Posts by Jeremy Andrew
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That's right, I am a good ol' post-colonial pakeha, and as proud of it as a white middle-class male liberal can be.
Sure, ethnically, I am european - I tick that box on the census where it says ethnicity. However, on other forms, where its less clear what they're interested in, or why, I quite happily & validly tick New Zealander.
What I was querying was Manukura's qualifying specs for being indigenous, a different thing to ethnicity, I consider myself ethnically European, but I don't feel indigenous to there. Manukura doesn't feel indigenous to Hawaiiki or asia, but ethnically, there's no box to tick for one, and the other would be stretching it. My point for him was, it does matter who was there first.
Then again, I suppose the possums in the gully out back don't feel indigenous to Australia, & they've been around for more generations (if not years) than my people have. So I'd be classifed as indigenous to Europe and endemic to varying extents in the rest of the world - kind of like rats. -
The most surprising thing is how surprised people are when a corporation screws them.
"Wow, the record company is more interested in keeping money than giving it to me!"
"Hey, Telecom would rather give me the bare minimum service they can get away with while extracting maximum cash from my pocket!"
"Woh, cigarette companies 'forgot' to mention that they knew their product causes cancer and is highly addictive!"
"Dude, McDonalds doesn't seem to care that their food makes people fat as long as they keep buying it."
There's even a doco about it (which I admit I haven't yet seen) which compares the psychology of the corporate entity to that of a person and finds them complete sociopathic.
Companies exist to make money for the shareholders, and the bigger they are, the easier it is for the individual cogs in the machine to abdicate any responsibility for the actions of the whole.
This lesson should really be taught in schools, but they'd never find a company to print the textbooks. -
Here's the rub. If someone wants to believe in Tane or Krishna or Jesus Christ, that's just fine. But they can't then use that belief to justify political claims, like who belongs in this country.
That's a part of the ongoing process regarding the level of influence of the treaty on how the country is run.
There are countries where what you believe is very important politically - Israel, most Muslim states, and arguably, the USA.
Depending on who's talking, the treaty may well require us to give as much respect to Maori beliefs such as Manakura's as beliefs like Stephen's are given in Israel.
I personally don't believe we're in much danger of becoming a religious nation of any stripe, but as a nation we are in an ongoing conversation on where the line lies between polite acknowedgement that others have different spiritual/religious beliefs, and giving those beliefs the weight of law. -
But...how much practise of traditional "Maori culture" would make me *coff* more Maori, & how much do the Maori people dictate "Maori culture" by just happening to be Maori, and...err...doing stuff? As far as I see it, the most relevant aspect of "Maori culture" seems to be active family/iwi affiliations. I know things like the legends & the waiata are significant, but they seem to have kind of degenerated into historical niceties. So which aspects of Maori history/culture should be retained (& developed) as a current, relevant defining feature, and which can be safely relegated to social studies lessons?
But surely its the legends and waiata and spirituality that make up the maori part of maori culture - having active family/iwi affiliations is by no means unique: one could argue that having active family/tribal affiliations is more a defining characteristic of humanity in general; it is the specifics that make the culture maori, as opposed to scots or sicilian.
On the bright side, with some study, and a bit of effort, you could become indigenous, as well as endemic :-) -
Its probably akin to the number of abused children who go on to bcome abusers. Wonder if you could use that as a mitigating circumstance "I didn't mean to colonise those people yer honour, but y'see, I was colonised myself as a youngster."
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Thank you Stephen, that sums things up quite nicely.
I was starting to feel a case of the Penn & Tellers coming on. -
1. Maori feel a spiritual attachment with the land while non-Maori feel a material attachment.
So as a non-maori, spiritual connections are ever denied to my capitalist money-grubbing soul?
2. For the Maori, however, legal ownership of the land is not an issue in feeling connected.
Whereas I feel no connection at all to the Wellington region as I only own property in Hamilton.
3. This is not the case with non-Maori. When the land has been sold to a developer, and all old tales replaced with brand-new joinery, the link snaps.
I would be very interested in seeing any kind of objective reasoning for this. Again I bring up the urban maori - somehow the deep spiritual connection that they all have buried unknowingly within them is something that can never be attained by me? Just because they ignore it, doesn't mean it isn't there, and just because I feel it, doesn't mean it is?
5. We need to differentiate between a tangible link with the land and a non-tangible one. All of us carry both type of links within our existence. The problem occurs when the State decides to subordinate the spiritual to the material.
Or when one group seeks to deny the spiritual to another.
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Manakura, what I'm trying to do is clarify your definition, Che has been straightforward in his definition of indigenous - it about the colonisation, and generally some degree of opression. If this is the case, then obviously non-maori can't claim to be indigenous, regardless of how long they've been here, and their relationship to the land.
We do need another,less loaded, term to define people who do have that attachment to the placeness of a place, who have the contours of the hills and the feel of the wind in their blood, but haven't been driven from the land or had it confiscated or otherwise been opressed.
The family vinyards of france have been inhabited by the same families going back well over 1000 years, their feelings towards the terroir have been expressed in poetry, prose, wine and song for at least that long. But indigenous isn't the word that springs to mind to descibe that relationship with the land. -
I repeat it is not about who was here first, where ever here is.
I really don't want to come across as a post-colonial opressor or anything, but how do you reconcile the above with:
I guess if they have an ancestral relationship to particular landscapes, and/or have been colonised then, yes they would come under my definition of indigenous.
Isn't the main definer of being colonised the fact that the colonisee was there before the colonisor?
Because, as I'm understanding what you've written thus far, you're indingenous if you have that strong ancestral relationship to the land, but not if someone else was there first.
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Leaving aside the the patronising aspects of pre-history as a term, I repeat it is not about who was here first, where ever here is. Indigeneity is about being able to look up at a mountain and say that mountain is my ancestor, my great-great-great ... great grandfather or mother. Indigeneity is literally being born OF the land, not born ON the land.
So its not about how many generations your family has been living in a country, it the familial attachment you feel to your ancestral piece of the land. How does this jibe with the many, many urban maori who have lost those familial links to their ancestral landscape? Are they no longer indigenous?
As a sixth generation New Zealander I have very strong attachments to the parts of the country my family have bonded with over the years. The hills of Wellington and the Kapiti coast have a lot of meaning to my family and I.
Obviously your whakapapa allows you to trace your ancestral links to parts of the country all the way back to the beach your ancestors pulled their canoe up on. Just as obviously, they forged over many generations their familial relationship to the land.
How can you measure how many generations, or what level of feelings for the land grant the status of indigenaity?