Posts by Manakura
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the urbandictionary entries for pakeha are in a similar vein.
what. are. these. people. like?
I have to second the comments of Span, Robyn & Tom: We'd like to think these kinds of people inhabit some Deliverance style locality far away from us, and that they're easily identified by their cracked teeth, tobaccy chewing ways. But unfortunately they're also our doctors, lawyers, bosses, colleagues, neighbours and even friends and family.
The worst thing for me is that the Pakeha rednecks are just as bad as the Maori ones.
And ae, the Listener is listing badly to the right (meaning tabloid pulp) and has been for some time. There's still a bit of wheat in there, but its getting increasingly hard to sort it from the chaff.
Its a great shame because really what are the alternatives? As much as I hate to point the finger, I really think that since Pamela Stirling took over the amount of self-help, maximise your property value, hold up your saggy baby boomer skin style pulp journalism has risen dramatically. I doubt I will bother renewing my subscription this year, especially considering most blogs are free.
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kudos to you for your revenge
Thanks, it was small but so sweet. Getting a box set for it 10 years on almost makes all the shit I got in worth it all over again. I still listen to The Skeptics a lot. Wish I could tell the full story but I promised to never incriminate my inside accomplice. Maybe i'll give them the box set for xmas?
Anyway thanks again PA system crew
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Lets all hold hands and sing we are the world.
And Kumbaya (spelling?) of course.
Dang,and lets not forget that state primary school hit of the 70s and 80s 'This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land'. Such sweet and subtle poetry in those lyrics.
O please sir may we have a thread we're we can get all nostalgic about the songs we were forced to sing in primary school? It's all coming flooding back.
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So what am I saying? Be careful with how you approach this issue if you want to change the behaviour of the offending people. Labelling them as racist, even if carefully qualified, could easily be totally counter productive.
Point taken, I hadn't thought that through. Still, don't think it applies to this thread, which is a credit to everyone here.
On other news, holy shit, I won some stuff! I was so busy being a ethnic identity smart arse that I totally missed Russell's post. Cool. Like to thank god, my family my agent...
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Manakura, you may feel that Pakeha is the right word for the ethnicity of white NZers but I don't believe that you can make that decsion on behalf of others.
Fair enough, I wouldn't accept outsiders dictating the nature of my identity to me. Not sure if that was what i was doing, certainly not my intention anyway. Let me just say that Pakeha is the word I use to identify myself as a New Zeland European, and it doesn't trouble me to use that term, neither does it trouble any of my Maori friends and whanau, nor the Pakeha ones (and obviously most of those people are, like me Maori and Pakeha). So its hard for me to undersatnd why Pakeha should be troubled by it, even though it has some negative connotations. 'Maori' does too, but we own it and meet the challenge to make it a positive term (i.e. "Mean Maori Mean!")
The other thing to it is that New Zealander as ethnicity is mostly just a substitution for 'Pakeha' or 'NZ European'. As Tze Ming said earlier:Still, despite all the definition and invention of 'New Zealand' identity and/or ethnicity going on in this thread, it does still look, walk, smell, swim and quack like good ol' postcolonial Pakeha to me.
So for most people the whole 'New Zealander' thing was a waste of time: "you say New Zealander, I think Pakeha.. lets call the whole thing off..."
Ok, so the appropriation of the term used to describe national belonging by (some members of) the dominant ethnic group of this nation for the purposes of naming their fledgling ethnicity is not KKK, lynching, John Howard racism.
Its not that serious obviously. But it's racist nonetheless, the kind born of not questioning one's assumptions, not questioning the reason for their priveleged position in society, and assuming the centrality of their culture over that of other memebrs of the nation.
Not suggesting that Neil, Yamis or any of the other 'New Zealanders-for-census-purposes' peeps here are intellectually lazy bigots. I accept some of the people that wrote in their nationality as their ethnicity have a well thought out and intentioned rationale. But clearly most 'New Zealanders' are New Zealand Europeans, and of that group most (or the most vocal perhaps?) are 'soft bigots'.
I still think the problem is to do with the size of the boxes you are aasked to tick - they need to be much much larger, so people with a fraught and complex identity can let it all out in wonderful flowing prose/exposition.
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Saying "I'm a New Zealander" when the subtext is "I am Caucasian" is racist (I'm not saying you are racist) because the implication is that other New Zealanders (non-white) are somehow less New Zealandish than us.
That about sums it up - its just not healthy to let a small group of people, lets face it, predominantly white people, who occupy a priveleged position in New Zealand, to appropriate a term strongly associated with National Identity and the status of citizenship It is an exclusionary practice whether intentional or not.
Besides which, its bloody greedy - New Zealand Europeans already have a perfectly adequate name: Pakeha (incorrect usage notwithstanding!). Just because it has taken on some negative shades of meaning doesn't mean Pakeha should try take on a new term - that newbie will become just as tarnished as Pakeha in a short time. Well, already has by the looks of it...
Instead of copping/opting out of the narratives associated with Pakeha that give it bad meanings, Pakeha should 'own' those narratives, meaning take responsibility for them. See it as a challenge to correct the wrongs that lead to negativity.
Opting out of narratives that form your identity is not a positive thing, especially when those narratives explain and/or challenge how a group came to dominate a society/country/land. Historical amnesia over how Pakeha gained their priveleged positon in NZ is not a good look. In fact it is one of the reason why 'Pakeha' can have negative meanings.
Yamis said:In 20 years time things like online gaming might be considered strong parts of NZ culture along with Karaoke rooms and Norei bungs, PC bungs and Po-jang macha on street corners.
I have no idea what the last three things are, but Karaoke rooms... dude! They are a huge part of 'NZ Culture', whatever that is. There are hundreds of them for a start, and a lot of New Zealanders (national not 'ethnic') of all stripes) frequent them... frequently. Viva la Champion Singing Rooms, Auckland CBD!
My point is, just because its not featured in media, or talked about nostalgically in blog threads or down the local doesn't mean it isn't imortant to what NZ is right now. Just takes a while for it to become apparent, especially if you live in... hmmm Masterton or Invercargill.
Yamis (and Anna):
Ok, I stand corrected, some Maori do use Pakeha to mean non-Maori, but I maintain it is an incorrect, and worse lazy usage. I have done a bit of asking round in the last couple of days, and the responses confirm Yamis' point. interestingly that defintion of Pakeha doesn't feature in any dictionary of te reo Maori, not even the mighty, constantly updated Wakareo online.It worries me that some Maori are lumping all non-Maori European NZ nationals into one group like that, when clearly there are vast differences between groups, especially in what they may mean to Maori in terms of mana motuhake and tino rangatiratanga.
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BTW: 'tae' is idiot speak for 'tame'
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They don't have the conquering of a wild hinterland in their recent history.
Translation: They don't have the often brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples and the confiscation (or dubious purchase) of their ancestral lands in their recent history.
Ok yes, the actual story of colonisation is way more nuanced than that - there were fair land transactions sometimes, some indigenous groups assisted colonists, etc etc...
But the idea of a wild hinterland or terra nullis or wastelands is a total myth, in Aotearoa at least. There was virtually not a square metre of land that wasn't subject to the mana whenua of one or more hapu. Perhaps parts of remote Fiordland. Wild hinterland connotes vast tracts of land with no prior claim on it, freely availiable to the first rugged pioneer with the will to subdue and tae its potent fertile energy into a dairy farm. Bollix, the lot of it.
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Stephen, not sure tha you read/understood my post correctly (probably the latter, I cease making sense after midnight). I would suggest that for a start that my sense of Pakeha is probably much more complex than King's - his is NZ-based culture that is not Maori is Pakeha (according to your post - I haven't read the book, because Being Pakeha Now is kinda like part of my lived experience, why read the manual?). I'm more interested in all those little grey areas in that big non-Maori area. Hence my references to migrants, refugees, and their descendents.
But um, Michael King is Pakeha historian, my angle is how Maori use 'Pakeha', 'tauiwi' etc, which may or may not be different to Pakeha usage. (The pakepakeha theory is but one etymology for 'Pakeha' btw - I've heard some very interesing very interesting tracings of that word from native reo Maori speakers, but I'll save that for tmoz maybe.) My question is how do us Maori make those sorts of fine distinctions amongst all the different non-Maori peoples that have settled the whenua?
What I disagree with in King's analysis is Pakeha being "no longer European." As far as I can tell Pakeha culure is still fundamentally based on Western paradigms: logocentricism, nationalism, faith in reason and posivitism, liberal democracy, culture/nature dualities and so on.
If we drag up good old Kant, then I am saying Pakeha culture is substantially European/Western but has many attributes that are local (I like that term as an alternative to Pakeha falsely using 'indigenous', nice one whoever here suggested it). But to say Pakeha are no longer European is stretching the imagination, let alone the intellect. Pakeha simply have not made any fndamental/structural changes to the culture necessary to longer be European. It's sort of like saying Maori are no longer Polynesian, which is rubbish.
As for the second quote, well, if by indigenous he means Maori, then I am not sure he is right. I'm not sure what your experience of Maori using 'Pakeha' is, but I've never heard it applied to non-European people before. However, there are grey areas, as potentially not all Pakeha are European. But I'd wait for Tze Ming to reply before tarring her with the 'possible Pakeha' brush.
Ms... eh?
Originally an 18th-century abbreviation of Mistress (compare Mrs); adopted by feminists from the 1970s onwards as a non-sexist title that does not reveal or assume the marital status of the woman to which it is applied, by analogy with Mr, which functions in this way
(from wiktionary)
How revealing, but of whom...
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Yamis, I hate to be pedantic, but its te reo you're misquoting so I feel obliged...
The word tauiwi is generally used to mean non-Maori, not Pakeha. Pakeha is more specific, especially in contemporary usage. Its broadest definition is 'white person' (in the online Ngata Dictionary). But I commonly hear it used to denote 'NZ Europeans' or just 'Europeans', depending on context. Most Maori I know seem to recognise a fine distinction between those two categories.
Anyway, not being a te reo Maori expert, I realise I can't think of what words we use to denote Thais, Chinese (notwithstanding Tze Ming's finer distinctions), Canadians, Korean/Pakeha children, etc etc.
My two cents on the 'ethnic NZer' debate is that there definitely seems to be a distinctive identity emerging, predominantly amongst NZ Europeans. This I think Maori would usually refer to as Pakeha culture. However, the fundamental paradigms that this emerging identity functions on are definitely from 'somewhere else' as Prof. Smith calls it.
That's an obvious and kinda boring point. What is interesting for me is
a. Why don't the erstwhile 'New Zealanders' want to own the term Pakeha? Why not make a positive reclaimation of the term from its more recent perjorative shades of meaning? (I have my thoughts on this, but I am interested to see if others share them...)
b. Where do/don't non-European NZers fit into Pakeha identity (from a Maori perspective i mean), such as your proverbial 7th generation descendent of a Chinese goldminer as opposed to the Burmese Christian refugee family my flatmate 'looks after' (via an RMS programme).
I know a lot of Maori identify more strongly with white NZers than Asian, Arabian... no wait MELAA's (lol!), and are often more hostile to these peoples than Pakeha, which is utterly mad. Correct me if I'm wrong Tze Ming, but I doubt the octo-tiger-dragon-peril had much to do with recent travesties of justice, such as the Foreshore and Seabed Act, or much at all with the negative aspects of colonisation? Who knows, maybe Helen Clark is the revived post-op mummy of Chairman Mao that some of the peeps over at kiwiblog think she is. (My pick, as ever, is Evil Robot Overlord, definitley no Made in Taiwan/China tag on the collar!)
What on Earth am I talking about? Thesis draining my sanity...