Aro-Mind

Kōpaki is the custom of commissioning a taonga (often a greenstone mere) to commemorate, to memorialise and to communicate a particular issue of deep significance to a people. When one community has an issue of great significance with another people - an issue that the first community wishes to 'keep alive’ -   a kōpaki (which means ‘to envelope, contain’) is obtained for this task. The kōpaki is taken to the marae of the second community and with great ceremony it is placed before them. It is spoken to by the first people and at length - so that the issue is clearly understood. If the recipient community agrees to address the issue placed before it, if they agree that they will do something about it, they will send someone to uplift the kōpaki from the marae ātea. In doing so, they are expressing their commitment to address the issue. The issue itself might be resolved on the day - in which case the kōpaki is returned on the day and the matter comes to an end. If the issue takes a...

In other writings, I have described three key themes in iwi/Māori history since the 19 th century as follows: A Journey of Survival – the response of iwi/Māori communities to the ravages of colonisation in the quest to meet the basic necessities of life The Quest for Social Justice – the quest by iwi/Māori communities for justice, for the alleviation of grievances, to achieve an empowered position in society The Desire for Cultural Revitalisation – the desire for the knowledge and culture of one’s forebears to be continuously alive in succeeding generations, the active response to language and culture loss To these three themes I have added the following: The Realisation of Creative Potential – iwi/Māori communities beginning to create anew based upon what we have rather than what we have lost or suffered, the move to explicit creativity and opportunity Iwi/Māori communities have always been creative including through the period of colonisation. Sometimes the responses have b...

I've had a quick look at  Gareth Morgan 's 'Talk Treaty' website and some thoughts have come to mind. (Haven't looked through it all yet.) I suggest that we ought to distinguish between the overlapping categories of Māori culture and people as an ethnicity in New Zealand society and the ‘constitutional status’ of the tangata whenua of Aotearoa represented in the Treaty through tino rangatiratanga.  The former is to do with the experience of a population of people in New Zealand  who were and are socially and culturally constructed in the face of ‘Pākehā’. This is an ethnic and cultural group called ‘Māori’ who have a shared experience of Aotearoa-New Zealand in the 19th-21st centuries. The latter, on the other hand, refers to the entire continuum of indigeneity-tangata whenuatanga first established during arrival from Polynesia, recognised in the Treaty of Waitangi (in tino rangatiratanga) and in a state of renewal today. This continuum is based upon a set of ideas,...