Just this week Richard Dawkins made a quick trip to New Zealand to give talks, interviews, and podcasts. Much of what he involved evaluating the merit of Mātauranga Māori—the indigenous “way of knowing” that includes practical knowledge, ideology, superstition, tradition, religion, and morality—as a competitor to modern science. I’ve written about this issue a gazillion times on this site (see here for a collection of links), arguing, along with the seven professors at Auckland Uni who signed a letter to The Listener, that while MM should be taught in anthropology or sociology class, it is not even close to being itself “science”. Richard has also promulgated this view.
But despite the palpable incompatibility between MM and modern science, the New Zealand government is going full steam ahead on teaching MM in science classes—indeed, in replacing the entire educational system of the country with a Māori-infused curriculum. It’s fine, of course, to be inclusive by adding local values and history (and some practical methods) to national education, but New Zealand is surrendering wholesale—and that includes its science funding—to the will of the indigenous people, although they comprise fewer than 17% of the inhabitants. In its behavior, including peppering government documents and decree with Māori words (as Richard notes, few, even among the Māori, speak the language), New Zealand is the wokest country I know of. Those who oppose this risk public opprobrium and even their jobs, so one hears little about the science/indigenous knowledge clash in the NZ press. It is a Land of the Cowed.
Richard is featured today in two article in UK papers: a report in the Times and his own take in a Spectator “diary entry”. I give the headlines below, but it’s likely that both are paywalled. I therefore also give links to the archived articles, which are free. Try clicking the screenshots and, if that doesn’t work, go to the archived links I’ll give.
As you see, Richard didn’t pull any punches about MM vs. science during his visit. I expect this will cause a huge kerfuffle in New Zealand, but it’s about time that people stopped being cowards about this issue and debated it honestly. People like Richard and I are foreigners and have nothing to fear, but many Kiwis can and have lost their jobs for speaking up against the fulminating indigenization of their country.
First, Richard’s own report on his visit to NZ in the Spectator. Click below, and if it doesn’t work you’ll find it archived here. I’ll give a few excepts from each piece.
Some snippets, written with passion and Dawkins’s characteristic panache. The “magnificent seven” are the seven Auckland Uni profs who spoke up for science in The Listener. (Two are now deceased.)
Perhaps the most disagreeable aspect of this sorry affair is the climate of fear. We who don’t have a career to lose should speak out in defence of those who do. The magnificent seven are branded heretics by a nastily zealous new religion, a witch-hunt that recalls the false accusations against J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock. Professor Kendall Clements was removed from teaching evolution at the University of Auckland, after the School of Biological Sciences Putaiao Committee submitted the following recommendation: ‘We do not feel that either Kendall or Garth should be put in front of students as teachers. This is not safe for students…’ Not safe? Who are these cringing little wimps whose ‘safety’ requires protection against free speech? What on earth do they think a university is for?
To grasp government intentions requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori. Since only 2 per cent of New Zealanders (and only 5 per cent of Māoris) speak that language, this again looks like self-righteous virtue-signalling, bending a knee to that modish version of Original Sin which is white guilt. Mātauranga Māori includes valuable tips on edible fungi, star navigation and species conservation (pity the moas were all eaten). Unfortunately it is deeply invested in vitalism. New Zealand children will be taught the true wonder of DNA, while being simultaneously confused by the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. Origin myths are haunting and poetic, but they belong elsewhere in the curriculum. The very phrase ‘western’ science buys into the ‘relativist’ notion that evolution and big bang cosmology are just the origin myth of white western men, a narrative whose hegemony over ‘indigenous’ alternatives stems from nothing better than political power. This is pernicious nonsense. Science belongs to all humanity. It is humanity’s proud best shot at discovering the truth about the real world.
No punches pulled! I love “cringing little wimps”, but the whole piece rings with righteous anger.
And below is the ending, which is pure Dawkins (“Kia ora” is Maori for “hello,” but literally means something like “Good health to you.”):
Postscript on the flight out: Air New Zealand think it a cute idea to invoke Māori gods in their safety briefing. Imagine if British Airways announced that their planes are kept aloft by the Holy Ghost in equal partnership with Bernoulli’s Principle and Newton’s First Law. Science explains. It lightens our darkness. Science is the poetry of reality. It belongs to all humanity. Kia Ora!
And the report from the Times, which you can also find archived here.
This is really just the Times reporting on what Richard wrote in The Spectator, but there’s a bit of extra background information:
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has hit out at the New Zealand government for proposing to teach traditional Maori mythology as equal to modern science.
The government of the former prime minister Jacinda Ardern proposed adding Matauranga Maori, or “Ways of Knowing” to the science curriculum, provoking a furious row. The proposal was put forward by the ministry of education, led at the time by Chris Hipkins, who succeeded Ardern after her shock resignation in January.
The government has taken several steps to incorporate indigenous beliefs into government policy over recent years. In 2017, the Ardern administration granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River, closing one of New Zealand’s longest-running court battles. The Maori had campaigned for more than a century to secure legal protection for the river, and the ruling prompted other countries to grant legal rights to natural treasures.
Dawkins is a long-term critic of Matauranga Maori. In a 2021 letter to the Royal Society of New Zealand, he wrote: “Science classes are emphatically not the right place to teach scientific falsehoods. Creationism is still bollocks even if it is indigenous bollocks.”
Not sure I could say that, even if I had a mouthful. 🙂
Richard Dawkins states the obvious, obvious for those not into the guilt ridden PC/woke cult. A great diatribe, IMMO.
There is indeed some real, genuine criticism of colonialism (I think about all acknowledge that). However, giving in to the PC/woke cult won’t help to remedy past injustices, but it will create new injustices, and more importantly, confusion and ignorance. A lose-lose situation.
I used to have great sympathy for Adern, and was happy when she was elected, but I’m really at a loss of words for this ridiculous promotion of MM (valuable as MM might be in itself) as actual science.
That’s a very nice (if short) piece by Prof. Dawkins in The Spectator, written with the grace and wit we’ve long grown accustomed to expect from him (at least in all fora save Twitter).
Why not Twitter? What did he do?
Let’s just say Dawkins has had his problems on Twitter over the years, some of which have been covered by our host, see, e.g. here and here and here.
Tweets (especially under the former 280-character limit) tend not to be the métier of people such as Dawkins, who are given to thinking and to speaking and (generally) to writing in subordinate clauses and long, qualifying appositive phrases.
Will people in the hospitals in New Zealand be given the choice of being treated by Māori science or modern medicine? If so, it would be interesting to see which one they chose?
NZ has a newly-established Maori Health Authority which funds “Rongoa Māori” (i.e. traditional Maori healing) with taxpayer funds.
You will note the breathless and uncritical reporting in this story from a major media outlet: https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2022/11/ancient-m-ori-health-treatments-make-successful-comeback-with-no-safety-complaints-despite-65-000-treatments.amp.html
Apparently the Polynesians may have extinguished seventeen per cent of all the bird species on earth as they expanded through the Pacific. Worth considering when we consult their “ways of knowing” for tips on species conservation.
The visit of Richard Dawkins seems to have been greeted by a deafening silence in the media; itself an eloquent testimony to the brain-death and cowardice that characterises most (but mercifully, not quite all) New Zealand society.
Dawkins is brave to go into the lion’s den—even if his legacy is not at risk. Short, clear, brilliant as always.
Sadly, I missed Dawkins’ lecture tour to Keyaurastan New Zealand.
A bit of detail on the reference to the Air NZ safety video, which until recently used to be quirky and entertaining. Dawkins may be gratified to know that last year I made a formal written complaint about it to Dame Fran Walsh, Board Chair of Air NZ — though I have not received even an acknowledgement. Bear in mind that the nation is 11% of Pacific Island descent, 16% Asian, and 17 % Maori; yet the safety video ONLY featured Maori culture with nil Asian faces. Its grand climax featured CGI of a Maori ‘sky waka’ , that is, a paddle canoe, as it took the skies, with the clear implication that a Boeing 787 or 777 was the spiritual heir of Maori paddle canoes as a transportation mode.
Last year when I flew to Japan and back, for one leg I sat beside a fellow NZer of Asian descent. He looked at me after the video and said, ‘People who look like us, and our cultures, will never appear on these videos’. My complaint to Air NZ in part read, ‘Air NZ should save its postcolonial guilt videos for the NZ to USA/ Europe legs. Since over half of ANZ’s international long haul flights go to Singapore/China/Taiwan/S Korea/Japan, where half of the passengers are Asian, you should make your Asian flights feature ASIAN cultures and people on their videos. Why use this fatuous, imaginary ‘sky waka’? Have you not heard of Zheng He, who in the 14th C sailed the Indian ocean in Chinese junks with a capacity of 3000+ sailors for the largest ships? These are archaeologically attested. Since Auckland is 28% Asian, I look forward to ANZ videos on Asian flights featuring ocean-going Asian ships that dwarfed the capacities of jumbo jets over 600 years ago.’
Ramesh 49% Chinese 49% Indian 2% Denisovan
You will be pleased to know that the vast majority of the considerable number of comments to the Times article are 100% supportive of Richard.
A very typical one (if very tongue in cheek): “Why oh why can’t Dawkins just accept that Zeus turned himself into a swan and had intercourse with the Queen of Sparta? And if that’s true, why aren’t schools warning girls that they need to be very careful when feeding waterfowl especially swans?”
Quite so. And alongside the heteronormative scientist dogma of human biological reproduction we should also let “The Stork Theory” of where babies come from have equal space in the curriculum. Teach the controversy!
Richard Dawkins is like a good wine. The older he gets, the better his thoughts and explanations become. 🙂
“Scythe of Wokeness” I love it, Jerry! May I use it as the title of a fantasy novel?🤓
I attended an event where Dawkins was speaking on the day after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I had chance to chat with Dawkins and, given my disappointment and concern over Trump’s election, I jokingly asked him if he had brought any UK citizenship applications with him that I could fill out. He responded — presumably also in jest — that in light of the UK vote to leave the EU a few months earlier (“Brexit”), he was thinking of applying for New Zealand citizenship.
I wonder if these recent events in New Zealand have changed is opinion about where he might consider alternative citizenship . . . . .
My hypothesis is that the New Zealand government deliberately came up with this as a way to deter a possible mass influx of immigrants.
Contrary to your suggestion that Richard Dawkins’ visit “will cause a huge kerfuffle in New Zealand,” it was almost completely ignore by our news media. Indeed, until I read about it in your posting today, I was completely unaware that he had recently been in New Zealand.
I consider myself a quite voracious consumer of news but had seen no mention of his visit on either of our main online news sources, Stuff (https://www.stuff.co.nz/) and The New Zealand Herald (https://www.nzherald.co.nz/).
On reading your piece I wondered whether I had missed something but no, when I did a search of both of the news sites above, I found no mention of the visit. Others may which to repeat my search for themselves and see if they have better luck finding something.
Stuff: https://www.stuff.co.nz/searchresults?q=Dawkins
New Zealand Herald: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/search/Dawkins/
There was nothing in the Keyaurastan Herald online or in print, as you note above. However, the Keyaurastan Herald did have an article online, around the time of the Dawkins visit, with words to the effect about how Maori experts want more Rongoa matauranga medicine levered into the public healthcare system. By the way, Maori and Pacific peoples get across-the-board free covid antiviral medicine after turning age 50 [ regardless of their health status ] , while Whites and people like me have to wait until we turn age 65.
Let them have all the Rongoa medicine they want but they can’t have it and science based medicine.
Sounds like “both” is exactly what they are getting. They’re not stupid.
In reply to Ramesh,
(a) Agree that the visit was totally ignored by the press which is appalling given the ongoing debate around MM. One main news source, Stuff, likes to boast at the bottom of every on-line article (begging you to subscribe) “Our experienced journalists get amongst it and find the facts behind the new. They might ruffle a few feathers, or or run into a wall, but they don’t stop. Ever.” Yeh Right as we say down here.
(b) the Maori/Pacifka access to anti-vrals reflects the much higher proportion of those populations that suffer from various risk factors – if the rest of us have them we still get access if under 65.
Dear Gordon,
this seems a good clinical case study on science versus the ideology of postcolonial guilt masquerading as ‘postcolonial science’ [ sic, and sick 🙂 ].
I have a non-Maori patient otherwise healthy aged between 50 and 65, who contracted Covid-19. Luckily I referred them promptly to a private cardiologist even though the diagnosis of Covid-myocarditis and secondary heart failure was non-standard ( nil chest pain, nil breathlessness.) They were ineligible for covid antivirals with the original infection, and recently developed repeat covid-19 infection.
Could they get covid antivirals this time round because they developed myocarditis and mild congestive heart failure with their first major covid infection? The answer was…. NOPE!
Why not? Because they weren’t ‘the oppressed Maori or PI’. For Whites or Asians under age 65, to get covid antivirals if testing positive, A) one has to pay $1350 cash for a 5 day course of molnupiravir, but are still ineligible for Paxlovid at any price.
B) the patient tests Covid-19 positive and has either : Down syndrome; or hereditary spherocytosis; or immunosuppression severe enough that they have a high chance of hospitalisation from covid; or been admitted to hospital with and because of a prior Covid-19 infection; or have AT LEAST 3 independent severe diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, psychotic disorders, BMI over 30 etc.
Because for infection 1, I referred the above patient quickly to a specialist, and they were treated as an outpatient, they didn’t qualify under the ‘admitted as an inpatient’. BUT, if I had delayed treatment and referral such that they became sick enough to be admitted to hospital as an inpatient, I could THEN prescribe paxlovid for subsequent covid infections. Which means I did them a disservice by prompt diagnosis and referral. Just fucking great.
For non-Keyaurastan NZ readers. The corruption is also because the definition of ‘eligibility for free covid antivirals between age 50 and 65 because one is an oppressed Maori or Pacific Islander’ ALSO INCLUDES ‘strategic Maori’. This means, basically well-off Whites who may be in the upper 10% of income, have been educated at fee paying private schools and be 100% healthy, but have ransacked their family tree to find at least one ‘official Maori or PI’ to make them ‘oppressed by structural racism even though they have late model European cars, own a mortgage free property or several’. This means that finding a Maori or PI ancestor trumps ANY qualification based on ill-health. There are many strategic Maori serving as govt consultants, serving on boards because they fill the Maori quota for government and commercial boards etc etc– and these august personages are often aged between 50 and 65.
What is more, the longer a White family has lived in Keyaurastan NZ, the higher the chance a family member in the past may have had some Maori ancestry. Since the bulk of NZ Asians have arrived after 1960, this means a middle-class Asian is far less likely to have a maori ancestor than an equivalent White.
What should the rules for covid antiviral eligibility have been? They should’ve been ‘Clinical eligibility determined not by ethnicity but by an assessment by a qualified prescriber that the patient has a high chance of hospitalisation by covid due to any valid combination of preexisting health conditions and occupational factors’.
Ramesh, not eligible for covid-antivirals unless I pay a NZ chemist $1350 for a 5 day course of molnupiravir.
A very good account of just how divided NZ has become, increasingly so under the present government. My late wife, who was born in NZ in 1955 to Indian parents, always considered herself a New Zealander, but was never allowed to call herself such in her 63 years on earth. No-one can truly “be” a New Zealander now without that magic one-sixty-fourth part (or whatever) of Maori ancestry. The rest of us are “colonisers” or “visitors”.
Stuff (or Stuff and Nonsense, as I prefer to call it) has, like most NZ media, signed an agreement with the government to toe the government’s line on all things Maori, in return for taxpayers’ money to prop up their businesses. You will not read anything against the separatist policies on that or most other NZ sites.
I certainly saw nothing in the Herald or Stuff. Richard Dawkins did have a couple of radio interviews, unfortunately with Mike Hosting and Sean Plunket – both of whom are quite happy to rubbish science when it suits their purposes. It’s probably hard for outsiders to appreciate the smug imperviousness to criticism that characterises mātauranga enthusiasts. In the case of Dawkins, the party line is some combination of:
He’s past it.
He was never any good anyway.
He’s English and not Māori, so we don’t need to listen to his views on Mātauranga Māori.
He’s a racist and an advocate of eugenics.
That would be the same Mike Hosking who told his talk-back audience that the recent cyclone that devastated large parts of the North Island was being over-hyped and just a fuss about a bit of bad weather?
That’s the man. He’s also had an interesting variety of views on Covid-19:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018741210/mike-hosking-s-many-contradictory-takes-on-covid-19
It’s a pretty sad indictment on NZ media and the general lack of interest in science here that a clown like Hosking is one of the only people prepared to have Prof Dawkins on his show.
If you have registered with any ticket agency in NZ which I do for concerts and events it was advertised. You would be surprised how many acts come and go with little mention.
Active followers of any particular artist or speaker seem to know though, it seems biased towards science entertainers like Brian Cox, who got lots of exposure.
The reason the media ignored it is that they have accepted millions of dollars in government (taxpayer!) funding in return for agreeing to toe the government’s line on all things Maori. We do NOT have a free press in New Zealand.
But seriously, I think this idea that indigenous “ways of knowing,” or, for that matter, intelligent design, are equal to modern science gains traction because of these hard-to-exterminate canards, namely, that science is based on faith and that atheism is a religion. These canards are the intellectual kudzu that keeps invading philosophical and political discourses. What can we do to rid ourselves of them?🤔
Just keep explaining why they’re kudzu! I have a refutation of the “science based on faith” one here:
https://slate.com/technology/2013/11/faith-in-science-and-religion-truth-authority-and-the-orderliness-of-nature.html
Much obliged!
I am not fond of a common statement in the article “You have faith (i.e., confidence) that the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has, (and there’s no evidence that the Earth has stopped rotating or the sun has burnt out.).
—
No, my science based faith is not “because it always has” but because there is a model with planets, stars, gravity, etc which explains why the sun rises every day.
There’s not much one can do to stop people from saying that science and atheism is a religion except don’t drag me down to your level.
I was very happy when I read about Richard’s trip to Oz and NZ – hoping he’d fly in stabbing at the stupidity which has sickened their country. So few (PCC-E excepted) with any profile have the cojones.
🙂
D.A.
NYC
Has anyone noticed any demographic trends among those who, like Dawkins, publicly oppose the Woke? Of course, they oftentimes seem to be those who are retired or otherwise financially secure. But aside from that, and this is anecdote only (we all know what that is worth), I sense from personal interaction and reading that the opponents seem disproportionately those who belong to what are (or recently have been) marginalized groups in either the broader society or the more narrow confines of the educated professions. In other words, they have at some time in their lives lived with the pressures of being in an outgroup, either because of who they are or what they believe. And they thus seem less easily intimidated now.
I have in mind atheists, gays, Jews, educated-yet-conservative Blacks, independently-minded thinkers from the former Soviet bloc, and the various personality types who rarely care what other people think about anything. And I would be derelict not to add educated-yet-still-conservative Christians, be they Catholic, Orthodox, or evangelical (before anyone balks, can you find me any group in elite or highly-educated society today that is more reviled or openly ridiculed by their peers?).
Anyway, it seems that a certain hardening of the spine is essential, either through birthright or the trials of life. Cheers to all of them, of any stripe, who have a public platform and use it.
When I trawled the comments on the USDA site at the end of Jan re. the petition to de-regulate the GRO (Genetically Rescued Organism) American Chestnut tree, one of the last ones came from GE Free New Zealand. All materials were submitted as attachments, but if you open the last one (…comment…) you will see that the letter opens and closes in Maori.
It’s one thing to open and close in the language of the person you’re sending the letter to – something that I’ve done in the past to, for instance, friends in Finland, but it’s entirely another thing to do that when sending to an agency obviously not conversant in that language. It would be like sending to my friend in Türkiye and opening in Finnish, just because I learned that I’m 1/8 Finnish. Indeed, they’re infected.
This twitter thread, started by a Professor in the physics department at Auckland university, is typical of what we’re up against.
https://twitter.com/nicgaston/status/1631288345484574728?s=20
OK, I understand that white Kiwis don’t like to be lectured to by a Pom, just like Canada bristles at the United States. If they invented Mātauranga Māori they feel they own it and have to defend it. It may be foolish but it’s ours. OK.
But I still don’t get it. Do those people not know what’s going to become of them when they lose their country? Or are they just hoping to be the last to be driven into the boats to take their chances on the Tasman Sea?
Or is that just the final common pathway of Progressive Leftism everywhere?
At least in Canada even our people like the ones in the Twitter thread who sympathize with indigenous machinations don’t plan to be giving their land back any time soon. Very sad.
Classic Dawkins – no one else can write like that (in a good way!).
“modish” excellent choice of word.
“vitalism” – how’d I miss that the whole time?!? I’m sure PCC(E) mentioned it but I sort of read too quick.
Yes indeed, vitalism. Which leads to the thought of – and for this I apologize – panpsychism. The one thing I’ll break a rool over : no more panpsychism!
(I’m being facetious for a laugh, I hope, of course – bring on the panpsychism punching bag!).
An important note I would add:
WEIT post:
“A comment by Helen Pluckrose”
PCC(E): “… Helen has some trenchant remarks about the “decolonize” trope STEM. Here’s her comment.”
Excerpt of H. Pluckrose: ” I don’t think I have ever seen anything more imperialist than claiming STEM to be white & Eurocentric. ”
See:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/02/07/a-comment-by-helen-pluckrose/
The Australian comedian, Tim Minchin, tells a good joke about this issue, which goes, “What do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.
My Kiwi contact, who is actually a transplanted Yank and a molecular biologist who had her own Science segment on NZ TV for awhile before COVID (not sure of the present status) tells me that the whole curriculum has been revised, and that apparently nobody told Richard, so he’s railing against something that either is no more or has been substantially changed. I only skimmed thru this page, and have no idea what the prior version looked like, but aside from being mildly seasoned by a few words in Maori (I guess ākonga are students), it seems pretty generic.
I’m just the messenger here.
Did you read through the Course Outline pdfs under the Teaching tab? A lot of woo in there, especially about the vital essences possessed by all things. Many words not defined in glossary so I don’t know what they mean by DNA being a tapu.
In many places, the course outlines refer to “our people” but talk only about Maori. Indeed you get the distinct feeling that only Maori really belong in New Zealand. It’s as if the curriculum is being aimed at an audience that is exclusively Maori and Pacific Islander, like a segregated Maori/PI school system, which makes no mention of all the other inhabitants of New Zealand. Even though they obviously outnumber them, in the chemistry and biology curriculum these other majority NZers simply don’t exist. They have been erased, to use the jargon. This Is especially vivid when genetics and migration are discussed: Maori seafaring but no English seafaring or airplanes that brought later immigrants from Asia. They have biology too, don’t they? There is clearly an agenda here. I think this is what Jerry means by valourizing one race..
Assignments can be presented in Maori, English, or NZ Sign. Maori and Sign are official languages; English is not. That means a teacher who doesn’t speak Maori will be unable to evaluate a student assignment written or delivered in Maori.
The typeface on the masthead uses Maori in larger point everywhere it appears, with the English appearing in smaller type underneath. You won’t think this matters until it happens at home. Imagine you live in a state where 17% of the population is of Hispanic origin. Only a few of them can speak Spanish and all understand English and speak it at home. (Not the actual case in America, I know.). Yet now imagine that all the official bulletins from your state government give prominence to Spanish so it looks as if you are dealing with the government of Spain or Mexico, but which has deigned to show English translations in small print for the benefit of tourists and temporary residents.
As to currency, the main text is official as of 2021 but there is a PDF of a draft for 2023.
Thanks, I dug into the first outline. It seemed that the cloud of Maori dissipated the farther I went into it, and my contact tells me that she doesn’t “know what is going on behind the scenes but they seem to be reconsidering their approach, which I think is good,” so that’s as much as I know.
But in writing this way, are they trying to act like Duolingo or one of those programs where (I gather) you read things with words from the other language interspersed with your native language?
In contrast, there’s Finland, which as you probably know is officially bilingual. But only about 5% of Finns know Swedish, and those are mostly in coastal locations. The way it works is that road signs in majority Swedish-speaking places have the Swedish name first, otherwise it’s the other way around. I like the Finnish model.
At least, it’s nice that the Maori seem not to have developed their own alphabet(?) so there’s not that to have to deal with. Also, I didn’t detect any Maori verbs. I presume they exist. Did they intend to roll out the Maori verbs in v. 2.0?
Another commenter posted here that the outcome of this Duolingo might be that New Zealand English will become a creole. It will have so many Maori words in it that speakers will have difficulty being understood elsewhere in the Anglosphere because they know only Maori nouns and, yes, verbs for certain concepts. We see this with the French creole spoken by the illegal Haitian migrants whom New York’s Mayor Adams is putting on busses to Plattsburgh so they can sneak into Canada “because they speak French up there.” But Haitian Creole is not readily understood by ordinary white Quebeckers or even by immigrants from French Africa.. It’s not just a different dialect. It contains words liberally borrowed from indigenous and African languages that have no similarity with Quebec French, analogous to the supposed Maori-ization of English.
Personally I don’t think this is very likely in New Zealand. Almost no one of any race uses Maori conversationally, even in stereotyped greetings such as a checkout person would use in a grocery store. (As a tourist I wouldn’t expect hotel staff or airport taxi drivers to greet me in Maori but a shop clerk in Christchurch wouldn’t know where I was from till I opened my mouth and if Maori was ever used, I’d have heard it at least once.). Tourists will hear Maori only if they attend a Maori cultural event.
We outsiders see a lot of written Maori in official documents and virtue-signalling e-mails from organizations but really nobody uses it on the street. All children are learning English at home and there doesn’t seem to be any attempt to enforce “Maori immersion” in the schools. Maori is essentially a dead language that’s being kept alive for political purposes so I don’t think it will creole-ize English. It will impede the dissemination of what passes for science into the outside world if scientists feel compelled by their bosses to lard their papers with words the world will not understand, or if Maori-valorizing scientists attempt to cloak non-scientific ideas in words that outsiders can not readily decode as hocus-pocus.