NEED TO KNOW
Ghosts of the Past
NEW ZEALAND
New Zealand lawmaker Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke and other lawmakers recently broke into a traditional Māori haka on the parliamentary floor.
The dance was part of efforts to resist changing a nearly 200-year-old treaty that governs relations between the British and their descendants who have since settled in the country, and the indigenous Māori community that they subjugated.
Elected last year, Maipi-Clarke, 22, launched into the haka after she was asked what she thought of the proposal to revise the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, a document still in effect today, that protects Māori rights to their land and other interests in exchange for accepting British governance.
She ripped up the bill.
Maipi-Clarke told the Morning Shift radio talk show that she and others in the room felt as if their ancestors who had signed the treaty had possessed them and wanted to express their outrage at the idea. “It wasn’t really me, it was them,” she said. “I was like … ‘Wait, what did we just do?’ And then we walked out and … looked at each other like ‘what just happened?’”
The architect of the proposed revision to the treaty, David Seymour, who leads the right-wing ACT New Zealand political party, a minority member of the government’s center-right coalition, said the original treaty wrongfully divided Kiwis by race. He panned the demonstration.
“To the rest of the world, and the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders, it just looks ridiculous,” he said, according to Radio New Zealand. “You’ve got one person putting up a reasoned debate and inviting a response, and then you’ve got people that dance around doing a war dance, hurl personal insults, and ultimately get kicked out of Parliament. We’ve got to take a reality check here, that behavior is totally unacceptable.”
Even so, after weeks of demonstrations and marches involving thousands of protesters across the country, Seymour now lacks the support to move the bill for passage.
Still, Maipi-Clarke and her allies don’t care. They worry there will be more attempts to trample on their rights.
As a result, they started a Hīkoi (communal march) with tens of thousands of people who walked more than 600 miles from the country’s northern tip to the southern tip of the island, arriving at the capital of Wellington last week, reported Australia’s SBS News.
Ella Henry of Auckland University of Technology told SBS that New Zealand has long been at the forefront of managing relations with Indigenous people, but the new bill and other measures would undermine that long tradition.
“Our concern about this bill not only is the way that it is trying to undermine some of that legislation by using very libertarian arguments that somehow there is inequality based on race and ethnicity, is hugely problematic,” she said. “So we have gathered (at the march) … not just Māori, but others who support an inclusive, diverse, equal partnership that our country has been a world leader in pioneering.”
The ancients would be proud.
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