The white people being more Maori than the Maori is pretty accurate actually.
No. It's just that some of us Pākehā actually care about preserving and supporting a people and a culture that our ancestors did their best to eradicate.
Those of us that care enough, will find out the appropriate ways to provide such support.
Auckland Airport has some (IMHO somewhat crass) token Māoritanga in the international terminal. They're quite happy to exploit Māori when there's tourism dollars to be made.
Thank you. I feel like not a lot of people consider this angle. I mean, whatever your personal heritage is, if the people of New Zealand don’t take some sort of stewardship over the national heritage, no one other country is going to.
I enjoyed the meme, but it's still better to have folks embrace your indigenous culture than try to stamp it out or banish it to the undesirable parts of your homeland.
You're right, but it's pretty cringe sometimes. I've seen a video call full of white people having a meeting about something that has nothing whatsoever to do with Maoridom start a meeting with a Karakira. It's very performative a lot of the time.
It's kinda hard to describe the attitude some people have.
There's performative bullshit because someone gets it in their head that a karakia is some from of "support". It's our version of "thoughts and prayers". A token gesture requiring no actual effort or investment to tick a box.
IMHO one of the best things to do is just lean our actual history, and not just post European contact history: there's another six centuries of history before that just in NZ. Though 19th century is the most important to learn.
Unfortunately it got embraced heavily in corporate office culture not so much in everyday culture so most peoples day to day experience with maori culture is very soulless and performative. The only positive is its keeping the language alive.
That corporate adoption is only profit/marketing driven anyway.
Look how culturally sensitive we are! Spend money with us!
It's sickening.
I flew to New Zealand and the only thing I saw on arrival was the baggage handlers throwing the suitcases so hard into the trailer that they fell off the other side.
raises beer
Haka Tua
It’s like a NZ Bollywood movie.
Should’ve went to Hawaii instead.
Replace "Haka" with "Lei ceremony" and "LOTR museum" with an observatory.
Weren't the Maori also just invaders who killed the natives and brought invasive species with them? I feel kind.of ambiguous about this whole Maori fascination.
The Maori were Polynesian navigators who were the first humans to settle NZ around 1300 AD. New Zealand and Hawaii were two of the last places on Earth to be settled by humans.
Then some of the Maori left from NZ and colonized the Chatham Islands around 1500. Due to their geographic isolation, they diverged culturally from the Maori, adopted a pacifist way of life, and came to be known as the Moriori.
In the mid-1800s, some Maori tribes, armed with muskets obtained from trade with Europeans, invaded the Chatham Islands and committed a genocide for nearly 30 years against the Moriori, who did not fight back because of their belief in pacifism. This is known as the Moriori genocide.
In 1870, a Native Land Court was established to adjudicate competing land claims; by this time most Māori had returned to Taranaki. The court ruled in favour of the Māori, awarding them 97% of the land.The judge ruled that since the Moriori had been conquered by Māori they did not have ownership rights of the land.
Ahahahaha, wtf
The land court's purpose was literally (as stated in the establishing legislation) to oversee the "extinguishment or Māori title".
Setting conquest as a precedent of losing your land was deliberate.
Pretty much every piece of NZ had been taken off someone by force at some point, before Europeans even landed. The Maori tribes had a number of wars between each other over territory.
I'd think that's the case for pretty much everywhere on Earth.
It's only fairly recently that we started exchanging coins for land rather than just killing whoever was on it.
There's still one little tribe of moriori left
Not 100%, all surviving Moriori are a mixture of Maori and Moriori. At this point probably some European as well.
The "full blooded X" argument is an attempt to disenfranchise Māori from their whakapapa. If a person can and wants to trace their lineage (whakapapa) to any iwi or waka then they are Māori.
I don't know, I have a not insignificant amount of indigenous blood (not Maori) and without any cultural ties I don't think it's significant as an individual. My family was raised and then raised me with no real connections to any of our hereditary cultures.
I don't really have an interest in submerging into a culture that is foreign to me, nor am I interested in attempting to benefit from any sort of reparations. I'm just a white girl with a large fraction of indigenous blood.
That was my "wants to" bit was supposed to cover. It's entirety your choice and no-one else's.
I don't get to tell you "how Māori" you are, or specifically if you are/not Māori enough.
Including David Seymour, ironically enough.
That's something I just don't get. That's why I included "and wants to".
Nope. Not even close. That's a myth used to invalidate actual Māori history.
The "moriori" were a Māori tribe on the Chatham islands who were conquered by mainland Māori.
Fun fact: NZ is the last place on earth to be permanently settled by humans.
TL;DR: Polynesians settled New Zealand over the 13th century, slowly lost contact with polynesia and the cultures diverged.
Are we just discounting that Antarctica still has no permanent residents?
Antarctica can't be the last place with a permanent settlement if it has no permanent settlement.
It hasn’t happened yet so New Zealand is last. Give it a hundred years and we’ll have antarcticans
Yep. It has some permanent research facilities but no permanent settlement.
They were genocided by mainland Maori, the island's inhabitants were either killed or enslaved, and forced to adopt the culture of their conquerors.
Yeah. I deliberately avoided using "genocide". It's a bit of a political hot topic right now (middle east) and I also wasn't entirely sure, so erred on the conservative side and just used "conquered".
Fun fact: Easter Island was probably settled about the same time, the Juan Fernandez islands weren't settled until the late 1600's.
ETA: Falklands/Islas Malvinas is even more recent iirc
Islas Malvinas
🤣
I have a question about the fun fact. Trying to better understand it. If I were rich enough to buy an island and move to it, would that be the new last place to be settled by humans? If no, why not. And if yes, then surely there's at least one example of someone doing that since the 13th century.
It depends how big the island is, and whether it's supported by something else. NZ is a very large place, a country in it's own right, and is economically independent.
Your hypothetical island would likely be answerable to another government, and economically reliant on whatever your source of income is.
Fair enough. Yeah, I thought that maybe there were still small, unclaimed islands out there where you could have a small farm with solar power and shit and be self sufficient.
If you look back far enough most everyone is an invader
Maybe we shouldnt be looking backwards for inspiration.
Kinda sorta. The Moriori settled in the Chatham Island (a few hundred km south of New Zealand) and were later victims of genocide at the hands of a Maori tribe during the musket wars. Previously it was assumed that the Moriori came to the Chathams in a separate wave of migration to the ones that brought the Maori, but more recent evidence seems to point to them arriving in New Zealand at about the same time, then moving south.
There were a few species that went extinct between the Maori arriving in NZ and the Europeans showing up, but expecting an ecosystem to not change when a new apex predator shows up is just "noble savage" BS.
Some of them were cannibals too.
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