Identity loss and suicide rates in Maoris

Yeah I hear ya - the Stone Age people it is. Good to know what they prefer to be called.

 

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It really rather sad that a post like this will not earn you a warning. An ad hom aimed at a whole culture and people. This is just the ignorant winners write history ad hom attitude that thinks is can dismiss a culture it is ignorant of. Ironically while the Abrahamic religions are losing ground in western nations animist, magical, pantheist place centered nature based world views are on the rise.

The world views that dominate the secular west today, so smug in the disconnnected minds of philosophically immature people with a tremendous fear of intimacy and presence have no idea what they are talking about when they 'evaluate' other ways of experiencing the ecosystems their technologies are rapidly destroying.

It is a myth, this whole animism to polytheism to monotheism to secular athiest evolutionary chain. This weird Darwinism of paradigms that gets bandied about as if there were even scientific evidence enough to support a theory.

You have no idea how naive you look.

SAM gets a month ban for 'libeling' a single person and you will get nothing for dismissing traditional indigenous people and other people around the world who are refinding value in ideas and practices that are simply not yours - that's it - and which you have no insight into.

 

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He reads books. He should read Mills history of India. It would make the Maoris look like the crew on the Star Trek Enterprise.

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see my edited addition above. Yeah, books. Not so post colonialist unscientific speculation as self pat on the back. I can't even remember which one believes in Jung's solipsistic crap.

 

I think of it as paucity of perception - the Save the Savages ideology [or justification] which dominates much of western history. My own frame of reference is the Indologists like Mills but have you read Edward Said's Orientalism? Its still relevant - "the haji" is the new age politically correct avatar of "the sand nigger" [which sounds like some exotic animal in an Attenborough episode rather than an invidious epithet].

Are there any good analyses of the Polynesian culture from the POV of the people themselves? I'm quite ignorant on their world view and can only relate to it from a South Asian aspect of theology. Or like Said said, there is room for everyone at the convocation of conquest

 

There's original Maori verse, oral traditions and whakapapa, including poetry and discourse of chiefs. Haka are dances set by the warrior class and handed down as taonga, from poems and sayings of elders and chiefs.
Quite a bit of early contact stuff and anthropology from the European side, there are libraries at universities etc. They weren't exactly noble savages, that's a European myth, or that they were any better at preservation than colonialists. just less efficient and less well armed to fight each other. They had a Neolithic hunter-gatherer tribal heirarchy, based on the arrival of waka (canoes) at different parts of the country, probably likely migratory patterns over many decades, which ended about 700-800 years ago. There may have been climatic reasons the migrations ended, or possibly cultural ones as they adapted to the hinterland. Polynesians are traditionally sea-gatherers and skilled fishers, boat makers etc, but hunt birds and primates too. Water and the ocean are very important symbols to Maori, because they mean food.

The traditional methods of armed combat are quite similar (not that surprisingly) to Asian martial arts, kendo and so on, the taiaha (which is the weapon and the method) in particular.

 

Thats not what I am asking, I am asking how they viewed their own world view. Like the difference between the English calling the Indians polytheists and the Indians all knowing that an avatar is an earthly representative of Brahman. Sort of like a dummies guide to who the Maoris really are.

They have a history going back [the Polynesian peoples] for at least 40,000 years, that's a huge reservoir of oral tradition - has anyone collated it, or is it lost?

edit: okay thanks you added some stuff.

 

I would look at how they adapted to Christianity, starting with the missionaries and the formation of Polynesian Christian churches, Ratana and the King movement. I.e. the Maori prophets, and their Crown and Church together - they saw a need to fill a gap, which was literally the Atlantic and half the Pacific away.

The oral tradition that got written is in libraries, goes back to missionary days, the early 1800s.

 

and?

:shrug:

 

So is the oral tradition no longer a part of their narrative? Do they identify as "Kiwis" or do they see themselves as connected to the land in other ways that predate the Kiwi identity? Is there a sense of generations of being there?

We have a concept of desh ki dharti [the soil of my land] which you can see in stories and films as a kind of personal love and attachment to "the earth that gave birth to you". In traditional stories, those who return home from abroad take a fistful of earth and wipe it across their forehead, in duplication of the homage we pay to our parents and elders [touch their feet and wipe the "dirt" across our forehead]

Its a kind of resonating bond that people have for the place where they are born and where they grow up - I used to think it was very Indian, then I saw how the arabs felt about their desert and skies and could hear the same kind of poetic longing for their home in the ones who moved for reasons of work. Not an attachment to things in the land, but the land itself. I have seen Palestinians for example who break down over a handful of earth sent to them in their refugee camps - the forced displacement probably aggravates the attachment to land. [this is inspite of the fact that the religion divorces the person from the land, ie in Islam, all the land belongs to God and its for everyone everywhere, including animals and trees] Its like a personal high that I get when I see the smog laden slums of Mumbai flying in from anywhere. Quite irrational, but very real.

I did not see it in western countries, they don't seem to have that feeling.

Do Maoris have any words that signify attachment to their land? Or is their philosophy divorced from it?

 

I'm surprised at your question, they migrated here and found "others" who got here a bit earlier, maybe a century or more, the Moriori.
They see land I suppose, as something they have to adapt their native idea of to the Western one.
Most Maori who are traditional will explain to you in Maori what land means, and then tell you in English that they can't tell you, in English.

I don't think any people can overcome this "problem" of the answer to the question: "what is land?".
It's certainly changed since we arrived, but as I said, Maori were changing it too. Because NZ is the largest southern island chain east of Australia and its population of Stone Age migrants > 50,000 years old, it was probably on its way to becoming something like South American civilizations.
They didn't have metallurgy, and didn't build in stone, they were highly adapted to a seagoing niche, who knows they might have invaded Tasmania eventually or something.

 

Yeah I see what they mean, you can explain the mechanics but not what it means to you.

Well I hope someone can articulate it some day, it would be a shame to lose something so personal to them.

I did not know about the Moriori. This is the first time I even heard of them!

What is their position in NZ society? How do they identify themselves and the Maoris?

 

By over-reaching, and ascribing to fraggle a "darwinism of paradigms" that he does not promulgate, you undermine the legitimate criticism of his underestimation of the sophistication of Stone Age cultures.

To whit: many Neolithic cultures, and likely the Maori among them, involved the people of the culture getting along with large numbers of strangers - even (maybe not the Maori) quite alien people, speaking different languages and living different lives, in close proximity with frequent encounters. Granted not like a modern industrial city, but not the sort of narrow and inflexible lives that would make the entire concept of another culture inconceivable.

You may have been dealing with suburbanites only. Westerners who grow up in a landscape, or a given city, do share that attachment quite often - it develops quickly, apparently: within one generation. People raised in the Wind River valley, on the shores of Lake Superior, along the lower Mississippi River or in the Bayou, in a particular neighborhood of New York City or Chicago or Boston, on Da Range or in the Green Mountains or the Panhandle, they know where they feel at home.

Sample lyrics of a soundtrack from a Western (a genre of film in the US):

He was branded by the Wyoming wind
He'll belong to her until he dies
His blood runs west from the Laramie River
And his heart beats for Cheyenne.

 

Are these people part native American?

Not to make it about race as such, but it seems to me that patterns of perception accrue over generations of conditioning and the whole lebensraum meme seems rather alien to the western psyche.

Its a very inclusive philosophy, one that celebrates belonging not an exclusive one that celebrates uniqueness.

They don't seem to fathom what it means and make a hash of it when they try.

 

You mean Reds or Indians? No. And pretty damn clueless. When are you going to learn to leave "native Americans" out of your posts?

 

When they are something other than a mascot for football games I guess.

They deserve a bit more than to be a chapter called "western expansion" in American history books.

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You know I recently downloaded a game called Westward Ho. It was significant for the absence of any natives in all the empty land just waiting to be settled. lol

All the gold lying there in little cases and bags, just waiting to be picked up.

 

Well, so far you have made not one single accurate reference to them on any thread I've been in. You have dealt unprovoked insult in many, apparently without knowing it. If persuasion is the goal, those are dubious means.