73 Human Rights Commission The visible expression of this became more overt and explicit as the colonial project progressed in strength and dominance. For example, in 1862, Henry Taylor, the Auckland Inspector of Schools, said: The Native language itself is also another obstacle in the way of civilisation, so long as it exists there is a barrier to the free and unrestrained intercourse which ought to exist between the two races, it shuts out the less civilised portion of the population from the benefits which intercourse with the more enlightened would confer (New Perspectives on Race, 1982, p. 1). The Native Schools Act (1867) increased government control of the country after the 1860s Wars of Sovereignty. The Act moved to suppress te reo Māori through section 21 “No school shall receive any grant unless it is shown… that the English language and the ordinary subjects of primary English education are taught” (ACORD, 1986, p. 2). Speaking during the debate on the 1867 Act, Member of Parliament Hugh Carleton said: Things have now come to pass that it is necessary either to exterminate the Natives or civilise them. Exterminating the Māori would be very expensive and could bankrupt the colony, therefore members should support the Bill to civilise them. We can never civilise the Māori through the medium of a language [te reo] that is imperfect as a medium of thought. If we attempt it, failure is inevitable; civilisation can only be carried out by a means of a perfect language [English] (New Perspectives on Race, 1982, p. 2; ACORD, 1986, p. 3). By the early twentieth century, the Act, reinforced by later recommendations and regulations would lead to the exclusion of te reo in both Native Schools and Board of Education public schools, by which time the number of Māori attending each was about the same (New Perspectives on Race, 1982, p. 3). In 1906, a School Inspector reported that Māori attending boarding schools spoke English in the playground while Māori attending Native schools continued to speak te reo. He impressed upon teachers the need for them “to take every care to impress upon the children the necessity of practising outside the school the lessons they learn within it” (New Perspectives on Race, 1982, p. 3). The consequence of this was that subsequent generations of Māori students would experience this ‘encouragement’ as a complete ban on te reo “enforced by corporal punishment, on the speaking of Māori, even in the playground” (Bruce Biggs, 1968, pp. 65-84). By the mid-1970s, at least half of the Māori interviewed for a study on te reo said they had been physically punished for speaking the language of their ancestors at school (Benton, 1981, p. 46). These policies caused the critical decline in Māori speakers of te reo: In 1913 90% of Māori schoolchildren could speak Māori. Forty years later in 1953, this percentage had dropped to 26%. Twenty years after that (1975) the figure had fallen to less than 5% (Waitangi Tribunal, Te Reo Māori Claim (Wai 11), 1986, p. 15). Colonisation had successfully ‘othered’ te reo Māori me ōna tikanga. The alienation of Māori identity Tamariki Māori born and schooled in the early twentieth century were subject to physical and verbal abuse for speaking Māori (Benton, 1981, p. 46). Many were tamariki whose language of the home was te reo. As they matured to kaumātua and kuia, they never forgot the punishment inflicted upon them. The loss of te reo inflicted significant psychological disconnect and identity alienation on that generation, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren (Halkyard-Harawira, 2021). Language loss was one part of a wider cumulative erosion of culture and identity: The intentional acts of the settler state to disenfranchise Māori from political power and land was an indirect form of psychological abuse, the trauma of which emerges as identity alienation. Therefore, the colonising environment not only included the traumas of poverty and disease but was also likely compounded by a growing identity alienation (Reid et al, 2017, p. 36).