Articles tagged with "māori"

In the first part of this article, I looked at some of the common archaeological misconceptions used to spread doubt about Māori being the first to settle New Zealand. Having spent some time debunking some of the more common ideas floating around on social media, which are supposedly covered up to hide the “truth”, this second part will be devoted to looking at the more widely accepted versions of historical events.

I saw a lot of anti-Māori disinformation on social media in the last few months before the 2023 New Zealand general elections. For clarity, disinformation is misleading content deliberately spread to deceive people with a goal in mind, whereas misinformation is incorrect or misleading information that is spread without specific malicious intent. Such rhetoric can create a voting block large enough for politicians to pander to, and it would be tempting for MPs to then pledge to implement policies to attract these voters. It can also swing voters to vote for parties who are sympathetic to their newly formed views. The anti-Māori disinformation that was being spread on social media at the time largely took on two forms.

Most kiwis will be aware that this coming Friday is a statutory holiday, the recently introduced Matariki day - being on Friday June 28th.

When we first arrived at Julian Batchelor's Stop Co-Governance talk, I was stopped at the door. The attendant blocked the doorway and asked why I was there. I was flustered and momentarily forgot the name of the person giving the talk. “I'm here for the co-governance talk” I stammered, and expected him to step aside.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I went to parliament to pray with a group of Christians recently. Simeon Brown was the only MP at this event, and he asked us to pray for Three Waters. He said that although he would not say what his stance was on Three Waters, as the prayer event is meant to be non-partisan, he has a very strong stance (to be clear, Simeon isn't a fan of Three Waters - and the National Party has pledged to repeal it when they are next elected).

This weekend we saw the first official celebration and statutory holiday for the Māori new year - Matariki.

It would be hard to miss that there has been some controversy in the science community in Aotearoa/New Zealand around the role of Mātauranga Māori (translated as Māori knowledge) in the school curricula.

The website of an organisation called the Maori Ranger Security Division is currently selling ID cards that they claim can help you avoid being arrested by police, protect you from Child Services, make you exempt from fisheries quotas, and may even let you travel without a passport - and all for the low, low price of $50.

Last week I attended, online, the funeral of Ngaire McCarthy, who died just over a week ago from cancer. Ngaire was an outspoken Māori atheist, humanist and rationalist who spoke to the NZ Skeptics at our 2014 conference in Auckland. She told us about how the census shows comparable rates of dis-belief amongst Māori and Pākehā in New Zealand, and how Christianity had imposed itself on Māori culture, merging in a way that makes it hard to pick them apart today.

This weekend was the Humanist Conference in Auckland, with some great international and local speakers.

Unorthodox claims about the origin of the Māori go way back. Co-founder of the Polynesian Society and erratic polymath Edward Tregear claimed in 1885 they were “Aryan”, based on such unlikely things as the similarity between waiū (milk: from wai, water and ū, the breast) and whey (Old English hwǣg). What follows is even less persuasive.

A while ago I was contacted by an older gentleman, Cedric, who told me over the phone that he'd heard me on the show and wanted to know if I was interested in a theory he has about the origins of the Māori race. Of course I was, I said, and after a while I received a self-published 32 page book about the theory.

A claim has been made by Noel Hilliam that European settlers beat Maori to settling NZ, and that reconstruction of skulls from a woman and man have shown that they originated in Wales and the Mediterranean, respectively. The woman had blue eyes and blonde hair, and the

Tim Hume (Sunday Star Times June 21) has written a good account of traditional Maori Medicine (Rongoa Maori). The Health Ministry provides $1.9 million annually for this nonsense. That money would pay for approximately 1000 hip replacements.

THOSE zany Ancient Celt people never give up, do they? Now they're campaigning to protect some boulders on a hillside at Silverdale, north of Auckland, due to be levelled as a site for a new hospital (NZ Herald, 6 May).

Elizabeth Rata's article Ethnic Fundamentalism in New Zealand is a series of extraordinary assertions, supported not with reason and evidence but emotionalism and error.

Claims about pre-Maori colonisation of New Zealand refuse to go away.

New Zealand has its own version of 'postcolonial science studies'. This is supposed to emancipate those who see themselves as subjects of colonial oppression, but the actual consequences may be very different.

Some doctors see a problem and look for an answer. Others merely see a problem. The diffident doctor may do nothing from sense of despair. This, of course, may be better than doing something merely because it hurts the doctor's pride to do nothing.

As a subscriber to your magazine, I am concerned by the general trends evident in the statements made by a number of your contributors. For example, in the last issue Mr Wyant complained about "whinging leftists", while Dr Welch claimed that "our own welfare state is a classic illustration of this problem" (i.e., assumed dependency).

Can traditional Maori knowledge be considered scientific?

by V. J. Hewitt & P. Lorie; Bloomsbury Press, 1991; $49.95

Calls for Maori input in the science classroom are fine for encouraging students in the belief that science is relevant to their lives, but could also be used to cut them off from the international scientific community.

Acommon failure of the imagination and of intellectual rigour is the belief that these two qualities cannot co-exist. In fact one is indispensable to the other if art and intelligence are not to be separated and trivialised.