Clarification from Bruce Moon
Who is Maori?
To the profound question of “Who is a Maori”, the official definition, as far as I can make out, is “anybody who feels like a Maori”. Apart from anything else, to define something in terms of itself is a piece of logical nonsense, a fake definition and it is surely somewhat of a sobering thought that many millions of dollars of our money have been and will be dished out by a succession of governments on the basis of a fake definition. (You may laugh or cry at that — your choice!)
Only one Treaty
Some people refer to “the Maori version of the Treaty of Waitangi”. Well, no, in actual fact there is no “Maori version”, simply one Treaty of Waitangi and that is in the Ngapuhi dialect, modified of necessity by the inclusion of some important missionary-defined words owing to the total lack in the said dialect — or any other of the many dialects spoken by various Maori tribes of words to express the concepts which it was necessary to state.
In particular, one of these (a pair to be more exact) was “tino rangatiratanga”, with capitalization by said author who must have felt that was necessary to emphasise its importance! Now we do not need at all to accept his/her suggestion to “start a conversation about what Tino Rangatiratanga might mean now instead of patronising attempts to use Māori language to continue denying it”, because it simply meant in 1840 “full possession” of property guaranteed to “tangata katoa o Nu Tirani” that is “all the people of New Zealand”, in an article which was actually redundant, because Article third guaranteed it to all Maoris and existing British subjects had that right already.
Treaty twisting and the Waitangi Tribunal
Moreover, the Treaty fell out of use shortly afterwards, until revived by our modern treaty-twisters with an entirely new alleged meaning to suit their political game-playing.
Then we get the suggestion “Maybe we should adopt not just a language but a way of thinking that’s indigenous to this country”. If this means the sort of manipulation of language and history practised by the corrupt Waitangi Tribunal, then just imagine the pigsty in which we should all land if we took it seriously. If we don’t call a halt to all the treaty-twisting and maorification of everything very soon, we shall need more than one Hercules to clean out the stables and everything else around us.
Thank goodness we have people like Bruce who has the courage to speak out against
the serious corruption and nepotism being visited upon ALL kiwi taxpayers by that
kangaroo tribunal.
WHO’S ON THE IDENTITY POLITICS BANDWAGON
Marxist National Question racial/cultural identity politics attracts three groups of people like flies to a turd.
– A numerically small group of hardcore Communists who derive a sense of superiority out of knowing they are manipulating the situation by dividing society into “oppressor” and “victim” groups. They want power and aim to get it via the divide-and-conquer principle.
– The liberal ‘Pinks’ whom Lenin once referred to as ‘useful idiots’ due to how readily they can be co-opted to serve Communist agendas. These West-hating socialist traitors want moral preening and public virtue-signaling opportunities. The Communists provide these by telling the useful idiots they can earn brownie [sic] points by crossing the floor and going in to bat for the “oppressed.”
Since the highest status in our society goes to anyone who can claim membership of a Marxist-designated “victim” group, so much the better if one has a remote Maori ancestor and can switch sides altogether. One is now an ancestor-denier and an indigenous pretender.
Outside one’s kin group, such an individual is actually a Pakeha with a touch of the tar brush, not a “Maori.” This self-delusion needs to be pointed out loudly and often, not pandered to.
– The more “Maori” [part-] Maori who want utu for being brown in a white man’s world. Their agenda is to shove everyone else’s nose in the racial turd as payback. We are back under the house again aged four, boobing uncontrollably the first time we realised the brown wouldn’t scrub off our skin, and our appearance made us “Maori” without the option. As Commie race-monger, Frantz Fanon reminds us: “The native is an oppressed [sic] person whose constant dream is to become the persecutor.”
Eric Hoffer said this, which applies to Treatyist [part-] Maori in spades: “The less able a man is to claim excellence for his own self, the more he will claim it for his race, for his religion, for his holy cause.” These are people whose individual significance in their own eyes (and more importantly in the eyes of the world) is small. The only way they can feel powerful and validated is by being part of a mob.
Hoffer sheds more light on this mentality: “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”
“The untalented are more at ease in a society that gives them valid alibis for not achieving than in one where opportunities are abundant. In an affluent society, the alienated who clamour for power are largely untalented people who cannot make use of the unprecedented opportunities for self-realisation.”
“There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.”
Perhaps YOU can answer these two questions?
Good luck — you will need it — because no radical ‘part’ or post-colonial guilt-tripping white liberal enabler has proved up to the task to date.
[1] on what basis should someone who is less than half-Maori be regarded by anyone OUTSIDE their kin group as “Maori” just because they say they are.
“Some delicate little snowflake will be butt-hurt to discover others don’t share their self-delusion” is NOT an answer.
[2] on what basis should someone who possesses more of the blood of the coloniser than of the colonised be regarded as a “victim” of “white privilege” rather than its beneficiary?
Please don’t tell me Maori genes are so inferior that even a smidge is enough to make someone a congenital loser and an inadequate. Oh, the soft liberal bigotry of low expectations. What was that word beginning with “R” again …
Nobody cares which group of ancestors you want to regard as representing your primary socio-cultural affiliation. AS LONG AS THAT’S A PRIVATE MATTER FOR THE KIN GROUP CONCERNED.
Clearly, if they accept your membership qualifications, you’re a member. None of anyone else’s business.
But once you start thrusting that socio-cultural affiliation into the public square, demanding financial and political patronage from outside your kin group far in excess of your value as productive individuals — that is the point at which everyone else acquires an ABSOLUTE RIGHT to tell you who THEY’RE prepared to accept as “Maori.”
Most of us would say “Less than half-Maori, you’re yanking it!”
We operate on the principle that 51% of the shares are required for a controlling interest in a company.
This is the equation people who operate according to reason and logic consider:
More than half-Maori = on balance a Maori.
Half-Maori = you get to choose what side of the fence you jump down on (if you’re a fence-builder).
Less than half-Maori = a Pakeha with a touch of the tar brush aka an indigenous pretender.
Herendith the lesson.
ENDS
INTERPRETATIONS LESSON
Article II of James Busby’s final English draft of 4 February 1840 from which Te Tiriti was translated for presentation to the chiefs at Waitangi the following day guarantees to “… the chiefs & tribes [the Natives] and to all the people of New Zealand [to include the Pakeha already here and the settlers yet to come] the possession of their lands, dwellings and all their property …”
T E Young of the Native Department’s official back-translation of Te Tiriti undertaken in 1869 accords with Busby’s final draft “…to the Chiefs, the Hapus [the Natives] and all the people of New Zealand [to include the Pakeha already here and the settlers yet to come], the full chieftainship of their lands, their settlements and their property.”
In signing Te Tiriti, Maori chiefs agreed that Maori would henceforth live under British sovereignty to be protected in their land and property — from one another — and from less-benevolently inclined foreign powers such as the French. Hence “the chiefs and the tribes.”
The Pakeha already here — who’d bought land from Maori, built on it, cultivated it, and acquired personal property – also needed an assurance that the incoming sovereign would not disturb existing land ownership and private property arrangements. The settlers to come also needed this assurance. Hence “all the people of New Zealand.”
Busby’s final English draft was translated into Maori by the missionary, Henry Williams, a fluent Maori speaker, who on the eve of the signing of the Treaty had lived in New Zealand for more than 17 years. Williams was assisted by his son, who’d grown up in New Zealand from an early age, and was fully bilingual.
According to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry compiled by James Fisher: “In preaching the Word, Williams focused on the use of te reo, spent many hours learning the language, including involvement in the monumental task of making Maori a written language and of translating the Bible into Maori. All teaching of the Maori was in te reo.”
Revisionist assertions that Williams and son had just a cursory understanding of the Maori language, inadequate to the task at hand, are hard to sustain.
“Possession” in Busby’s final English draft became “tino rangatiratanga” in Te Tiriti. Since Article II also guaranteed tino rangatiratanga to non-Maori, in the context of the Treaty — supported by back-reference to the final English draft — that clearly meant “ownership.”
In Te Tiriti, the word “property” – again guaranteed to “all the people of New Zealand,” not just to “the chiefs, the tribes” — was translated as “taonga.” Today that word has come to mean “treasures,” both tangible and intangible, including language and culture.
This blatant try-on would have astonished Sir Apirana Ngata. In his 1922 explanation of the Treaty, Ngata described “taonga” as applying to “this canoe, that taiaha, that kumara pit, that cultivation.” Not once did he hint that taonga included intangibles as claimed today by race-hustlers and their liberal enablers.
Ngata was well-fluent in the Maori language. His explanation was consistent with Kendall and Lee’s 1820 vocabulary, the Williams 1844 dictionary, and Frederick Maning’s personal account of pre-Treaty New Zealand. Had anyone bothered to check these texts, they’d have learnt that “taonga” meant goods, property, things, chattels, or in legal terms “personalty” [personal property].
F.E. (Frederick) Maning settled in Northland in 1833. He fathered four children to the sister of a Maori chief and later became a Judge of the Native Land Court. In his book Old New Zealand, Maning translates “taonga” as “Goods; property.”
Some years ago, researcher, Dennis Hampton, wrote to Auckland University’s Professor Andrew Sharp about this matter. In his book Justice and the Maori, Professor Sharp had observed that in 1840 the Maori language “was clearly not under threat, so how could it have been in anyone’s mind as a thing needing protection?” He expressed even greater doubt about Maori cultural values.
Replying to Mr Hampton, Professor Sharp said “[E]ven if taonga could mean things such as language and culture, it was not being used that way in 1840. I entirely agree with you that what was being thought of was property, and the kind of property that could be held exclusively.”
The taonga myth entered the public square via former Waitangi Tribunal member (and claimant), Sir Hugh Kawharu’s 1989 mischief-making back-translation into English of the Maori Treaty text, in which “taonga” in Article II was misrepresented as meaning “treasures,” when in context there’s no doubt it had a much narrower meaning.
What University of Canterbury law lecturer, David Round, refers to as a “portmanteau word” soon became a kete for anything Maori activists wanted to claim in subsequent Waitangi Tribunal hearings. The Tribunal’s Kaituna River Report (1984) stated that “ratou taonga katoa” meant “all things highly prized.”
The Tribunal concluded in its Manukau Report (1985) that “Taonga” refers to more than physical objects of tangible value. “A river may be a taonga as a valuable resource. Its ‘mauri’ or ‘life-force’ is another taonga.”
Since the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 gives the Tribunal sole authority to determine the Treaty’s meaning and intent, it didn’t take long for word to get around and things to be invented.
In 1987 Parliament passed the Maori Language Act. Its preamble stated: “Whereas in the Treaty of Waitangi the Crown confirmed and guaranteed to the Maori people, among other things, all their taonga: And whereas the Maori language is one such taonga:”
The taonga/intangibles fabrication then made its way into a number of law reports. For example, in a 1994 case, NZ Maori Council v Attorney-General, it was stated that the Maori language is “a highly prized property or treasure (taonga) of Maori.”
The Tribunal further expanded its myth-making to state that the Crown is obliged by the Treaty to protect the Maori way of life in its entirety – based on references to a non-existent “Article IV” that Treatyists [the Marxist race-mongers of Project Waitangi] have invented and increasingly try to thrust into the public square.
The source of this claim is a pre-Treaty korero that took place at Hokianga, where Bishop Pompallier had established a Roman Catholic mission. Primed by their spiritual advisers — who feared the Church of England wanted them run off — Maori Catholics asked if the Crown, as incoming sovereign, could guarantee freedom of religion.
Hobson replied that all religions, including “Maori customs,” would be protected. Freedom of religion was of course captured in Article III of the Treaty, which accords individual Maori “all the rights and privileges of British subjects.”
The Tribunal starts out by reinterpreting the Treaty on the basis of prior discussions, not its black letter clauses. Re-writing the Treaty on the basis of what was said before it was signed is analogous to construing an Act of Parliament on the basis of the Select Committee Report to the House and the Parliamentary Debates that took place before it was passed and ratified. Not to put too fine a construction on it: arrant nonsense.
Even if it was appropriate to reinterpret the Treaty in this way — which it is not – in drawing downstream conclusions about there being an obligation on the Crown to protect and foster Maori language and culture, the claimant-biased Tribunal willfully disconnected the Hokianga discussion from the context in which it occurred, giving it an unintended wider meaning that both Hobson and its Maori signatories would have regarded as a startling proposition indeed.
The Treaty of Waitangi is what its black letter clauses say that it is. Nor does it have an Article IV. There is no “partnership and no “principles” to be distilled out of it. To admit of this possibility is to open a Pandora’s box to anything part-Maori might want to demand, for as long as New Zealanders will allow European-Maori (with an ever-declining portion of Maori blood) to assert that they are “Maori” for unearned financial gain.
ENDS