Maui Street - great new maori blog
Great to see that muzza has set up a maori blog Maui Street - we need more maori blogs and we need to connect them all up.
I've been an avid reader of the New Zealand blogsphere for quiet a while now and i've recently noticed the shortage of blogs written from a Maori perspective. This blog is an attempt to address that shortage. Most of my postings will deal with Politics and are written from the perspective of a young Maori male.
This post from muzza discusses the maori party and there successes/failures - an excellent summation and discussion.
A common criticism from the left is the MP have favoured symbol over substance. To a lesser extent they have shown far too much deference to the “Iwi elite” and not enough compassion towards urban Maori – or poor Maori. In my opinion the first criticism holds true. Many, if not most, of the MP policy wins have had very little practical effect.
Awesome to have more korero - thanks muzza - looking forward to part 2.
7 comments:
As a newcomer to New zealand politics I'm intrigued to see that there is a party called the Maori Party. Also I have heard people representing the party say "our people' when referring to party members and I presume Maori people in general. From what I have gathered the tone of the party is actually quite racist and if any other political representation adopted similar words I'm sure it would be roundly denounced. If a National or Labour party politician said 'Our people" there would be a hue and cry but not it appears when a Maori party leader says it.
I was tempted to learn Maori and in fact took some steps towards that hoping the voyage would lead me down exciting avenues. You see when you learn a new language it opens doors to culture and history and I was looking ahead to reading about what early Maori people had said and how they thought but it came as somewhat a surprise to learn that there was no written Maori language. No books, no recorded written archives only hearsay, tales that history has shown distort the truth in the telling. And having an interest in music I was hoping to find a catalogue of pre-european Maori musical folklore. So far I haven't. What I have found is that there are present day Maori activists with an agenda of their own who seem quite prepared to sacrifice three or four generations of Maori and are doing that by brain washing young Maori into believing they have been hard done by. I was in the country when a Maori party politician called white people "m...........s". And he is still in the party!
Thanks for that Marty! I agree that we need more Maori in the blogshpere and a bit of connection between them all.
With refernce to the above comment. I thought long and hard about whether or not to respond to your comment. I did not want to justify your comment with a response however, such hideous ignorance should never go unchallenged. Then again this is the interent and you should never feed a troll.
I will address one point though. Maori have been hard done by. One minute of research on your part would uncover a wealth of evidence to support this 'fact'. Take for example this incidence of historical racism.
"Smaller relief payments were made to Māori compared to Pākehā under a government scheme during the depression of the 1930s. The justification was that Māori could provide for themselves from their subsistence land holdings" Source: Claudia Orange, ‘A kind of equality: labour and the Māori people 1935–1949.’ MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1977, p. 63
This happened despite Maori having been virtually landless following the land theft during the previous century.
And heres an example of some contemporary disadvantage
"A study of colon cancer treatment found that Māori patients were less likely to be offered and receive chemotherapy compared to their non-Māori counterparts, and more likely to wait longer than two months to start chemotherapy. Other studies show Māori patients first admitted to hospital with a heart attack or unstable angina were less likely to receive cardiac surgical procedures than non-Māori (after taking relevant factors into account); Māori women are less likely to receive pain relief in childbirth; Māori hospital patients are more likely to experience adverse events, and Māori are more likely to have teeth removed than restored"
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Now, please take your small minded ideology, your distorted analysis (or lack of), your flawed reasoning and your simple conclusions to more academically bereft forums, such as the National Front website or an ACT Party conference.
Well Haime, don't you have a lot to learn!! I hope you go about the learning and do so with an open and unprejudiced mind. Maori have a fascinating and rich history and traditions and culture. I'm sure you will find the journey rewarding. If you go back far enough in your own culture you will find that there was no written language either. In Western cultures, written language really only came into its own with the advent of the printing press. Some Asian cultures had some kind of printing press several hundred years earlier than Western societies, but even so, over the span of human civilisation, written language is relatively new.
As for the notion of a political party for Maori, you are welcome to give your party vote to the Maori Party, it is not exclusive in that regard. You will soon learn too that the National and Act parties in NZ are for rich white people. Enjoy the journey
Kia ora Haime,
You write.. "tales that history has shown distort the truth in the telling"...
If you have not studied the oral history, or the many now written books on the treaty and its meaning, and the evolution of these relationships today, whose history are you saying is distorted? It reads to me as if you have already made up your mind about putting these things into your own boxes and preconceptions. Let go of your western notions of superiority for awhile and approach this with an open mind. I am a new comer as well, 18 years now, and I have not even begun to really learn and understand. Much less judge.
Haime, I am unsure why the fact that until recently te reo was an oral language negates against you learning it. Babies learn any language in an aural / oral fashion and, in my opinion, anyone learning a new language should learn by listening and speaking before focussing on the written form.
Whakapapa, mōteatea, waiata, pepehā, whakatauki are all rich in meaning, knowledge, history and tradition. They have been passed on for centuries and therefore have all the prospects of exciting avenues to follow that anyone could wish.
Might I urge you to read widely on New Zealand history, looking at James Belich and Claudia Orange with Anne Salmond's autobiographies of Amiria and Eruera Stirling.
As for the Māori Party being 'racist' - anyone may belong and give it their party vote should they choose to. The party hasn't yet stood candidates in general seats but might well in the future. I can't say that I have ever heard my MP say 'our people' meaning iwi in general but that is not to say that she hasn't. I must listen more closely. Many politicians do, though, trying to emphasise that they are speaking for a lot of people, non-specific as to race but rather referencing ideology, perhaps.
@haime: you might find brian flintoff's 'taonga puoro' an interesting start point for pre-eurpoean maori music. likely available in most libraries, definitely so in auckland.
BTW Haime, the word 'māori' means 'normal, usual ordinary' pge 179 Dictionary of the Māori Language - H.W. Williams published 2001
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