? Grade X | Main | Let's terminate it (piracy)! ?
December 14, 2005
Μην κρίνετε ίνα μη κριθήτε
Classical Values' Eric Scheie links to a post by Beautiful Monsters, a New Zealand blogger, reporting from Enough is Enough!, a late summer 2004 march by several thousand blackshirts in Wellington. Well, late winter in New Zealand; some things really are a matter of perspective. Eric expresses his confusion about competing claims to moral authority based on culture and identity. On the one hand, supposed Maori traditionalists with the aforementioned black-shirts and stiff-armed salutes doing a war-dance against gay marriage and on the other a white progressive insisting her beliefs express authentic Maori values and that Enough is Enough! is some sort of European cultural imposition.
Who scripts these things? Don't I have enough problems keeping track of the "Culture War" in this country? Why do I have to be directed into this by intrusive dreams?
I cannot speak to self-proclaimed bishop Brian Tamaki's Destiny Church, its purported Kingdom mandate or its off-shoot political party. Their claims make no more sense to me than Canadian evangelical "literalists" claiming to know God's will regarding contemporary public policy; untroubled by their inability to read a word of Hebrew or Greek. Though I will grant that Maori cultural supremacists making use of Scripture, alleged historical grievance and the spectre of a gay conspiracy to justify their bad behaviour have many fine precedents in European expressions of Christianity. That said, I thought I might offer Eric some historical perspective in the comments to his post and further thought to reproduce an edited version here.
***
Having been brutally colonized and otherwise put upon by the British, the Maori of Taranaki decided to colonize the Moriori of the Chathams. Maori oppression by the Brits was so complete, in fact, that their conquest of the Moriori was enabled by chartering the brig, Rodney, and loading a boatload of traditional Maori muskets to do the job. The Maori proceeded to express their traditional culture by tahaki, "walking the land":
Not that there is anything wrong with that. Tradition and culture unknown to the spiritually challenged Paheka ingenue should be respected. Of course, the Maori version of colonization involved cannibalizing the Moriori and enslaving the survivors so that was a new twist. This was in the bad old days of 1835 so I expect by now the Chathams count as Maori land since "time immemorial" just like New Zealand's north island, thought by some archaeologists to have been conquered from Moriori-speakers some remnants of whom live on the south island. Though I gather that version of history is now considered nothing more than a racist justification for European colonization so take it with a pinch of salt as the historical linguists battle it out. We can all take in the edifying spectacle of traditional Maori "literal" readings of Hebrew Scripture and hatred of same-sex civil unions in the meantime.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at December 14, 2005 08:37 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ghostofaflea.com/cgi-bin/mt/trackback-engine.cgi/5208
