Sydney Davies: Moving to Logan a case of 'perfect timing'
Reprinted with permission of
The Herald Journal, Bridgerland Edition: "Neighbors from Afar"
By Chuck Nunn
Sydney Davies came a long way to get to where he is, not just in miles, but in life experience. From his birth in 1956 at the hospital in Whangerei, New Zealand, to growing up in the island nation’s Maori culture, to being on the cusp of earning Utah State University’s first Ph.D. in community psychology, Davies has quite a story to tell.
Davies spent his early childhood in the town of Hikunrangi, where his parents lived. In fact, family was the one thing he had around him in rich supply.
“That’s where I have my indigenous roots, and that was sort of like the village living environment there in Hikurangi,” he said. “Most of the people in town were all related to each other.”
But Davies also got a taste of city life when his family moved to New Zealand’s capital of Auckland. The move was part of a trend with many Maori families at the time.
“My parents moved into the big city, into Auckland, when I was very, very young, which was in keeping with the urban drift of the Second World War,” he explained. “Before the Second World War, most of the indigenous peoples, like 80 percent, lived in the rural areas, and only 20 percent lived in the cities. And by the time the Second World War finished, it was switched around: 80 percent were in the cities and only 20 percent were in the rural areas.”
However, Davies’ father was also part of a reverse trend in the 1970s, a cultural awakening that took the family back to their ancestral lands and a very different way of life than what they experienced in the city.
“My father moved back to the ancestral lands, to the tribal lands, and he was like 70 years old, and built a shack with my mother—dirt floors with no amenities. My mother cooked on an open fire outside, because they needed to go back to their ancestral land, and that was it. They shifted out of their home in the city and stayed there pretty much for the rest of their lives.”
Davies lived most of his life in the city of Hamilton, but even at an early age he saw a lot of New Zealand, and as a young man he tried to establish himself in different careers. After serving for a few years in New Zealand’s Fire Service, he served an LDS mission, then returned, only to find that the high rate o turnover that once existed with the Fire Service had changed with the economic times.
“I applied to two fire regions, got accepted into both—those two fire regions had a turnover of about 400 staff a year,” Davies said. “Three years later, they had a staff turnover of three combined for those two regions. And that was the job situation in the ‘70s around the first fuel crisis and the economies started to change on a global scale. So I left the Fire Service and went on my mission, and when I came back two years later, it was like I couldn’t get back in. I was on the top of the list to get back in, but I might have to wait two years to get in, because there was no staff turnover and no one was leaving.”
But his time with the Fire Service did give him a leg up when Davies decided to go into law enforcement, and he stayed with that profession until economic pressures of another kind began to take their toll—Davies was paying 48 cents on the dollar in taxes on his income. A relative in Australia had work available and convinced Davies to go there, and he was able to make a much higher wage and pay less in taxes—10 cents on the dollar.
Dview stayed in Australia long enough to get some money saved up for him and his wife, Maureen, and their young children to return to New Zealand and set themselves up. When they did return, the moved to the tribal land where Davies’ parents had settled, built a house and started a bakery, which provided the people in the are with a much needed commodity.
“It was an island off the coast of New Zealand, and everybody used to fly in their bread and any baked sort of stuff,” Davies related. “It was insane. So I started up a bakery and supplied bread and small goods to everybody on the island. That hadn’t happened for like a hundred years.”
The Davies lived on that island for a number fo years until their children began to to reach school age. They moved to Hamilton on the North Island, and Davies set upon the path that would occupy him for the better part of three decades.
“One of the things I was doing was working with street kids,” Davies said. “We tried to set up a program on the island with kids that needed to have some diversion from jail, you know, forma w way of life. But I was talking to lots of different officials and they just went, “Eh, what qualifications have you got? Why should we listen to you? Just because they’re indigenous kids and you’re an indigenous person, you don’t know nothin.’
“So I thought, well, I’ll go back to university and get some qualification so that people would at least listen to me, and that’s how I got started into going to university, and that was back in ’84. So I started going to university and I think I finished my bachelor’s in 1986.”
Going back to school is hard for anyone in their 30s to do. But for Davies, as a Maori, there were additional challenges that had to be faced.
“It was a foreign environment because I didn’t finish high school,” Davies said. “In fact, I got kicked out of high school, which is not unusual for indigenous people, for Maori to get tossed out on your ear in high school, because you just weren't doing anything. My grades were so low—in fact, in my last year of high school most of my teachers refused to give me a grade, because it was just a waste of time. There was no grade low enough to give me. So they just left it blank, and I got kicked out. I basically got kicked out of school.
“But that was sort of like the system, the gatekeeping process. It was like, indigenous peoples, you’re good for using a shovel, you know? Go do some menial task. Forget about going to university: that just wasn’t in the picture. And there was no money to support going there, either.”
It was difficult, though not impossible, as a native person for Davies to navigate the process of getting higher education in New Zealand. But he was able to do it, and after he got his bachelor’s degree he did an honors year, which in New Zealand means an extra year beyond his bachelor’s program. Then he started to pursue his graduate education. Because counseling psychology was actually part of the counseling program instead of the psychology program, Davies was pursuing master’s degrees in both at the same time.
But by that time, the Davies had seven of their nine children, and the pressures of providing for a growing family began to take their toll on the family budget. Davies also had a difference of opinion with his instructors over counseling issues for indigenous people that made completing his counselor’s degree problematic. And although he was close to finishing his master’s in psychology, the economic factors facing his family forced him to withdraw from that program as well.
“Once you’re at that level, you can’t stop and go back—you stop and you stop,” Davies said. “So I stopped and fed my kids, and I had teenagers coming up. So for 10 years, I still worked in psychology in Maori and worked in counseling. I had my own counseling practice that I was operating in.
“But working with indigenous peoples, no one’s paying you, so you can’t do that and have a livelihood. So I had other jobs, and then all the stuff that I did with indigenous people, that was all just pro-bono, that was stuff that I just did at no cost. So I had to have money to feed my family, then I did other work, then in terms of counseling and working with indigenous peoples and doing psychology work, I just got no pay for it, because when you’re working with indigenous people, that’s what you do. You go and do it for free, just so you can get it done, and then you have another job that supports you to do it, which I was happy enough to do.”
But while his counseling work with Maori people may not have been bringing in a lot of money, iot was giving Davies experience that he needed. And also, at last, people in New Zealand’s government were paying attention to what he was saying about issues in counseling native people.
“I sat on a number of government boards and agencies,” Davies said. “And I’d like to feel that I was instrumental, and on teams that were instrumental, in changing the way that counseling psychologists and counselors got trained and how they viewed and implemented programs at both the university level and at the schooling level for training of indigenous peoples, or people who work with indigenous peoples, and on government advisory boards and government-sponsored, programs on a national level, and I did that for a number of years.”
Because of work he was doing in the private sector, Davies was actually doing quite well financially by that time. But as his children got older and began starting their own lives, he felt the need to go back and finish what he started.
“So I went back to school and finished my master’s and then looked for a school I sould do my Ph.D. in,” Daview related. “And I wanted to do something outside of New Zealand but still have access to indigenous peoples.”
Although Davies was pretty well oriented to the United States through business and extended family ties, he had never heard of Utah State University. The story of how he came to attend USU is and interesting one.
“I thought, “Utah, OK, there’s two universities with graduate programs: University of Utah and BYU in Provo. So I went and interviewed with both of them, put them on the list, and applied to them. And then on the last day I was down in St. George with a family down there, and they said, “’Well, did you go to USU?’ and I said, ‘Who? Is that an Irishman? What’s USU?’”
“So they told me there’s this university in the state of Utah, and it’s Utah State University in Logan. And I went, ‘Where’s Logan?’ And here I was in St. George, right, flying out of the country the next day. So I flew home and I hopped online and I looked at it and found that they had an indigenous component in psychology with Carolyn Barcus at the American Indian Support Program. And the other two universities didn’t’ have any indigenous support, so I wasn’t really thrilled about it, even though I had applied (to them).”
Once contacted by Davies, Barcus invited him to attend and present at the annual AISP Convention. Davies came, and he liked what he saw. Barcus helped put Davies in touch with the right people, and he ended up in front of Rich Roberts in the Early Intervention Research Institute. Davies was looking for a community psychology program, Roberts was starting one up, so the timing was right for Davies to make the move to USU.
“I applied, got in, and I was the first community students to go through the USU system,” Davies said. “And I’ll be the first person to graduate from USU with a community psychology degree.”
Living in Cache Valley, Davies has experienced all the similarities and differences between his environs here and what he’s known in New Zealand. But the two areas aren’t as different as many people might think.
“New Zealand’s a South Pacific island,” Davies said. “But you have this picture of South Pacific islands with the palm trees and the white sand and the warm beaches—and we have that. But you have to understand that New Zealand’s closest neighbor is the Antarctic. So it gets pretty cold, and we get snow in the winter, and you don’t’ normally think of Pacific islands and snow, and that’s what we have.
“In fact, New Zealand has two man islands, and when the English arrived the were very inventive, and they called one North Island and the other one South Island. And on the South Island, which is closer to the Antarctic, there’s an area there called MacKenzie Country, which is identical to Cache Valley in terms of looks, altitude; it gets snow there in the winter, and people get trapped because of the snow. And it has the huge frosts and cold, and it’s beautiful. It’s just as pretty as a picture, just like it is here—except of course it doesn’t have the population like it does here.”
In addition to similarities in weather, much of New Zealand is very rural, much like Cache Valley, with agriculture and forestry being the country’s main industries. Also, Davies notes the friendliness of the people as another big similarity between his native land and Cache Valley.
“People talk about the Utah way, or the Utah life. I don’t see that as being much of a problem,” Davies said. “I have spent many years doing business mainly on the West Coast anyway: California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Washington, those areas. Utah people are Utah people, and they have things that are a little bit different, but I don’t really see them as different as any of the other places I’ve visited in America. They’re very friendly, very open, very inviting, and I’ve had that same experience almost everywhere that I’ve gone in America.”
In terms of the things that are different between Cache Valley and New Zealand, two stand out for Davies: food and education.
“I found the adaptation to the food was very difficult, next to New Zealand food, which is very unprocessed,” Davies said. “In New Zealand, everything’s made from scratch, whereas here it’s more like semi-cooked—you buy a pack of this , a pack of that, and you mix and match, and there’s your food. And that was very foreign. So food was a big contrast. Everything’s got sugar in it here, and by the same token a lot of people that I’ve spoken with who’ve been to New Zealand say our food has got no flavor, and I think, ‘Yeah, because it’s missing all the sugar.’”
And with school-aged children coming along for the journey, the education system in the United States posed some very unique differences that Davies and his wife needed to consider.
“The schooling system is really, really different, because we follow more of and English-type system,” Davies said. “So schooling is very different, and we had to adapt to that, both elementary and high school. Even the university system is very different. So like in New Zealand, you don’t do generals. That’s done at high school, because in New Zealand, high school is five years, and you start school at five. That’s not Kindergarten, that’s grade one at five years old. If you want to do Kindergarten, that’ll start at three years old and four years old. So we start a lot sooner, and we spend more years. When you get to university, you’ve done your generals. That’s all done at high school. So when you get to university, you start straight into your major.
“So when we moved our kids here, we had to find a happy medium. Because if we put them into their age group, they’re two years behind their schooling level. But we couldn’t put them up to their schooling level, because they’d be two years above their age cohort.
“So we got a medium in between, where they’re the oldest kid in the class but a year behind in their school work. And we had to look at some of that, because when we go back to New Zealand, then they’ll be a year or two years behind their age group when we go back. Some of the schools we went to, they understood that, others not. So finding sort of like a happy medium with the schooling was a little bit different.”
But even with the adjustments that Davies has had to make to life, there’s nothing about Cache Valley that he doesn’t like, at least nothing that he wouldn’t find anywhere else he might live and not like.
“There’s nothing here that I don’t like. There really isn’t Davies attested. “There’s nothing here in Cache Valley that I don’t like that I haven’t found in other places that I don’t like. I’ve talked about people that are friendly, inviting and open, and you’ve got people here that are very racist and close-minded, but you’re going to get those sorts of people everywhere in the world. But there’s nothing here in Cache valley that I don’t like. But I’m more of an optimist. And people who are hard-nosed and not friendly, you’re going to meet those people anywhere in the world. You get to pick your friends, people that you like to associate with, and the rest you tolerate. And that’s fine, it’s all good. It’s not like Cache Valley doesn’t have its faults, but they don’t have any faults that are unique or different to anywhere else in the world.”
