Māori are ‘not indigenous’, Winston Peters claims
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters made the claim that Māori are “not indigenous” while speaking at a public meeting in Nelson on Sunday.
“Here’s the rub if you are Māori. We’re not indigenous,” Peters told his supporters.
“We come from Hawai-iki. Where’s our Hawai-iki? We think it is in the Cook Islands. We think it’s in Rarotonga … but we’re not from here. And you go back 5000 years, we came with our DNA from China. Not like 55,000 years in Australia.”
Asked after the meeting by Stuff if he could see that that view might be upsetting to some, Peters referred to it as “the truth”.
Wow.
“Māori ain’t indigenous because they only came to New Zealand 800 years ago as opposed to 50 000???
What level of chicanery, fat-bloke-down-pub level nuttiness is this?
First of all, of course Māori are indigenous to NZ FFS.
Where the fuck are they supposed to be indigenous to?
Hawai-iki? Did he really say that?
Look, this Winston is a very different cat to the one we knew and loved.
His dependence on the conspiracy theory vote and the dawning realisation they aren’t actually nearly enough to guarantee his return to Parliament is forcing him to make these types of outrageous claims on Race in a desperate bid to stay over the 5% threshold.
NZ First should be 8% They are hovering around 5%.
The crazier the Voices for Freedom get and the more power they take over of the structures inside NZ First to push their candidates up the list, the more alienating they become.
Having candidates who believe there are nano robots in vaccines is a bad look and Kiwis aren’t that conspiratorial.
They are however racist and Winston is throwing this raw meat out into the election because his antivax lunatics are turning away as many voters as they recruit and that keeps pushing his vote around and might fail him on the night.
Inflammatory race baiting in a political landscape this frayed and angry is a dereliction of duty in terms of political leadership and shows that Winston will literally say any hateful shit he thinks might win him enough votes so that he can once again hold the country to hostage for his knighthood.
Hateful shit like this from the lips of one of the most prominent Māori Politicians of our age dishonours Peter’s mana, Māori mana and New Zealanders mana.
His hateful, spiteful, malicious comments, thrown out purely for the celebration of bigotry and the harvest of demeaning toxicity, are a sad gasp of desperation from a Political movement that started with New Zealand First and ended with White Supremacy Last.
Winston is the brown politician European New Zealanders can love to champion because he says the racism they can’t.
What a deformed blight on a chequered career.
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Winston has finally cracked.
Maori are indigenous. End of story. ACT will fix this mess. Let’s stop this blurring of reality and get on with fixing NZ for all. Let’s stop the division. We are all kiwis.
Weren’t Moriori New Zealand’s tangata whenua ? The China origin is nothing new; I’ve thought that Paula B looks made in Hong Kong, Hipango more Mongolese, and Peters himself resembles Emperor Tang Taizong. Davis is Welsh gened, but that really doesn’t explain him either.
Did you learn that at school Hollyhock in history perhaps
Winstone is showing he is desperate he thinks this outburst of racism will get him over the line if anything he is being more divisive than those he has been parroting about. Any Māori that is stupid enough to vote for this old washed-out clown deserves everything they get. As for his people of Ngati Wai they might have been here 900 years but there are others that were here long before that.
Kilroy was here.
Peters is talking shit .It is easy to Google the meaning of indigenous which covers the Maori claim but it is no more silly than your claim of the length of time Maori have been here .All historical data is 900 years .
Are you a historian or perhaps a anthropologists Thomas some waka came here 900 years ago but here were others here.
Indigenous is a term chucked around by all sorts of people, who don’t actually know what it means. It seems that they want it to apply only to brown (or black) people in countries colonised by the West. By that definition, my Irish ancestors were indigenous, as were the original inhabitants of Britain. And they and the Irish certainly weren’t brown or black.
Of course Maori aren’t indigenous: they came here from somewhere else. They’re the first colonisers of NZ: the first settlers.
Tread carefully, D’ Esterre. Go too far back and you may find that you were made from the rib of a man, whom you then proceeded to outsmart, thereby both being punished by no longer ‘knowing’ the sole source of truth : either God, or the government of transparency, kindness and publicly bestowed hugs…
Snow White: “….you may find that you were made from the rib of a man…”
Heh! Don’t you just love those creation myths? Rib of a man indeed…
Yes @ D’Estere, terra nullius in the original. Australia also – but way way way back in history, so far back we dont know for sure.
We usually associate terra nullius with colonization. Righly so. In these historical accounts ‘original’ inhabitants didnt get the rub of the green. Think the Americas, even Japan. What really did happen to the Ainu? The present day Japanese dont really like to go there. Even those isles off the coast of what we now commonly know as Europe and Scandanavia. Dare I say our shakey isles here in the South Pacific. None of those places empty lands for the taking. Those without power pushed aside by the ebb and flow of history and a good deal of argy bargy.
NZ First could attract some of the ACT vote. I’m even questioning though the 800 years of NZ settlement. If the indigenous Australians have been present there for 50,000 years +, then surely Maori must have been here for a lot longer than a thousand years; maybe even 50,000. In this case absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
ALL evidence points to around 800 – 900 years. Nothing longer. No DNA. No tools. No middens. There is faint rumour of ‘pre-voyage’ settlement in the Hokianga but I cant recall who it originates with. You’d gave to ask the old folk up that way. And if they had a view it’d be something they’d heard from their tipuna, and their tipuna before them. As for 50,000 years, I think the Australian aborigines walked over what was then land. I’m sure they would gave walked to these southern Pacific islands if they could, but even back then there was a big ocean stopping them. It was left to the Polynesians of the Pacific, after centuries of voyaging and resettlement,
to settle the last remaining southern islands. At least that’s what the accepted history tell us.
The Maori is indigenous, but not autochthonous.
Nonsense – look up the meaning of the word!
You can’t walk to NZ gronk.
Wow that’s a big word mikesh.
Seems like you are following Peters, Jones, Luxon, and Seymour by using big words to spread bullshit. How many people do you think will have a clue what you are talking about.
100% mikesh.
And I suspect this is Winston’s point although I am not sure why he made it. Surely he woud have been better off saying “I dont like the settlements process and think its holding NZ back instead of stir up this b hornets nest.
Indigenous originally meant originating from somewhere if you look at an old dictionary definition. If you went back 60 years, almost no-one in the country referred to Maori as indigenous (in terms of the use of the word indigenous) apart from some Maori. Over time and with the support of the UN, indigenous has been recognised as meaning ‘First peoples’ which Maori are as far as we know. Hence the differentiation between Indigenous and autochthonous.
I personally look forward to more genealogical and anthropological research as it would be good to put the theories to bed. I also think it would be good for Maori to have a better sense of who they are as a people.
Did all the tribes come from the same place? What was the defined timescales of arrival and if so, why did migrants stop coming? Did Maori travel to the Auckland Islands and Peru? Antarctica?? Are the Moriori descended from Maori? Was there ever earlier visitors? Lots to learn and as a whakapapa based society, I think probably quite beneficial to Maori identity as well.
Fantail: “….why did migrants stop coming?”
Perhaps because the first migrants didn’t return, or couldn’t. Or died on the return journey.
“Did Maori travel to the Auckland Islands and Peru? Antarctica??”
The Maori who conquered the Chatham Islands in 1835 took Moriori slaves and attempted to colonise the Auckland Islands. But they failed, because the weather and sea conditions were inimical to human settlement. Michael King wrote an account of this.
Historical evidence suggests that the first Polynesian voyagers likely reached the west coast of South America.
Maori didn’t travel to Antarctica, because they didn’t have the resources to allow it.
“Are the Moriori descended from Maori?”
Moriori weren’t the first settlers of NZ. They were another group of the original Polynesian settlers who went on to colonise the Chathams. They were then unable to voyage back to NZ, because they lacked the resources: suitable timber and so on. Michael King has also written about this.
Pathway of the birds: voyaging achievements of Maori and their Polynesian ancestors.
Andrew Crowe, 2018
Helps answer some of those questions @ Fantail. Helps to assemble the jigsaw.
The really scarry thing about Winston is that so many people are still prepared to support him. This sadly shows the society we are becoming.
Doesn’t this just speak to the incoherence of “indigeneity” as a concept. Are not all humans “indigenous” to one area or another? Or indeed, all indigenous to planet earth? And exactly how long does one’s ancestors have to have existed on a particular patch of dirt to be called indigenous. 800 years is enough, 100 not? So, somewhere between the two? Or perhaps, we need to drop this as a way of categorizing people, and accept it for what it actually is, ironically enough, an outdated inherently colonial/Eurocentric view of the world.
A good deal of English people aren’t indigenous either. They’re descended from the Normans who invaded 1000 years ago.
And before them the Saxons and Vikings. There were indigenous Brits evidently, the stone age mob that constructed Stonehenge.
True I have viking dna too (big news to me) as my family originated in the ‘danelaw’ area going back 1100? years.
And science is teaching us new things all the time. Its fascinating.
The latest is that the Picts were a tribe with Northern British origins and not descendents of Sycthians as has been commonly believed for a few hundred years.
This is clearly nonsense. The bigger issue however is that whether you are “indigenous” or not it should be irrelevant to your rights and responsibilities as a citizen.
Very true. The bigger picture is human rights and social justice for all. But hard to deny that historically being ‘indigenous’ has compromised human rights and social justice. Not only think Australia, Canada, North America …. even in Taiwan the indigenous people were pushed over the mountains to the backwaters. Japan? The story of the indigenous Ainu rarely told.
Sad to see Winston go down such a rabbit hole–he should know all too well that just because we can’t beat the bastards yet…we do not have to join them!–but hey, he is a vain old tory egomaniac when it comes down to it.
He could have retired gracefully with kudos in 2020 after his nice PGF achievements, but no, he prepared a letter to the Governor General backstabbing Jacinda Ardern. In 2017 Peters actually criticised neo liberalism in his statement backing a Labour led Govt.–so who knows where the old fucker is really at apart from craving attention.
Can anyone explain how the NZ place name Paraparaumu came about?( Hint it wasn’t a name given by Maori)
I give up
Actually it is a Maori name. Hint for you Charles UMU OVEN.
Umu is a variety of earth ovens in Polynesia and is not a Maori language name, Uncle Tom, sorry to disappoint.
So are you saying it comes from polynesia or elsewhere? In Easter Island, earth ovens are known as Umu Pae but in Peru, the ovens are referred to as Huatia.
Correct
There’s another saying in Texas…”man my cousin is hot”
What if Winston us right though. He is after all the smartest politician in the campaign.
I was just waiting for him to say next that the Moriori are the indigenous people of NZ.
It doesn’t matter how his comments are hateful, spiteful, malicious, thrown out purely for the celebration of bigotry and the harvest of demeaning toxicity, and are a sad gasp of desperation from a Political movement that started with New Zealand First and ended with White Supremacy Last.
You just know that in a bowling club in Whangarei, a rest home in Tauranga and in assorted other places of oldies, heads will be nodded and “Winston’s on to it,” will be uttered.
I thought it was Paremata, also north of Wellington, that was a ‘maorified’ corruption of the Australian Parramatta?
It’s all about splitting hairs over definitions I guess. If by indigenous he means did they evolve from the primordial soup to homo sapiens here then they are not. But if he suggests that they were not the original human inhabitants of this land then as far as there is any evidence they were. I think the latter is the accepted interpretation and without knowing the context it’s hard to see why he made that statement.
D J S
David Stone: “….if he suggests that they were not the original human inhabitants of this land…”
I haven’t seen anything to suggest he did that. But being the original inhabitants doesn’t make a people indigenous. They came here from somewhere else, as did the ancestors of the rest of us.
Being indigenous isn’t the same as being endemic. Maori are neither of those things. The “indigenous” trope is being used by Maori activists (every one of them of European descent, of course) as a weapon against white people. But they’re settlers, just like the rest of us. But they got here first. And the paleobiological evidence suggests that they weren’t able to return, either because they lacked the resources, or the shipbuilding expertise, or both. Or the weather conditions didn’t admit of return journeys. As to their arrival time, the link in Pope Punctilious’s comment above is useful.
Perhaps the old lawyer in Winston is playing to the crowds.
If you was up somewhere on a boat you are NOT indigenous.Period.
wash
Winston is right on the money.
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