110 ● Anaru Eketone and Shayne Walker
human service workers have to find ways of interacting with their Māori
clients. A number of problems can occur: being afraid to engage, resorting
to essentialism (reducing Māori practices or structures to stereotypes), or not
recognizing the diversity that exists within Māori society.
True bicultural practice must go beyond mere tokenism. Clients deserve ser-
vices that acknowledge their cultural meaning-making frameworks and contexts
(Waldegrave 2012). The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, also
known as the Bennett scale (Bennett 1993), can be used by human service
workers to identify and improve how they react to cultural differences. This
approach requires an honest self-assessment of sensitivity to cultural differences.
It is based on moving through a continuum of stages within two states: ethno-
centric and ethnorelative. In the ethnocentric stages, a worker uses his or her
own values, customs, and standards to judge the behavior and values of persons
from a different cultural outlook. In ethnorelative stages, a person is comfort-
able in a variety of cultural settings, and he or she has developed practice effec-
tiveness by adjusting his or her assessments and behavior to suit the setting and
context. Practitioners first establish, through honest self-reflection, where they
are positioned on the continuum. They are encouraged to then move through
defined states and orientations, so that, as their experiential knowledge and
practice grows, their potential competence in intercultural relations increases.
It would appear that ethnocentrism is often the reason for poor attention
to the development of cultural skills and knowledge. If workers want to “do”
social justice and human rights with Māori, a good personal starting point is
their own self-awareness. They must be prepared to talk about those things
that are deep within or that may or may not be important to them as part
of their own cultural framework. It is a difficult thing, requiring honesty and
self-awareness, to admit that one is ethnocentric, to acknowledge that one
denies or misunderstands cultural difference. Ethnocentric thinking on the
part of human service workers will be obvious to those with whom we work.
No matter how honorable our motives, our effectiveness in working with
someone is often based on how they perceive us. When working with people
of other cultural backgrounds, we need to understand the basic skill package
required, what Walker (2012, 72) called “the skills to respect,” where even to
engage with a family we need to know how to acknowledge them in a way
that allows them to maintain a degree of dignity, all the while allowing our
lens (our views of others) to be challenged.
To work biculturally with Māori and move beyond tokenism, we must
have at least a basic competence in te reo (language), tikanga (customs),
kawa (protocols), Māori values, and Māori history (see also chapter 2). The
authors of this chapter, who are Māori social work educators and prac-
titioners in New Zealand, would like to see some practices evidenced by