If you think talkback radio is angry at the idea of changing the North Island to the Maori name of Te Ika-a-Maui, imagine how incandescent with rage they will be when they realize Te Waipounamu is Maori for ‘Isle of the crimson necks’.
I digress.
Now we seem to be getting culturally shaped by Gen Xers and Gen Y over marriage equality, why shouldn’t we start pushing for Maori names for our very boring ‘North Island’ and ‘South Island’ and add Aotearoa instead of New Zealand?
Maori culture is a strength to our country, not a weakness. It makes us unique, I am proud to call myself a Pakeha rather than a ‘European New Zealander’ but I suspect that pride has something to do with me being a Gen Xer and seeing that legacy as a positive rather than a negative.
To me the Treaty gives me legitimacy to call this country home and it sets the power relationship between the Crown/Government and its peoples. That role stipulates that it is the Crown/Government responsibility to protect our rights as citizens and in that light we should embrace the Constitutional reforms that are being currently debated.
The fears, bigotry and racism of NZs older generations should be pushed aside with the ease we are seeing Marriage Equality being pushed through. Gen X and Gen Y should proudly uphold Maori culture as part of us, as part of what makes as unique as New Zealanders.
The appointment of a closed minded squash player who wanted to play in apartheid South Africa as Race Relations Commissioner and the recent comments of an old dickhead to sterilize Maori smokers are all examples of old thinking by an ancient generation whose only relevance is in their tyranny of the electoral majority.
Their petty garden variety bigotry of yesteryear should be buried with Paul Holmes. Rejoice in our enlightenment being the future.
At the moment people who criticise or challenge the corrupt system are not arbitrarily arrested and ‘disappeared’.
Once the covert fascism currently endured morphs into overt fascism -because the dumbed-down masses do nothing to prevent it- it will be a crime to criticise the controllers.
Orwell predicted Thought Crime in 1947, and Orwell’s 1984 is the model the elites are implementing.
if you disagree you get annihilated.
The drones are coming.
Thanks for making my point, Re: it will never be enough always something more
Ha Ha Ha! It’s being sold out from under us, but at least we can squabble about what it’s called?
No it is colonizing, Maori culture doesn’t belong to all NZers it isn’t a part of white settler identity, it belongs to Maori. If white NZers call the settler state Aotearoa, what will Maori call a state if the treaty is ever actually honoured & Maori sovereignty is recognized? Whites are not doing the people they colonized a favour by stealing the culture as well as the land
What happened to not letting Knuckle Dragging racists on your posts?? oh that’s right its only racist the other way round
This stuff “rejoice in our enlightenment” Maori culture make “us unique as NZers” – this is colonizing attitude, this is racist. The purpose of the existence of Indigenous people is not to make settlers feel special or feel like they belong on the land they stole. Cultural appropriation settlers adopting Maori culture for their own identity purposes is just another form of assimilation of making the Indigenous people disappear. Settler colonialism has always been about this. We’re 1 nation & Maori culture belongs to all NZers, so colonizers can inherit their land and thereby become Indigenous themselves. NZers have always done that and it has never been to benefit Maori. the early c20 some white people wanted to call NZ “Maoriland” but they didn’t want Maori to live in it.
If you want to feel legitimate and if you want to base your claims of legitimacy on the treaty, you need to honour it. NZ is not a post-racial or a post-colonial state and changing its name won’t disguise on-going colonization.
Also, racism isn’t limited to old people, unfortunately. Young white NZers aren’t post-racism.
“Settler colonialism has always been about this. We’re 1 nation & Maori culture belongs to all NZers, so colonizers can inherit their land and thereby become Indigenous themselves.”
Couldn’t agree more! I’ve long felt there’s been confusion between the idea of ‘statehood’ and ‘nationhood’.
We might be the western legal definition of 1 state, but it’d be nice if we could all get our heads around the notion of multiple nations within that, and that membership is not necessarily limited to a single nation.
The guy who initiated the review process for the island names claims that, properly, ‘Aotearoa’ only refers to the North Island and that using it to refer to the whole country is a white colonial misappropriation.
No idea if he’s right or not.
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