Identity loss and suicide rates in Maoris

If you follow the pottery and archeology, the Maori are ultimately of Asian stock anyway.

And as for opression...

Auckland Landmarks offered in Treaty Deal

Maori given access to loans to build on Ancestral Land

Google offered in Maori

 

Here I quote Wikipedia liberaly.

 

Well of course they are. The Austronesian people, who range from Taiwan to Indonesia and Malaysia to New Zealand to Hawaii, had to come from somewhere.

They most definitely did not come from Australia. The Australians are a distinct ethnic group, descendants of the first wave of migrants out of Africa ca 60KYA, and aside from a few northern islands they have no close relatives.

All the rest of us non-Africans are descended from the second wave ca 50KYA. They populated southwestern Asia first, then eastern Asia and later Europe. Migrants from eastern Asia finally populated Austronesia and the Americas.

 

The invention of the technology of writing is not counted as a Paradigm Shift; not even by me (a linguist!), and I count six, twice as many as Toffler. Nonetheless this is an excellent illustration of the way a new technology can change a people's world view. Suddenly their history, legends and culture are written down permanently, so they don't change slightly with every retelling.

How many of the arcane details in the Torah would be forgotten, muddled, condensed, "improved" by the whim of artistic license, or edited so as to increase the interest of a modern audience--if it had been passed down orally for 2400 years?

A written history is a richer history that simply "feels" older; and a richer and older history grounds a people more securely in their past.

 

And Waitangi Day rolls around again...

 

Why does it matter?

Not even all maori know maori.

 

I don't know where you'd get a ridiculous notion like that from.

 

For example, Kai Tahu speak a different dialect from Northern Tribes, and I'd find a moriori to talk to to find out more about their language, but the Maori commited genocide against them, so...

And no, not everybody in New Zealand speaks Maori (otherwise why would the maori tv channel have english subtitles?)

 

Maori is the one native language but according to the Wikipedia article on the Maori language only about one-fourth of the Maori in New Zealand speak it well enough to qualify under any reasonable definition of "fluent." Very few speak it as their primary language at home. Of the entire New Zealand population, 78% of which is of European ancestry, only 4% speak Maori.

In the 19th century the British occupying force began to institutionalize the replacement of Maori with English and many Maori leaders supported this trend, accepting the importance of fluency in one of the world's primary languages. It wasn't until the 1980s that the movement to restore Maori gained any momentum and the number of speakers began to grow.

Maori is in the Tahitic group of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family, which some linguists say has the largest number of members of any family on earth. There are dialects of Maori, but since the islands of New Zealand were only settled about 800 years ago they have not diverged to the point that intercomprehension is difficult. In fact, with a little work Maori can usually understand both Tahitian and the languages of the Cook Islands such as Rarotongan.

 

Nope.
There are some 'pakeha' fluent in english and maori.
There are some maori that are fluent in english and maori.
There are maori and 'pakeha' that are fluent only in english.
And there are some maori that only speak maori.

 

I have no idea - I can only tell you that I haven't met any.

And I've already told you that much of this is regionally driven.