Photo: Qiane Matata-Sipu/NUKU
The 1955 Adoption Act allowed adoptive parents to sever ties with a child’s birth parents, and left few options for adoptees to access information about them. For Māori who went through the system as children — and their descendants — this often means having no knowledge of their whakapapa.
Erica Newman is the coordinator of the Indigenous Development programme at Otago University and her mother was one such adoptee. She says feelings of disconnection carried through to her and her own children. Last year Newman was awarded a Marsden scholarship to study the journey fellow adoptees are taking to find their tūrangawaewae. She has set up a private Facebook group for them to support each other.
Newman’s story appears in Qiane Matata-Sipu’s book Nuku: Stories of 100 Indigenous women.
