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.
No. It's just that some of us PÄkehÄ 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 MÄoritanga in the international terminal. They're quite happy to exploit MÄori 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 donât take some sort of stewardship over the national heritage, no one other country is going to.
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 reached 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 MÄori had returned to Taranaki. The court ruled in favour of the MÄori, awarding them 97% of the land.The judge ruled that since the Moriori had been conquered by MÄori they did not have ownership rights of the land.
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.