Māori are 'not indigenous', Winston Peters claims
Māori are 'not indigenous', Winston Peters claims
The NZ First leader told a crowd of supporters, "you go back 5000 years, we came with our DNA from China. Not like 55,000 years in Australia."
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Depending on whose definition you use, he may have a point. It's well understood that Maori came from elsewhere to NZ, and quite recently in historical terms. Thus, are not "naturally occurring".
Of course, they did get here first though, and we signed a treaty guaranteeing certain rights regardless.
Mostly this is just Winnie being Winnie.
I mean, Homo Sapiens is only "naturally occuring" in Africa. We may have spread to Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas (much) earlier than to NZ.
But if you think of the Maori as a people of Oceanian (more specifically east polynesian) descent, you can absolutely make an argument, that they are a native group spreading in their native territory.
You wouldn't call a north american native people "not native", just because they began settling some remote part of Canada nobody had been to before only in 1250 CE. The only difference would be that one is separated by water while the other is not, but "separated by water" loses all meaning in Oceania.
/sigh
*loses
Thx, not my native language and somehow I keep making that same error.
If you define it as "didn't come from somewhere else" then it's a meaningless term since everyone outside parts of Africa came from somewhere else.
The UN definition is explicitly about colonization, which makes sense, i.e. some people arrived, then some other people came and took over.
Yeah, he doesn't have a leg to stand on with the UN declaration.
You mean the declaration that was voted on by all UN members and supported by an overwhelming majority, including (eventually) NZ under John Key?
Yeah doesn't hold any water....
/s
You do understand I'm agreeing with you, right?
Yes, sorry I might have misread your post
Used to people reacting badly to UN DRIP
The problem with arguing this is that it ignores the things he isn't saying - Maori aren't indigenous which means colonialism wasn't a crime, and the treaty doesn't need to be honoured.
You can argue the semantics about what indigenous means all you want, but that's not the argument he is actually making.