Do I have to tell them yet again that “Aotearoa”, which they will never find in that text, near-sacred to some, the Treaty of Waitangi, is a fake name for our country, “certainly not known to Maori as Aotearoa in pre-European times.”[ii] One might have thought that a Senior Lecturer in Maori history could at least have got that one right, even if his University cannot!
So here is Dr Peter Meihana, doing the usual thing of listing his ancestral Maori tribes – four of them – but with not a word of his apparent European ancestry. If an academic, or anybody, cannot, or will not, give an accurate summary of such significant details, how much reliance can we put in anything else he says? We’ll take a look.
