The Carter Observatory's learning and programming manager, John Field, said in a 2013 article published on www.stuff.co.nz:
"If you went back about 15 years, no-one had heard of Matariki. It was only celebrated in the far north or middle of the North Island," he said. "After Te Reo became more popular, Matariki became much more of a celebration."
According to Te Ara Encyclopedia of NZ:
"Matariki celebrations were popular before the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand, and they continued into the 1900s. Gradually they dwindled, with one of the last traditional festivals recorded in the 1940s.
“In 2000, Matariki celebrations were revived. Their increasing popularity has led some to suggest that Matariki should replace the Queen's birthday as a national holiday.
"When Te Rangi Huata organised his first Matariki celebrations in Hastings in 2000, about 500 people joined him. In 2003, 15,000 people came. Te Rangi Huata believes that Matariki is becoming more popular because it celebrates Maori culture and in doing so brings together all New Zealanders: ‘It’s becoming a little like Thanksgiving or Halloween, except it’s a celebration of the Maori culture here in (Aotearoa) New Zealand. It’s New Zealand's Thanksgiving.'"
In your dreams, buddy.
Matariki clearly has nothing to do with bringing groups together. The underlying agenda is to foster an ethnocentric separatist consciousness in part-Maori along much the same lines as the made-up Kwanzaa in the US.
Creative Hawkes Bay’s website advises: “Te Rangi Huata has 20 years indigenous arts management experience in Asia, Australia, and North America.”
Huata clearly witnessed first-hand how successful Kwanzaa proved in building a separatist racial consciousness in Black Americans and identified the opportunity to do much the same here.
Kwanzaa was invented by Ron Karenga (aka Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga) in 1966.
He branded it a black alternative to Christmas.
The idea was to celebrate the end of what Karenga considered the Christmas-season exploitation of African Americans.
According to the official Kwanzaa Web site - as opposed, say, to the Hallmark Cards Kwanzaa site -- the celebration was designed to foster "conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans" and provide a "reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilised by Black Americans' ancestors."
Karenga postulated seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, each of which gets its day during Kwanzaa week.
He and his votaries also crafted a flag of black nationalism and a pledge: "We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one God of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination."
Kwanzaa's overt promotion of collectivism, identity politics, and group “struggle” is straight out of the Marxist-Leninist National Question playbook (divide cohesive nation states into contending ethnic groups), same as modern-day Matariki celebrations in New Zealand.
Tony Snow, a columnist for the Detroit News, said this of Kwanzaa:
“Nobody ever ennobled a people with a lie or restored stolen dignity through fraud. Kwanzaa is the ultimate chump holiday - Jim Crow with a false and festive wardrobe. It praises practices – ‘cooperative economics, and collective work and responsibility’ -- that have succeeded nowhere on earth and would mire American blacks in endless backwardness.
“Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronise black activists and shut them up.”
To paraphrase that second paragraph, we might say: “Our treatment of Matariki provides a revealing sign of how … The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just for that warm glow which comes from being ‘culturally sensitive,’ but to patronise Maori activists and shut them up.”
Meanwhile, the Marxist-Leninist agenda of polarising groups in order to fracture cohesive societies, leading to eventual socialist control, chugs quietly on.
Peter Hemmingson is a New Zealander of multiple ethnic origins, who believes in a single standard of citizenship for all.
17 comments:
Ask people what Matariki is and nobody even knows, ask AI, I did and it claims an accuracy for planting in NZ of maybe 2 months so starvation would result.
people love a free day off or paid day or penalty rates. it is here to stay; they don't care or think the day is wonderful . If a party offered a public holiday for just about anything the public, a majority, would go for it
It's a "remember me" day that Ardern set up for herself so that history will remember her.
Nothing whatsoever to do with any Maori cultural day.
Having given the day off to Maori it will be impossible to rescind.
The first modern Matariki day was estimated to cost NZ $500M,.
That will compound over the decades to many billions of dollars of lost productivity to satisfy Ardern's ego.
Once again, a total misrepresentation of the “Marxist-Leninist” position on “the national question.”
Lenin, the foremost Marxist authority on the national question, championed the rights of oppressed nations, and opposed national privilege of any kind, but only as a way to achieve unity among the workers of all nations, understanding that you can’t have real unity between unequal groups.
Lenin strongly criticised advocates of what he called “cultural-national autonomy.” If Mr. Hemmingson had bothered to research what Lenin actually said, he would find dozens of passages like this:
“ “Cultural-national autonomy “ implies the most refined and therefore the most harmful nationalism; it implies the corruption of the workers by means of the slogan of national culture and the propaganda of the profoundly harmful and even anti-democratic segregating of schools according to nationality. In short this programme undoubtedly contradicts the internationalism of the proletariat and is in accordance only with the ideals of the nationalist petty bourgeoisie.”
Or this statement from Lenin’s 1913 polemic “Critical Remarks on the National Question”:
“In any reality serious and profound political issue, sides are taken according to classes, not nations.”
But how else would I know when to plant my kumaras?
Peter, I suppose you could say the same about Christmas and Easter, and possibly also King's Birthday and Labour Day. Each is meaningful only to a small minority of New Zealanders, and for the rest of us it’s just a welcome holiday. They don’t “unite” us as a nation, any more than Matariki does, or Waitangi Day, Chinese New Year or Diwali for that matter. The only day that seems to resonate with the majority of New Zealanders is Anzac day, because that represents an incredible sacrifice done for a noble cause by people of all ethnicities. I’m all for people of a similar DNA celebrating their culture and their language, as long as they do it in their own time and at their own expense. Personally I think we should replace not only our flag but also our statutory holidays, and design the holidays so that they are spaced evenly throughout the year, with a longer one in mid-winter and an even longer one in mid-summer. As for what you call them, maybe name them after our most prominent New Zealanders (starting with Kupe) or perhaps our favourite flora and fauna?
In my corporate office in Auckland we all had to bring a plate to celebrate Materiki. There were quizzes about various star systems and maori culture, that you could answer questions about to win prizes, as well as other activities. A huge deal was made of it. At least they said New Zealand though and not Aotearoa. It was like I was suddenly living in a 3rd world country, , like I was a european expat celebrating someone else's day, not a kiwi born and bred, whose ancestors actually built this country.. "It's great to celebrate nz's day" we were told. It was weird. There are only about 5 of us original kiwis in the office now so you would look like an idiot saying something.
It must be my age, time of day, or educational shortcomings, but I find Lenin's words almost impenetrable. Tell me Terry Coggan, is matariki recently confected nonsense and just another example of the social divisions leading to a form of apartheid in this country and do the leninist/marxists actually advocate this?
What a wonderful culture New Zealand has. Fantastic celebrations yesterday and wow what about the weather - for those of us up here in the north, at least! Culture that is surfaced and celebrated has a chance to thrive. Let’s keep it going.
Mumbo jumbo or expressed another way just B S..t Hopefully commonsense will prevail and it will be scrapped with Waitangi Day.
I was laughing to myself... On the M-Day-off on Friday I took my dog for her run at Little Shoal Bay. Was amused when returning to my car, a Maori grandmother, VERY well dressed formally [European-wise, make-up earings, no tatts, well groomed hair etc,] clearly had spent the day with the kids... allowed out of their clean tidy car awhile..... little to mark the Maoriness of the day..
I don’t understand people who complain about events that bring people together. There is a relatively new phrase “grievance peddler”. I’m not sure to the specifics but this type of opinion piece seems to fit the term.
Terry Coogan raises an interesting point. We are being subjugated by an ideology but what is a good label. Is it more akin to fascism as has such a racial dynamic? Whatever it is it represents a shift in power away from democracy. It doesn't like free speech. Like Hitler's fixation on colonisation oppressing the Aryan race this also fixates on colonisation as being evil. Fascists believed in a form of state/corporate control. This ideology believes in race based corporations with superior rights. It clearly controls what the media says about it.
In some sort of reply to Allan Heath:
I'm old enough to remember the powerful impression made by a play by Selwyn Muru that appeared on New Zealand television in the early 1970s, at the beginning of what has been called the Māori renaissance. In it a young Māori boy was asked by his father why he was vigorously rubbing his arm with a bush and soap. He replied that he was trying to scrub the Maori out.
In the decades since there has been a tremendous advance to a situation where people are proud to be Maori and can celebrate their culture. Lenin would have welcomed this, as would all democratically-minded people , but he would also have said to Maori don't let this progress turn into its opposite and become itself a form of national chauvinism that can only be an obstacle to your joining with working people of the world of all nations and races to get rid of this rotten system we live under.
Contrary to what people like Mr. Hemmingson keep saying, genuine Marxists strongly reject identity politics and all forms of wokeness (for want of a better word), because they encourage working people and youth to see the world and politics through the lens of race or sex, rather than class, which is the only way to acquire the consciousness necessary to effect fundamental change.
Lenin likened Marxists' support for the right of oppressed nation to self-determination to their support for reforming divorce laws (a big issue at the time.) He said we support the right to divorce, but that doesn't mean we advocate it.
Anon 1023 if every public holiday costs the country $500m, why do the let these wokesters have any public holidays at all? I can’t help but wonder what the right price to pay is for holidays in this country.
Matariki is about as meaningful (or is that less?) as Groundhog day. I am so fed up with BS in this Country, it is never ending!
Or as meaningful as Halloween!
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