This article actually appeared on the Museum of New Zealand’s website, and is about as explicit an argument for the country adopting indigenous “ways of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori, or MM) as I have found. You may remember that MM is a mixture of practical knowledge, religion, superstition, morals, teleology and guidelines for living. Despite this mixture, there has been a constant battle to get MM taught as coequal with modern science, though the argument has euphemistically changed to coequal “ways of knowing.” The “coequal” bit derives from a slanted interpretation of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (the sacred “Te Tiriti” that you encounter in all of this literature), a treaty that said nothing about schools teaching equal amounts of Māori or “Western” knowledge. But that’s how it’s interpreted, for Māori see coequal teaching as a way to retain power in their society.
The problem is that MM is not a “way of knowing” in any scientific sense, for it lacks explicit tools for finding out truths about the universe. Any “way of knowing” that relies on superstition and legends cannot possibly be coequal with modern science, though it can be usefully taught in sociology or anthropology classes. In the article below (click to read) several white women (“Pākehā “, meaning a New Zealander of European descent) and one Māori woman discuss how they can create a teaching site that centers MM.
The conclusion: white “ways of being” are not good ways to teach Māori “ways of knowing.” In other words, only Māori should control the teaching of MM and, further, the Pākehā corrupted their society and distorted their ways of knowing (the piece is imbued with victimology). When you read it, you may well come to the conclusion that my NZ correspondent did when he/she sent me this piece:
This blog from our national Museum is a good example of the extent to which Critical Social Justice Ideology has deranged our institutions:
Click below to read:
The aim:
Two wāhine from different backgrounds reflect on their growth developing Ko Au Te Taiao, an online learning resource that seeks to centre mātauranga Māori values. As Mero Rokx and Sarah Hopkinson worked through the complexities of this project, they discovered much more about themselves and their relationships to each other, place, and the cosmos. In this article, the co-authors consider ways of working together that enable authenticity and provide reflective questions for other practitioners embarking on similar kaupapa [policies or proposals].
Rokx is Māori and Hopkinson Pakeha, here is the photo they provide with caption. Rokz sports a chin tattoo, something that is not rare in Māori women but I thought I should explain to readers who haven’t seen them.
The authors begin with a long recitation of their backgrounds. The piece is heavily larded with Māori words, but fortunately most of them can be translated (not always accurately) with a click on the website.
The Treaty is of course of central importance here, for you can’t teach MM without mentioning Te Tiriti as the rationale:
Ko Au Te Taiao centres Te Tiriti o Waitangi and aims to support the broadening of perspectives among teachers and learners throughout Aotearoa [New Zealand]. It is an online resource providing teaching and learning activities for connecting with te taiao. It is far from perfect, but in the attempt, a great deal of lessons have been learnt.
In creating Ko Au Te Taiao, we have discovered more about ourselves, our relationships to te taiao and the work we do at Te Papa. The collaborative and organic nature of its design has resulted in the development of a taonga that carries the mauri of all those that contributed, it is living evidence of the process becoming the outcome.
“Mauri” is the teleological Māori term for “vital essence,” and in indigenous ways of knowing it is explicitly teleological, with everything having a vital essence of life force. This emphasis on mauri, though ok here, is one thing that makes MM unsuitable for being taught as equivalent to modern science. Nor can MM really be a “way of knowing” since there is no evidence for a “mauri” in science.
There is a lot of this kind of stuff from the authors. Mero says this, among other things:
One of the beautiful things about whakataukī is the way that they expose perspectives through interpretation. Ko au te taiao, ko te taiao ko au is much deeper than the expression ‘I am nature’.
Ko au – I am.
I am the legacy of my ancestors – tūpuna who go as far back as the beginning of time, and beyond. I am Papatūānuku, I am Ranginui, and I am everything that exists between them. The innate philosophy that I have of being a descendant of the earth, the stars, and the sky is what ko au te taiao, ko te taiao ko au means to me.
Ko au – I am.
I am a mother, he ūkaipō. I reflect on my role as a mother, and the inherent obligation of continuing the legacy passed down to me. I feed my offspring into the night, such as the expression ‘he ū-kai-pō’, both fuel to physically grow, and knowledge to understand the responsibilities that they will inherit as being descendants of Ranginui and Papatūānuku.
And Sarah says this:
Ko Sarah Hopkinson tōku ingoa. My ancestors came from England, Wales, and Norway. I grew up at the ankles of Taranaki on Ngāti Ruanui and Te Atiawa whenua. I am a māmā, a strategy creator, a curriculum designer, an urban farmer, a storyteller, and earth dreamer. I have been working alongside Te Papa Learning to develop online resources that connect schools across the motu with Collections Online. Mero and I have co-developed Ko Au Te Taiao , the latest resource from Te Papa Learning.
With that self-identification out of the way, they reflect on why MM simply cannot be taught in a “white” framework, whatever that is.
There has been momentum in recent years, through both the Ministry and NZQA, to recognise the equal status of mātauranga Māori in schools. It is a lofty ambition, and one that deserves attention. But it comes with considerable challenges, not least of which is that almost 75% of teachers in schools are Pākehā, and mātauranga Māori belongs with hapū, iwi, and those who whakapapa Māori. There is a tension and challenge between these two truths.
Note first that MM and (presumably) modern science are considered “two truths”. But MM is in no sense a monolithic “truth”! Note too the “equal status” to be recognized for MM. But equal to what? Clearly it must be an “equal status as a way of knowing”, and that really means science. But the paragraph also implies that MM cannot be properly taught by white people, or in a framework of white methods of acquiring knowledge and teaching about it. This is a clever strategy, because it prevents students from being exposed to MM and modern science by the same teachers. It is a way to gain power.
And Sarah comes precisely to that conclusion. I started out bolding bits of this, but I bolded nearly the whole thing. So I’ll go ahead and do it, as this is the heart of the piece, and here is its main conclusions:
Through the process, I have learnt that:
- Mātauranga Māori values are informed by practice that is led by Māori, rather than by what might be learnt abstractly.
- Knowledge is deeply place-based and has evolved from embodied ways of living in relationship with te taiao, over generations.
- There is no fixed content, no singular truth or universally accessible information that is available to all.
I think there are lots of Pākehā, like me, who support the vision of Aotearoa being a place in which te ao Māori is revered by all, cultivated and celebrated. An Aotearoa in which indigenous ways of knowing lead us forward.
I also think that many of us are still realising that there is really no way to do this inside Pākehā systems as they stand. Put simply, Māori ways of knowing are not best supported by Pākehā ways of being. And knowing this, if someone asked us to start the project again, Ko Au Te Taiao would almost certainly not be on a website. It’s somewhat of an oxymoron.
So for me, alongside a commitment to centring mātauranga Māori, there also needs to be an acknowledgement that we cannot do this inside Pākehā models of transmission. And I don’t want to write myself out of employment here, but perhaps Pākehā like me are not that useful in the design of new ways of being. We just don’t know what we don’t know. And that’s okay. It’s important we accept the un-knowing.
The conclusion then is that European New Zealanders simply can’t get near MM because they don’t have the “right model of transmission” and never will. But since MM has coequal status, this gives Māori control of half of the educational system, at least as far as “ways of knowing” are concerned. Yet Europeans constitute 67,8% of New Zealanders, Maori 17.8%, Asians 17.3%, and other Pacific peoples 8.9%. (Māori is also spoken as a daily language by only 4% of New Zealanders—the same as Chinese) compared to over 95% who speak English. Clearly the indigenous peoples are asking for a huge inequity in education, but of course they use the Treaty of Waitangi to buttress their aims to transform education.
Finally, behold the claim that “knowledge is deeply place-based”, which is surely not true for modern science and should not be true for MM if it really is a “way of knowing”. As readers have pointed out, any knowledge that purports to be scientific cannot be place-limited, for then every region (e.g., the Pacific Northwest) has a “way of knowing” that applies only to that region. Of course, if your “knowledge” deals with phenomena or things that occur only in your country, then it could be place-based, but that can lead to nonsense like the millions of dollars spent on Māori-guided initiatives like playing whale songs to kauri trees (and rubbing them with whale oil) to cure a fungal disease that is killing those iconic trees of New Zealand. After all, Māori legend tells us that whales and kauri trees used to be brothers, but the whales made off for the sea, and the kauri trees got sick because, as landlubbers, they were lonely. I am not making this up, and see those defending MM emitting an angry response to the post I just linked to.
That dumb kauri/whale project cost $4 million NZ. It is a total waste of money since there is no scientific reason to play songs to trees and rub them with whale oil especially because we know that the cause of “kauri dieback” is an organism that infects the trees underground: oomycetes, a fungus-like eukaryote. If kauri dieback is to be solved, it will be the methods of modern science that does it (indeed, that’s how they identified the cause), not indigenous knowledge, which doesn’t have the tools or tradition to deal with problems like this.
Finally, by saying what’s b elow, Hopkinson explicitly disqualifies MM as any real kind of knowledge- or truth-generating system.
There is no fixed content, no singular truth or universally accessible information that is available to all.
The conferring of primacy on indigenous knowledge is part of the Critical Social Justice ideology mentioned by my correspondent. The other part is the implication that the Māori are victims of ongoing colonial bigotry, something that may have been true in the past but is not true now: if anything, there is strong affirmative action in the country favoring Māori.
Sarah admits her white guilt, as if the article was a sort of struggle session:
When I take a look around Aotearoa New Zealand, it is abundantly clear that all is not well. The values that my Pākehā ancestors brought to this land have also brought us to this moment, a time where those in kāwanatanga spheres of power are not informed by life giving systems. From inside a Pākehā worldview that continues to individualise, capitalise, exploit and commercialise, it is impossible to be in a living relationship with Papatūānuku.
And note that she has been educated by Mero, who apparently has adopted a role of a Kiwi Robin DiAngelo:
Over the course of developing this resource, Mero and I have begun a wonderful friendship. We have found ourselves talking widely about our histories, experiences, and truths, about what it is to be a Māori woman and what is to be a Pākehā woman. Our lives have deep contrasts and many things in common. Both are delightful to notice. And I have learnt so much about so many of my Pākehā habits and assumptions, because hard things have been able to be talked about with softness.
The last sentence implies that Rokz has, perhaps unconsciously, made white guilt sprout in Hopkinson. Imagine what it would look like if Rokz, the Māori woman, said that she had learned about so many of her Māori habits from Hopkinson, and that was hard for her to hear! That would be pure blasphemy.
At any rate, do remember that this screed appeared on the website of the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington, a wonderful place where I visited for hours. Sadly, like the rest of New Zealand’s scientific establishment, it is in the process of being captured by Social Justice Ideology.
Sigh….
I think every second bridge built in New Zealand should be done using Mātauranga Māori ways of knowning just to be fair. /s
So tiresome.
Further the numbers are way off. So… one in 20 NZ households speak Maori?
Sorry. No. I don’t believe it at all.
And that 17% number as a Maori % of the population (“self identified” note) is v. debatable given NZ demographics before Maori became trendy by liberals and more importantly… profitable via gvt transfers.
As of my last visit to NZ in 2001 very, very few people could speak Maori and I knew of nobody – in real life or the media – knew ONLY Maori.
Similarly the aboriginal population of Australia has risen eight fold since the 80s, apparently. What has actually gone up is gvt largess and prestige, college slots.
The MM stuff is just nonsense and a hazard to science teaching in NZ.
Sad. It pains me to see a country that as a kid I called home, along with my native Australia, turned into a laughing stock and a non serious country. They had so much potential!
D.A.
NYC
The Maori speaking population figure was self-identified in a census question. You only need to use a few sentences a day in Maori to tick that box. With regards to fluent speakers and readers of the language, that is a lot smaller subgroup. But they do have a Commission of worthies coming up with Maori words to cover the English ones. They are not transliteration which is frowned upon. They come up with a massive explanation to link the new word with ancient Maori beliefs and concepts. Many of these are cringeworthy and are not used.
By the 1990s – the last era I visited NZ regularly — I recall really stretched neologisms for some stuff: Library, passport, department etc.
It seemed fake and kind of cringe even in those limited examples and struck me as drawing attention to the LACK of these things in “traditional society”. Almost embarrassing and deeply patronizing.
But if you pay for it they will come: NZ taxpayers paying woke fools like those in the article (why is this always so female coded btw?) above to just make stuff up that actually harms relations and embarrasses Maori culture. I’m pretty sure that absent gvt funding this wouldn’t happen.
D.A.
NYC
Of course it’s Government-funded, David. Who would want this that he would pay for it with his own money? The activists want other people to pay for it (since they have no money themselves), and for that you need the heavy hand of government. (Or set up a GoFundMe, I suppose.)
If you want a bit of fun, use Google Translate to convert something in English into Maori. Take a standard passage on something scientific (maybe a paper abstract) and see what it converts it to.
Here is the first passage of Jeremy’s article above:
I puta mai tenei tuhinga i runga i te paetukutuku a Te Whare Taonga o Niu Tireni, a, he tino tohenga mo te whenua ki te tango i nga “ara mo te mohio” (Mātauranga Māori, MM) i kitea e au. Ka maumahara pea koe ko te MM he ranunga o te matauranga mahi, te karakia, te whakapono, te morare, te waea me nga aratohu mo te oranga. Ahakoa tenei ranunga, he whawhai tonu kia whakaakona a MM kia rite ki nga mahi putaiao hou, ahakoa kua huri te tautohetohe ki te riterite “nga huarahi mohio.” Ko te moka “coequal” i ahu mai i te whakamaoritanga titaha o te Tiriti o Waitangi i te tau 1840 (te “Te Teriti” tapu kei roto i enei tuhinga katoa), he tiriti karekau he korero mo nga kura e whakaako ana i te riterite o nga matauranga Maori, “Te Tai Hauauru” ranei. . Engari ko te tikanga o te whakamaoritanga, i te mea ka kite te Maori i te riterite o te whakaako hei huarahi e mau tonu ai te mana i roto i to ratau hapori.”
Note New Zealand translates as Niu Tireni and there are no macrons- that may come as a surprise to modernist progressives.
Unlike the modern transliterations used to create new Welsh words then. If you are ever driving in Wales and see the word “AMBWLANS” in your rear view mirror, do pull over.
Re the 17% said to be Māori, without the ink and the necklace the author on the right of the photo would easily pass as white. Being a Māori is clearly not based largely on heredity, despite the Māori cultural emphasis on genealogy. AIUI, one can register on the Māori electoral roll if one can plausibly claim one Māori ancestor. WTF?
Activist over-reach is a consistent theme and the driving force behinds most activist failure. Get and inch, take a mile politics drives people away from the group supporting the cause of a noble endeavor and into the group of those trying to keep the rabid crazies from breaching the wall.
“There is no fixed content, no singular truth or universally accessible information that is available to all.” This makes very obvious that post-modernist affectations (see media like Social Text 30-40 years ago) created the path to the contemporary indigenization craze.
In that connection, permit me to make a demand on behalf of the ~2% Neanderthal part of my genome. WE DEMAND that Neanderthal ways of knowing be given equal emphasis in all academic curricula of physics, medicine, architecture, chemical engineering, and, of course, anthropology.
I want to challenge these proponents of Maori “other ways of knowing” whether these ways should be adopted worldwide.
If they answer “no”, then why would Maori claims about reality only work in New Zealand?
If they answer “yes”, then are they comfortable contradicting the local traditions of other cultures?
I would actually have more respect for them if they answered “yes”…as the first answer “no” is nonsensical on its face. Of course, the follow up challenge to a “yes” answer would be “demonstrate the superiority of your ways then, and we’ll do it”.
Contrast with the following question:
“So in your Western ways of knowing, you believe a tiny thing you call a “pathogen” causes small-pox, and you say this thing called a “vaccine” will eradicate it…is that only the case in France or Germany or other Western countries, or will this “germ theory of disease” tradition also work outside of the West?”
No hemming or hawing necessary to answer that!
Wow, that is such muddle. My eyes glazed over from trying to read all that obfuscation and smoke and mirrors.
You know, if you substituted the various traditional truth claims from Maori story telling with contradictory truth claims from a completely different traditional culture, only academics who are steeped in Maori culture would know you are pulling a fast one.
But if you tried to substitute truth claims earned thru science with contradictory truth claims, everyone with even a basic education about the world and how it works can discover that to be utter b.s. All one needs to do is to try to reproduce the results from experiment and observation. A Maori can do these, if they cared to.
And therein lies a possible tragedy. A generation of Maori children may be prevented from learning about the world and how it works. There could be geniuses among them. Geniuses never allowed to flourish.
Mark, to pull off an insurrection requires an abundant supply of poorly educated young men with little prospect in the regular wage economy to advance themselves out of the underclass. (Face tattoos will keep them unemployed, too, I should think, except in the intimidation trade.) No movement wants to make itself irrelevant to its potential recruits. The activists don’t regard your predicted scenario as a tragedy at all but instead as an investment in the future.
The Moko face tats on women in NZ denote a political ideology: to a person they have been ultra woke, wildly racist and deeply obnoxious. I have not encountered in real life or the media a single exception.
On the male side there’s always been a cohort of young men there with tribal face tattoos which express (quite honestly) exactly what you’d expect – violent criminality, usually gang based. Maori have one of the highest imprisonment rates in the world. They enjoy meth fueled sad motorbike based gangsterism.
Think…. El Salvador and its youth if they could afford bikes and meth. 🙂
Similar. Makes it easy to know who to arrest (and now deport!).
As a defense attorney (only in NYC, not NZ) I always ordered all my clients to cover all tatts in court.
D.A.
NYC
David,
Not all women with Moko use it to denote political ideology.
Several of my colleagues have Moko, and in each of them their Moko has been earned. It is part of them, their ancestry, and their family. It is not a political statement. I’m honoured to work with them.
For background, each of these women (and one man) are Registered Nurses. We live in a community that is about 1/3 Maori. We work in medicine, and MM has no place in our work. And yes, I’m Pakeha, trained in science.
Isn’t the need to indicate your ancestry by tattooing your face an indication of your political ideology? It indicates tribalism and a focus on tribal ancestry.
We in North America have a visceral disgust for face tattoos so please bear with me.
How do you earn a Moko? Does it have any meaning that someone outside the culture should respect on its objective merit? Like a professional certification or a pilot’s wings? Or is it more in the line of being able to recite creation myths and long genealogies from memory without missing a beat, an accomplishment that I’m told is honoured in NZ. Is it reasonable to worry that when push comes to shove, their loyalty so emblazoned on their faces is to their Iwi, and not to New Zealand? Which doesn’t mean they can’t be good nurses before and even during the shove.
Do you refer to yourself as Pakeha because you want to, because you are wishfully hopeful for good relations, or because you are just a little afraid of them? Or have some non-Maori simply got more resigned to calling themselves without defiant irony by the term that Someone Else calls them? This is decidedly unusual for any group that already calls itself one thing to adopt a foreign culture’s epithet for themselves. The discussion about the etymology notwithstanding, it still seems an odd thing to do. Foreign epithets are almost never so adulatory that the name gets uptake. “Gringo” may not be a particularly nasty term for non-Hispanic Americans — it might be used jocularly in casual mixed company without provoking a fistfight — but it’s hard to imagine any large number of Americans adopting it to describe themselves in their own country just because that’s what some Latinos call them. It would even smack of cultural appropriation or mockery. Why are you using my culture‘s word for you? You making fun of me in a way that I’m not sophisticated enough to get?
Or is it, along with the numerous Maori words sprinkled in official writing and the inexorable MM, a signal of reverse assimilation?
Replying to S:
Why would a focus on tribal ancestry denote political ideology? Many people in the United States of America (as a single example) have widely varying political ideology but similar tribal ancestry.
Replying to Leslie:
I’m an individual Pakeha. My Northern European tribe seems to like body tattoos. I don’t. I don’t know of any of my male ancestors and relatives without tattoos. I have none. All of my male ancestors were in the armed services, which is often where they got their tatoos. I did not enlist, having chosen to become a medical professional instead (Board Certified in USAnian). My personal preference is for no tattoos anywhere on the body.
I was born outside of NZ and have been adopted by my chosen country. As well as “New Zealand European”, NZ uses the identical meaning term “Pakeha”. I learned that on my first day in school in NZ. My understanding is that the term “Pakeha” isn’t even Maori, but may be a European derivation of a mishearing – I can’t be bothered looking up the currently favoured origin as it changes so often.
David said: “On the male side there’s always been a cohort of young men there with tribal face tattoos which express (quite honestly) exactly what you’d expect – violent criminality, usually gang based.”
I and my colleagues, both with and without Moko, would agree with that almost completely, provided the word “tribal” is excised. No gang members have a Moko. They are all male, no females, and all they may have is a facial tattoo common to an individual gang.
Each of my female and male colleagues with a Moko is a highly respected professional and I respect them as the medical professionals that they are. Their Iwi (for which I interpret family/elders) pay them earned respect by allowing them to have an individual Moko. Every Moko is unique to the individual, there are no duplicates. This is all common knowledge in NZ. Compare that to carbon copy facial tattoos in gangs.
David seems to have interpreted the gang facial tattoo as a Moko on the basis of being in New Zealand some years (decades?) ago. I’m not an expert, and I suspect he isn’t, either, but I see gang facial tattoos as merely denoting gang membership with almost nothing in common with Moko.
I see Moko having more in common with individual Aboriginal body art and tattoos, individual Samoan tattoos, and individual North American Indigenous tattoos, as just three examples, than it does with the gang culture that David refers to. It just happens to be on the face.
All this just to say that David appears to think that all facial tattoos denote political ideology, if not criminality, but I see it as being much more nuanced than that.
I see a Moko as both respecting and paying respect to the individual. It has no relevance to any conglomerate political ideology.
This may sound extremely uninformed and I am happy to be corrected, but tattoos in the modern world seem to function similar to coloring one’s hair blue or some other bright and obnoxious color.
That is, they are narcissistic (“Look at me everybody!”) costumes.
As in…I have blue hair…I am dressing up as someone who is “creative”, even though I’m not really capable of producing anything creative.
And look, I let somebody draw all over my body…doesn’t that make me look tough or something? You may not be able to punch through a wet paper bag, but boy that skull tattoo makes you look like a bad dude.
In the past, tattoos (and especially facial tattoos) may have served a legitimate function for some cultures. There was probably a higher risk of infection in getting them, and perhaps you actually had to do something arduous in order to earn one, so maybe they really were reliable signals of prowess.
But now? Tattoos are mainly a reliable indicator of low impulse control.
A recent MSM item on South Korea told me that almost all tattoos are illegal there, so there are obviously dramatic cultural differences.
And re low impulse control, what counts as low differs among individuals / families / tribes / nations / civilisations. E.g. the British “stiff upper lip”.
I thought that the boomerang space rocket cartoon in Hili the other morning pretty much said it all.
Sarah says she is “a māmā, a strategy creator, a curriculum designer, an urban farmer, a storyteller, and earth dreamer.” She also says “I don’t want to write myself out of employment”. Seems to me that that’s exactly what she has just done. In the reality-based world, anyway.
Does it then hold that anyone of Maori heritage cannot transmit “western” science?
Yes John! I can’t imagine it otherwise.
Elizabeth Weiss (who spoke at PCC(E)’s Californian conferences – both of them) discusses in how dealing with NAGPA (Native American Graves etc) activists there’s a movement to not have non-natives touch anthropology bones. Her being a woman made it worse (menstruation prohibitions).
It is only a matter of time this kind of wild “anti-racism” in science reaches NZ.
Prof Weiss is an excellent authority on this in the US.
Paleoanthropology as a science is endangered in a real way by this – the story of who we are as a species. Many items have been removed from the NY Museum of Nat. History uptown from me as a result. More to come.
D.A.
NYC
At least in North America the sheer number of indigenous languages make it unlikely that we’ll see the mixed language word salads noted here.
In Canada, the natives seem more interested in land and money, and they’ve received much of both.
But “indigenous ways of knowing” do exist, if not as conspicuous as in New Zealand.
In Canada there are many, many different ways of knowing. New Zealand was more or less culturally homogeneous when the white colonialists arrived. But the New World had extraordinary cultural diversity. Canada can’t go for native ways of knowing without Huron tradition coming into conflict with Cree and Inuit and Kwakiutl traditions and etc.
Good points. Many different groups, often fighting with each other.
Agreed. As with so many features of Canadian cultural and political life, regionalism defines us (and in this case might save us from a bad mistake).
Michael
Even though pre-European Maori spoke the same language, albeit with dialects, they were continually at war with each other. The losers became the main course at the victory feasts or were enslaved to be eaten later – something that is airbrushed away from sanitised history. Invasion from the north is the story of all of our human history.
Even nowadays, there are not a single common cultural practices requirement. Some tribes refuse to allow women to speak at significant meetings – even for female Prime Ministers (assigning women are a very subservient role – where are the feminist protests?), other groups allow women full speaking rights.
+1
The intertribal Māori “musket wars” were a long-running horror when the titular weapons suddenly became available. Ritual cannibalism was tame by comparison.
Your correspondent was correct!
I forgot to add that if “Europeans” can’t contextualize MM with their own way of being, why bother to teach it to them?
I was going to make the same point. If only Maori can teach MM, then it follows that only Maori can learn it.
And it similarly follows that we should not teach to Māori Western science such as mathematics and physics and chemistry since only whites can learn it.
A lot of people misquote Emerson (Ralph, not Lake and Palmer) as saying “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and even more people act that way.
I just want to say, I hate all tattoos. Every single one. The natural skin underneath is always better.
Visualizing these classes reminds me of going to an Episcopal school in sixth grade. Instinctively, I wrote parody songs of the hymns.
Please, do tell.
I probably missed it but can I get a basic description of “place based”.
The irony is I remember a little over 20 years ago in high school the Te Reo teachers were some of the most laid back, easy going and respectful teachers I had. It was a just a bit of fun, not a life or death situation.
Like just about everything I was totally hopeless as a student, and I admit it wasn’t my highest priority but at least they treated me with respect as a hard worker compared to the real lazy and disrespectful jerks of out class, three guesses to their ethnic background!
Readers may be interested in Peter Boghossian visited to NZ invited by the Free Speech Union of NZ to speak and the event was recorded on YT. The specific concept of MM was discussed at 37min