Originally Posted by
Sanx
Meh? Is that all? My surname is anglo-saxon, dating from Warwickshire before the Norman Conquest. That's on my dad's side. My mother's family originates from the Baltic states, but as they're all Jews, who knows where the fook they come from before that.
As I see it then, I have lots of people and governments I can sue for confiscation of lands my ancestors had traditional ownership of or customary rights to. The Vikings (all Scandinavian governments) and the Normans (the French) will have had a negative effect on the presumed wealth of my father's ancestors - yes, for all I know they were lowly serfs, but that's not the point. As for my mother's family ... well, it's hard to know where to start. The Germans, the Poles, the Cossacks, the Russians - they'll all have to be sued too.
Treaty claims, and therefore settlements, are a crock of shite. Nowhere else in the world has had a system of compensating the natives for land taken during colonisation, with the possible exception of Zimbabwe, and look how well that's gone.
Before whitey turned up in this country, the Maori were a stone-age canabalistic society with no formal governance or structure outside of the Iwi; and that governance took the form of a lord / serf arrangement. Internecine feuds were commonplace, with many tribes displaced from lands they held or simply wiped out completely. (As soon as one tribe got guns, the first thing they did was attack the next Iwi over to take their land.) Whilst Maori like to portray themselves as a peaceful people with an advanced well-established culture, they weren't. They hadn't discovered the wheel, let alone such other niceties as the written word. There were massive differences in language from one region to another as well as in other traditional cultural activites and customs. Maori hadn't even been in New Zealand that long, in the grand scheme of things. No-one really knows when the seven great waka arrived - or in fact how many great waka there actually were - somewhere between 800AD and 1300AD is usually quoted, with Maori generally claiming they got here towards the early part of that period to try to further legitimise their claims against the Crown.
The issue of whether or not the Moriori were here first, or devolved from the Maori population as a whole, is unknown. The commonly-held belief that they were here prior to Maori and were wiped out or displaced by Maori, thus negating any tangata whenua-based claims, has since been revised with the common thinking that Moriori settled just the Chatham Islands at the same time as the Maori settled New Zealand. Their physical and genetic simlarity to Maori makes analysis of bones very difficult, so no-one actually knows. What is absolutely certain is that the virtual extinction of the Moriori was primarily caused by Maori invasions of the Chathams. Although the population declined once whitey turned up with their exotic diseases and started hunting the seals that formed a large part of the Moriori's diet, the biggest decline came from massacre at the hands of Taranaki Maori. In 1835, two ships carrying 900 armed Maori arrived in the Chathams. The Moriori were enslaved or slaughtered. Moriori were forbidden to marry or breed with other Moriori. Between 1835 (whitey arrived in 1791) and 1862, the population declined from 2000 to only 101 full-blooded individuals. The last full-blooded Moriori died in 1933. My point in saying all this? The confiscation of the Chathams and the slaughter and enslavement of its inhabitants was acceptable according to Maori culture at the time. They saw nothing wrong with it. To my knowledge the Iwi responsible for the Chatham invasion (Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama) have never apologised for their actions, let alone paid out compensation. Should such acts have been carried out by whitey on Maori, you can be certain there'd be numerous claims for substantial compensation.
Loss of traditional land and customs is often blamed for Maori's over-representation in just about every negative statistic going: child abuse, alcoholism and drug-abuse, prison population, life-expectancy, illiteracy, unemployment, etc. Well, contrary to what many Maori activists would like to claim, customs and language cannot be passed down through genetics. The vast majority of today's activists did not have land taken from them. The vast majority of such acts did not occur in the lifetimes of today's activists' parents. The grievances they have are therefore not raised from the loss of something they (as individuals, not as a culture) once possessed, but more a passed-down sense of aggrievement. The failure of modern Maori to adjust, as thousands of cultures and peoples have done all over the world, is blamed on this one thing. If we'd had our lands we could of, should of would of been OK.
The difference between Maori and the thousands of other peoples in a similar position round the world is that there was that Treaty. Ignoring the small fact that not all Iwi chiefs signed it (though that's never stopped those Iwi making claims under it, funnily enough). Maori were happy to conquer other Iwi, confiscate their land and slaughter and enslave their people. That was the Maori way and in keeping with their culture and customs. The rules that Maori today want to retrospectively apply to whitey do not apply to them themselves. One only has to look at the spat between various Iwi over who 'owned' the lands around the Hauraki gulf to see an example of this inconsistency. Now there are great wads of cash up for grabs, there are different Iwi fighting over who should get it. The greatest hypocrisy comes from the Iwi that came out on top way back when, with their modern descendants claiming the land was theirs by right of conquest. Well, in that case, why can't the right of conquest be applied to whitey coming and taking it over only a few years later?
The whole Treaty issue has grown into a gravy train machine designed to extract as much money and land out of the government. It's existence is divisive to the nation as a whole. The best outcome would be for the whole thing to be abolished and the Treaty of Waitangi written out of legislation and relegated to a status it should have occupied years back; an interesting relic.
Forum whore
...
/haɪˈpɜr
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks