappropriate if we remember that they are better calculated by nature to get their living by manual rather than by mental labour (Calman, 2012b). Therein were sown the seeds for instituting an education system predicated on channelling Māori towards low-skilled, low-paid menial work for the benefit of Pākehā, regardless of possible detrimental consequences for the wellbeing of Māori (Waikato Tainui, Tokona Te Raki, BERL & The Southern Initiative, 2019, p. 5). Premised on the purported intellectual inferiority of Māori, the effects of racist Western assimilated education channelled Māori away from academia into domestic, manual or factory labour. This undermined the collective and individual integrity, identity, and the ability of Māori to self-determine their futures. Native schools After the cessation of the Wars for Sovereignty, the Native Schools Act (1867) and Native Schools Amendment Act (1871) established Native Schools adding further impetus to the formal entrenchment of a white supremacist assimilationist education system. Native Schools were to bring Māori ‘into line’ with European ‘civilisation’ (Timutimu, Simon, and Matthews, 1998, p. 111; Smith and Simon, 1998; Simon and Smith, 2001). A British curriculum (ACORD, 1986, p. 3) was to teach Māori children a range of labour and domestic skillsets (Calman, 2012b) so that by the 1930s “the Māori lad would be a good farmer” and the “Māori girl to be a good farmer’s wife” (Office of the Children’s Commissioner, New Zealand School Trustees Association, 2018, p. 16). The suppression of te reo Māori Located in the pre-Wars of Sovereignty era, when Māori were demographically stronger and rangatiratanga more robust and independent, mission and church schools had tolerated te reo out of necessity because their existence depended on the hospitality of Māori. A latent denigration and intolerance of te reo were implicit, real, and fundamental throughout the colonial settler project not only because of racist notions of a superior white culture and inferior Māori culture but also because Europeans believed the cultural and societal dismantling of Māoridom, disguised as the civilising project, was necessary to remould Māori as a new brown proletariat working for the benefit of white privileged colonial society (Taonui, 2021).