What About the Moriori? New Zealand and First Peoples By Brian Simpson

     As this is a sensitive issue I will let the left-wing paper do the scene setting:
  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/14/after-more-than-150-years-new-zealand-recognises-extinct-moriori-people

“For decades history books in New Zealand taught schoolchildren that the Moriori people were extinct. The accepted wisdom was that the Polynesian settlers of the Chatham Islands, who arrived hundreds of years before Māori, were wiped out by invading Māori tribes, who killed and enslaved their population after landing on the islands in 1835. But more than 600 years since the Moriori arrived in New Zealand, their descendants have signed a treaty with the government that enshrines their rights and been awarded NZ$18m in compensation. The treaty includes an agreed historical account and a Crown apology. The settlement package includes the transfer of lands of cultural and spiritual significance to Moriori on Rēkohu (Chatham Islands) and Rangihaute (Pitt Island) as cultural redress, and $18m in financial redress. In the 1990s the Moriori began to rebuild their culture and traditions, officially becoming recognised as the Chatham Islands’ Indigenous inhabitants in a Waitangi tribunal decision. According to the 2006 census, 945 people said they were of Moriori descent and today the New Zealand government recognised their decades-long struggle for recognition.”

     Ok, the Moriori were “were wiped out by invading Māori tribes, who killed and enslaved their population after landing on the islands in 1835.” What I would like to know, given this, is why the narrative of a first people continues, since someone else was there before them, and why is there the continued white guilt about the settlement of New Zealand? Please explain.

 

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Thursday, 18 April 2024

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