It’s not so surprising that Auckland University harbors a Māori activist like Eru Kapa-Kingi; what is surprising is that Auckland University has publicized his words and activities, amd they seem proud of them! For Kapa-Kingi’s goal is apparently to decolonize not just Auckland University (once the best university in New Zealand, now a hotpot of identity politics), but all universities in the country. And he sees academia more as a place to enact activism than to seek the truth.
For Kapa-Kingi already knows the truth, and it’s that universities must be decolonized (I take that to mean that all “Western” influences must be expunged), and they should be run on the principles of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, a pact that has nothing to do with academia. If you read its three provisions, you’ll see this, but the Treaty (“Te Tiriti”) is now being interpreted by the indigenous people as meaning “Māori should get at least half of everything.” (They constitute 17.8% of New Zealanders.) This drive for inequity is eventually going to wreck New Zealand academics, driving away those who want to study something other than the Treaty of Waitangi—and to keep away academics who ponder studying in New Zealand.
I used to think there was hope for academics (and politics) in this beautiful country, but the fact that the University of Auckland is publicizing Kapa-Kingi in a long puff piece made me realize that universities are committing academic suicide through identity politics. Yes, the whole country has been ideologically captured by the activist tendency to play on the guilt complexes of those descended from Asians and Europeans.
Click below to read the article from the Auckland Uni news site, and if the article disappears you can find it archived here.
Note that the university doesn’t bother to translate most of the Māori language into English. This is its way of virtue signaling, though most Māori (about 79%) do not have a conversational knowledge of their own language. It’s okay to use the language in articles, but the University of Auckland really should translate the Māori terms.
The article’s introduction to Kapa-Kingi:
As the early morning sun cast long shadows over the Far North town of Te Kao, hundreds prepared to embark on a hīkoi that would stretch over nine days, culminating at the steps of Parliament.
Their mission was clear: to challenge the Treaty Principles Bill and uphold the mana of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Leading them was Eru Kapa-Kingi, an emerging leader in te ao Māori. At age 28, the law academic and activist ultimately mobilised one of the largest public demonstrations in New Zealand’s recent history. But for Eru, of Ngāpuhi and Te Aupōuri descent, this was more than political activism – it was an act of whakapapa, a reclamation of identity and duty.
“Protecting the tapu, the mana, the integrity of Te Tiriti o Waitangi is something that’s closely aligned with my purpose and my identity,” he says.
“It’s tied to my journey of reclaiming my reo, my connections to who I am, to my iwi, Te Aupōuri and Ngāpuhi. I’ve come to see just where I fit in that puzzle in the matrix of te ao Māori.
“Te Tiriti and He Whakaputanga [the 1835 declaration of independence], and the kōrero that surrounds them, I’m drawn to it on more than an academic level.”
That journey began in the lecture halls of Victoria University where Eru graduated with a conjoint law and arts (te reo Māori) degree with honours, and later continued at Waipapa Taumata Rau. In 2023 he joined Auckland Law School as a professional teaching fellow, where he designs and teaches compulsory courses on te ao Māori me ōna tikanga (the Māori world and its cultural practices).
Yes, the law school at Auckland has compulsory courses on the Māori world and its culture. Compulsory! Do their laws differ from those of New Zealand? I doubt it. There may be cultural adjudications within the various tribes, but if you want a law degree from Auckland, do you really need to learn about Māori culture? Maybe optional courses, but perhaps in sociology or anthropology rather than the law school. But as we’ve seen, throughout New Zealand each major is developing compulsory courses in indigenous culture. It doesn’t matter if you’re a physics or math major, you’ve going to have to take one of these.
At any rate, I’ll give some quotes from the article uttered by Kapa-Kingi, a well-known activist. The quotes are in italics. I’ll also link to the Māori Dictionary since no translations are given:
“Protecting the tapu, the mana, the integrity of Te Tiriti o Waitangi is something that’s closely aligned with my purpose and my identity. . . . “
“It’s tied to my journey of reclaiming my reo, my connections to who I am, to my iwi, Te Aupōuri and Ngāpuhi. [JAC: Tribes from the North Island] I’ve come to see just where I fit in that puzzle in the matrix of te ao Māori.” [JAC: “The Māori world”
During a meeting in Parliament, Kapa-Kingi showed people opposed to a pure Treaty-led government that they were not welcome. (He did an intimidating haka performance):
During the Waitangi Day pōwhiri for Parliamentarians, Eru took a stand. As politicians made their entrance, he led a separate haka. He says it was a direct challenge, that sent an unambiguous message: ‘You are not welcome here’. The act was not symbolic; it was a deliberate response to the voices of the hapū within his iwi, Ngāpuhi, who he says made it clear that certain politicians should not attend, following a year of what they felt were attacks on Māori rights and sovereignty.
The “attack on Māori rights and sovereignty” appears to involve favoring the Treaty Principles Bill, a doomed bill that intended to codify what the Treaty of Waitangi really means today. People don’t want the bill because the “progressives” want to interpret the Treaty in ways that consistently favor the indigenous people. (New Zealand has no constitution.) Even the Prime Minister, who at one point pushed the bill, has realized its antiwoke implications and now says it has no chance of passing.
Finally, the dangers to New Zealand academia, my primary concern:
For Eru, academia is not just a career path but an opportunity for transformation. He sees universities as central to the colonial project in Aotearoa and believes they have a responsibility to undo its damage.
“We need to start realising that universities were one of the primary tools of colonisation in Aotearoa, replacing Māori philosophy, Māori ways of thinking, speaking and acting.”
“That places an obligation on academics today to really contribute to the deeper, longer-term decolonisation project,” he says.
“And it’s not just an academic topic but a lived reality. It should be a daily practice that all people in Aotearoa contribute to.”
And there you have it. Everybody must decolonize!
As the anonymous correspondent who sent me this article said, “This is not what we thought we were agreeing to when we supported affirmative action to increase the proportion of Māori academics, but it’s what we got. This guy is basically using his university position to further the political interests of Te Pāti Māori.” [JAC: the Māori Party]. “It’s not hard to see why people like this oppose institutional neutrality.”
That’s how it is with DEI. Since the DEI hires are (usually) not of the calibre to do real research and scholarship, all they can do is be activists and agitate for yet more DEI and “decolonisation”.
And that’s not limited to New Zealand, the same applies everywhere.
On the money…
all bold added :
From the article: “For Eru, academia is not just a career path but an opportunity for transformation. ”
Every Woke word conceals an agenda.
Robert J. Lifton termed this loading the language in his 1961 book on “brainwashing” in China.
Transformation is literally a reference to the modern guise of Hermetic alchemy – dialectic.
And don’t forget – there’s a reason for academia :
“Transformation is the red thread running through all the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations’ agenda for responding to global challenges facing humanity and the planet.”
Parr, et. al.
“Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability”
2022
UNESCO
doi.org/10.54675/YBTV1653
The loaded language is geared to the socialist revolution. Further it is loaded with Motte and Bailley meanings.
Transformation and becoming: Marxism is gnostic. Thus this world is evil etc and under progressivism, the elite knowledge of critical theory will transform the world by their thought. It is, as Chantal Delsol has stated a case of Icarus Fallen and with repeat falls in trying to capture the Dream, albeit secular, of St Gregory of Nyssa.
These are fools and buffoons of the first order.
As I see it Maoridom has been hijacked and colonised by 19th C European Hegelians and 20th C neo Marxists from Frankfurt, US universities and the Sorbonne. They will in turn meet the fate of Mao’ Red Guard.
Oh how utterly obnoxious, divisive and stupid.
Here’s the thing with “activists” you always have to remember from a psychological point off view: They don’t care about the “cause” – it could be anything. Goes for Pawestine, TRA’s and Maori maniacs. The real “cause” is them and their ego, mostly because they have achieved little else in life and activism is easy.
They’ve melded their activism with their narcissistic personalities.
Activism SELECTS for narcissism, so the cause is irrelevant.
And your friendly reminder from a guy who half grew up in NZ: almost nobody speaks Maori there. And the 17% of the population number results from a lot of “Yes I’m part Maori” for the government goodies. Cash. It is how in neighboring Australia the aboriginal population has increased by 800% since 1980. Incentives matter.
Look at genealogical data not incentivized “self report” surveys.
Doesn’t matter though – the whole edifice of Maori “rights” as per Titriti is built on false stilts.
What a disaster and particularly horrible not just b/c I’m attached to the place emotionally, but because it is otherwise such a great, beautiful and civilized democracy.
D.A.
NYC
+1
I’m getting sick of fools like this. He stands there in his Western clothing, wearing his clownish tattoos, spewing nonsense, doing his childish dances. His people, to my knowledge, have contributed nothing of real value to the world; my ancestors, well, they created the greatest empire the world has ever known and frankly, I’m proud of that; for me, the name colonist brings no shame – it evidences the indomitable spirit of a people who ventured beyond their own boundaries.
Unfortunately, until other Westerners grow a set, this idiocy won’t stop.
Yes, Dan. Uncharitably… the theatrics and stage management could be construed as “cope of the defeated people”.
I’m unsure of how popular his maximalist and racist position is with ordinary part Maori people (for genetically nearly all are “part”). My guess is not so much. He’s no doubt popular with the lower achievers, the low IQ cohort who don’t have much going on in their lives, as these positions often are across the board.
D.A.
NYC
1/4 Maori person here. His nonsense has no appeal for me. I despise these charlatans.
While it’s probably true that it appeals to the low IQ people, I know plenty of university educated Maori who buy this tutae (crap).
Sadly I think you’re right about the “cope of the defeated people”.
Seems to me New Zealand is asking for a brain drain. What bright New Zealander student would choose to study math or physics or chemistry or biology or engineering at a NZ university if it means a wasted year of coursework studying indigenous lore instead of science? The best students would have options to study abroad and not have to put up with that.
Fortunately. Canterbury is not infested by that idiocy (yet) and that is where three of my children did their STEM degrees. They are now well out of the system so don’t care./ AU haven’t released official numbers yet but the rumour is Auckland enrolments are down. I would speculate that if there is another year of lower numbers, then retrenchments and policy changes will occur. If the universities love anything more than displaying their woke credentials, it is protecting their bank balance. AU has already attracted the gaze of several Ministers in the current government. I think they will start flexing their power to rein in the progressivism. I watch in anticipation.
Auckland has reported a near 8% increase on 2024:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/544894/enrolments-increase-at-otago-university
Your link is for Otago University, not quite the same as Auckland U. Enrolment in AU does appear to have dropped from 2023 (43k va 45k). If these numbers represent a real reversal or just a blip nobody knows.
The linked article includes mention of Auckland numbers as well. From the end of the article:
The University of Auckland said it had 29,123 full-time equivalent students in Feburary, nearly eight percent more than the same time last year.
“Postgraduate enrolments rose from 6,168 to 7,605 EFTS (11,912 to 13,768 students) and there was a 30 percent jump in school leavers from 4,016 to 5,236 EFTS (5,062 to 6,347 students),” it said.
Maori law, and indigenous law generally, absolutely does differ from the sovereign law. That is its basis for undermining the sovereign government that passes those laws. “Your law doesn’t apply to us. Ours does. And we are going to make ours apply to you.”
Indigenous law in Canada is a big lucrative business for white law firms that sue our government on behalf of their indigenous clients making claims worth hundreds of billions of dollars in contingent liabilities against the Canadian and provincial Crowns. In the name of reconciliation, the federal government’s policy has been to “defend incompetently”, losing or generously settling cases that the professional lawyers in the Dept. of Justice think the Crown (and its taxpayers) could have won. (Hey, it’s only tax money.)
Law schools in Canada bend over backwards to admit indigenous students to DEI-focused “indigenous law” programs. Graduates are snapped up by prestigious law firms as window-dressing for when they go shopping for clients in the next big land claim. Each settlement generates money to fund the next lawsuit.
The law is not even remotely a peripheral consideration in indigenous activism. It is the pointed end of the spear. Undoubtedly the same is happening in New Zealand. You see how if all the law schools decolonize their entire curricula, there will be no lawyers graduating who are fully qualified to defend the Crown’s “racist”, “settler” side, and all the judges will have been appointed from the ranks of the activist plaintiff bar. As in New Zealand, our judges are sympathetic to discovering ever-new and novel rights in our constitutional documents that have the effect of giving the indigenous people half of everything and a veto over our use of our half.
Thanks to Jody’s directive, there isn’t to be any litigation on any native-related file, only settlement. The 2024 budget deficit included a $20 billion claim settlement. The 2025 one is projected to be 76 billion, with a total contingent liability according to the 2024 July contingent liability report of $2 trillion Canadian taxpayer dollars. The Canadian economy cannot sustain this. If Canada were to become the 51st state you can be sure this nonsense would be stopped. sometimes I don’t think that would be a terrible idea. Look at the case of Jim Heller and Dallas Brodie and what happened to them (both lawyers) when they dared to challenge the narrative. The legal industry (let’s just call it what it is: the aboriginal industry) is fully bought in. I guess you pay the master who is buttering your bread, so to speak.
That’s an interesting comparison with Canada, Leslie. I’ve no data but I wonder whether the NZ situation is modelled on the Canadian experience? Even in the 1980s there were a small number of hotheaded Maori activists who sane people (Maori and Pakeha alike) avoided. This curse, thankfully reported by WEIT, has befallen their country in the last two decades.
You’re surely not suggesting that ay-hole LAWYERS are following the incentives for profit now are you? I can’t imagine……. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
I like to look to NASA’s current astronaut corps as a paragon of proper long term use of equal opportunity and affirmative action philosophies in employment. It was not straightforward in the early 70’s as NASA senior administrators’ cultural prejudices and years of growing up in segregated schools and cities along with the dictates of traditional roles for women and men. I think the book and movie, “Hidden Figures” provided a pretty honest representations of things at NASA for women and blacks in the late 1950’s and 60’s. Attempts at some specific corrective efforts at the Agency level that began in the early 70’s were fraught with confusion, continuing discrimination and growing pains until a few good and strong men and women were appointed to positions of authority within the Agency. It took a couple of years, but by the time NASA was ready to hire a class of new astronauts in 1976 after almost ten years of not hiring, and an existing astronaut corps that was all white and male, there was a critical mass of reasonable people to lay out updated job requirements and do a fair evaluation of applicants. Known as Group 8 (or colloquially as the thirty five new guys), this class had six women, three Blacks, and an Asian American. The women included Sally Ride and Judy Resnick, and later to be NOAA administrator, Kathryn Sullivan. The Black men included on of our NASA Langley test pilots, Fred Gregory. It certainly helped that NASA threw out a very wide net, getting 24,000 inquiries and over 8,000 completed applications for some thirty positions. And the backgrounds and qualifications of the resulting selected candidates are astounding as they continue to be across the diversity of the corps today. No quotas, no special exceptions, no lowering the bar…simply trying to choose the best from an embarrassingly huge group of highly qualified people. Even as I retired from the agency in 2008, every promotion board that I can recall had a representative from EEO, not to direct us but simply, I think to remind us, to keep fair and equal opportunity in mind as we worked. I look at the bios for the U.S. astronauts on Station from time to time and just shake my head…where do these amazing people come from? There is a pretty comprehensive Wikipedia article on the history and results for the astronaut corps at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Group_8
All that said, people are people and we still had some hard headed white supremicists and misogynists in the late 80’s as I recall. We lost some good people because of them, but they were in the extreme minority and eventually pretty much died out.
Very well said!
I like that philosophy – cast a wider net, but keep the standards for achievement the same.
“This is not what we thought we were agreeing to when we supported affirmative action to increase the proportion of Māori academics, but it’s what we got. This guy is basically using his university position to further the political interests of Te Pāti Māori.”
Of course this is what you got. Activists are not academics…and most of the practitioners of “grievance studies”, of which this is surely a species of, are not at universities to do serious research.
How many times must Charlie Brown have the football pulled away before he gets it?
What I’m curious about is how New Zealand is going to be able to involve itself in international scientific collaborations. While the NZ government can demand the inclusion of “Maori ways of knowing” in NZ universities and government funded projects, it obviously can’t demand it in international projects – and there’s not a chance in hell (I hope, anyway) that other countries will voluntarily agree to it. E.g., I don’t think that scientists from NASA or the European Space Agency would tolerate the integration of irrational, non-empirically based ‘ways of knowing’ in a multi-million-dollar, multi-national project.
So, it seems to me that when it comes to collaborations with countries that don’t recognize the Maori way of knowing as legitimate, NZ has two choices: 1. It can decline to participate, or, 2. It can agree to exclude indigenous (non)science from international projects. But under the wildly expansive interpretations of the treaty that I see prevailing in NZ, I can imagine that legal activists like Kapa-King wouldn’t have any trouble in convincing judges that such exclusion should be illegal.
Taken to its limit, NZ is going down a path that will lead to not only intellectual and social regression, but increasing isolation from the rest of the world.
On edit to JC: Is there anything I need to do so you don’t have to moderate every comment I make? Seems like it must be a real nuisance for you.
Telling picture of Eru Kapa-Kingi. Is that a zipper on his (probably microfibre) jacket? A pocket? He’s wearing a wool peaked cap and a knit (probably cotton) tee shirt. Probably wearing jeans, shoes and socks. He’s welcome to all that, developed by white, European or North-American, made by Vietnamese or Indian or Bangladeshi people, but he might try for a little less mean-spirited hypocrisy in return.
AIUI, the weak PM was never in favour of this bill, and accepted temporarily supporting it as one of the (many) prices he paid to his minor-party coalition partners to get a parliamentary majority. In many ways that makes all the foreseeable kerfuffle about the bill, which was never going to become law, a painful unnecessary own-goal for NZ, all for the benefit of one minor-party leader’s grandstanding. Disgusting.
Hello Barbara,
Yes, you’re correct. The PM never wanted to support the Bill. But there’s another more positive angle than what you describe. The Treaty Principles Bill has at least made it possible for Kiwis to have a public discussion about the Treaty, race relations, etc. We had not had even that until David Seymour put the Bill forward. Anything but fealty to MM and decolonisation and co-governance had been shut down. But now, at least in my town, there is a lot of talk about it — neighbours gently testing whether they can talk about it with each other, shop keepers cautiously questioning their customers, and vice versa. There was nothing like it, no such conversation, before the Bill and before the videos of ordinary citizens speaking to the select committee. Maybe Kiwis are learning to talk to each other again.
Ah, thanks. But it was IMO still needless craven behaviour on the PM’s part. Empty suit.
An obvious question comes to mind: bearing in mind that there were no universities before colonisation, ‘decolonisation’ actually involve? But of course the media don’t ask such questions. One wonders whether it’s more than laziness or cowardice.
The singular answer to that excellent question is here (bold added) :
“That’s why I admire Cape Verde’s president, Artistides Pereira. He gave a speech in Praia in which he made an extraordinary statement that has a lot to do with our conversation now: “We made our liberation and we drove out the colonizers. Now we need to decolonize our minds.” That’s it exactly. We need to decolonize the mind because if we do not, our thinking will be in conflict with the new context evolving from the struggle for freedom.”
Paulo Freire
The Politics of Education (1985)
p. 187 (in my version.. there could be others)
Remember, Freire’s pedagogy is that everything is political, therefore he has to put his politics of Liberation Theology – which developed out from Brazilian Churches – into everyone’s mind.
Synonyms :
• thought-reform
• “ideological transformation” (sīxiǎng gǎizào, 思想改造)
• “brainwashing” / “wash brain” (xǐnǎo, 洗腦)
See Lifton, Thought-reform.., 1961, 1989
“but the fact that the University of Auckland is publicizing Kapa-Kingi in a long puff piece made me realize that universities are committing academic suicide through identity politics.”
It’s not only “academic” suicide that they are committing.
There is a new Nature piece on indigenous science:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00798-6
They mention indigenous science being more holistic than (western) science and I realized it just might be because the body of knowledge is smaller.
Centuries ago, individual European scientists often worked in fields as diverse as physics, astronomy, medicine, history, philosophy, theology, architecture, and art at the same time and saw them connected.
Nowadays the amount of knowledge necessary to do cutting edge research is vast forcing scientists to overspecialize. However, many discoveries are made on meeting points of different fields such as sociophysics, evolutionary psychology, computational neuroscience and such so western science is also holistic but in a different way (and we of course ruled out connections like the influence of planets on human health or deities on evolution).
“Centuries ago, individual European scientists often worked in fields as diverse as physics, astronomy, …and art at the same time and saw them connected.”
In 1588, a young mathematician and inventor named Galileo Galilei obtained his first academic job teaching about perspective at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. Later, Signor Galilei went on to other things in areas of study he probably thought of as related to his first specialty.
When I wrote that I had in mind Newton (theologian, alchemist, physicist, and mathematician) and, since I started reading his biography, Da Vinci, who invented machines, painted, studied animal and human bodies and did dissections, designed ideal cities etc. Both of them definitely saw their pursuits as connected.
They should start by wearing trad maori clothing, avoiding tap water, electricity, internet, cheese, milk…
Thie professor is dressed like a cabbie from Brooklyn in 1982. And I consider that cultural appropriation.