Unconscionable.
Does the hakka mean the same as it does in western cultures as a peaceful perfomative protest or does that mean something like a threat/declaration of war in Maori culture? I’d apply the former, but last time I did that I was accused of being orientalist :/
It can be both. Traditionally is was a ‘war dance’, but depending on the lyrics and context it can be used as welcoming, a farewell, or many such things. You would have to translate it to know.
makes sense
They did a dance and were suspended. Sounds like New Zealand parliament is channeling their inner magat.
I think that was amazingly awesome. The people saying there’s a time and place, you’re correct. This was the time and place. Take a stand, make noise, make people uncomfortable. Quiet compliance is what got us here in the first place.
Exactly. White person living on the other side of the god damn planet here, and I cheered when I heard what she did. She’s amazing. If all politicians had her moral fiber and backbone, we’d have world peace.
Culture, in MY politics?? No, no, I need to pretend all people are the same and want the same things I do, if I have the context of culture 🤢 I might have to consider people have valid perspectives I don’t share!! /s if we do that here
Also like, it’s fucking Aoteroa. In colonial nations one must be prepared for indigenous members of their government to perform cultural acts of resistance when the colonist faction of the government gets up to some shit.
From the other side of the world I saw her actions powerful and warranted. Though I do come from a country with a history of far less reasonable displays of dissatisfaction in our legislature.
Which one is that and what are the displays? (if you don’t mind sharing, of course)
It’s America, so in the modern day it’s mostly relegated to shit like reading the phone book or if lucky reading incredibly long relevant things. But we’ve had fist fights and duels as a result of congressional conflict.
The people critizing her think Americans politics are the best model.
American here and who the fuck are these insane people
They are the locals. They are indigenous New Zealanders and they are doing something that is customary in their culture in the kind of situation they were in during that session.
The New Zealand lawmakers were trying to pass a bill that would have severely reduced the rights of the locals, and this reaction is part of how the local culture demands people to act.
I think the “insane people” they were referring to are the people who “think Americans politics are the best model”?
Gross. An American.
You know a lot of us hate our government too right?
Wait if I’m reading this right this punishment comes from something that happened 5 months ago and it will result in them not being allowed to participate in the budget debate? Will that’s fucking Twisted isn’t it? If it was really a punishment for an action why would it not happen sooner? Why would they wait until this critical budget debate to implement it? Seems like maybe it’s just an excuse to stop these people from participating in the budget debate. Like an excuse to stop their constituents from being represented. This is blatantly anti-democratic.
It’s racism so that the colonialist power structure can continue its genocide without dissent from the people it is targeting
In Spain one congressman, Alberto Rodríguez Rodríguez, had his seat removed by a “judicial decision” in 2021 and once the elections passed, in 2024, and he didn’t have the seat anymore, that “judicial decision” was reversed, saying that he had to be fined but he shouldn’t have lost his seat.
Now everyone, let’s sing: LAWFAREEEEEEEEEEE!
Brazil had an entire presidential coup based around the same logic.
The three MPs will not receive their salaries during the suspension and will not be present during next week’s annual budget debate.
There we have it. They’re making sure that Maori people won’t have representation when taking away their rights is debated again.
This sort of thing always strikes me as odd.
There are agreed rules on language, some parliaments have dress code but besides penalties or fines a representative can be served with under no situation a representative can be barred from exercisizing their dutifully elected functions.
I have representatives in my national assembly with criminal charges that none the less exercise as they have been elected.
This is plainly stupid and abusive.
In New Zealand it is pretty common for members of parliament to get thrown out of the chamber for a whole bunch of reasons. In general you have to do whatever the speaker says, sort of like you would a judge in a court proceeding. There’s a whole lot ( perhaps dated ) rules around treating other members of the house with respect, letting them speak when their part of the process is up etc.
I think most of this is covered by this list of rules: https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/parliamentary-rules/standing-orders-2017-by-chapter/chapter-3-general-procedures/
Save this example for the next time some chud tries to tell you colonization is a past event and not an ongoing process right this minute
Every parliament record here in Hungary
Boo
This call for more hakas… 💪
Hakas will continue until morale improves
My morale improved with the first one! …there is room for further improvement though 🤔
Colonialism is alive and well in NZ.
It was clear the collective western governance doesn’t give a shit about indigenous people when they facilitated, funded, supplied arms, and downplayed the palestinian genocide. Their “human rights” only extends to marketing themselves as moral civilized people, while making themselves rich and powerful comes first.
Honourable cause, not good praxis interjecting it into random topics making people more fed up hearing about it than they’re fed up hearing about vegans.
White folks stepping on brown folks isnt really a different topic, but I dont really disagree with you here either.
This was five months ago. The MPs haka sparked national protest and a nine day march against the Treaty Principles Bill, which did not pass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Principles_Bill
Sounds like it worked, and now the conservatives are mad and trying to punish?
Pretty much. That and trying to distract people from the details of their budget, which will without doubt be all the usual crap you’d expect from conservatives.
I would venture to guess that the disciplinary action generated more attention than the haka itself. So a good thing in the end.
Pretty amazing, the NZ conservatives mount a major attack on Māori and are then intimidated by haka. Snowflakes.
That was pretty badass.
Agreed. If that had been targeted at me, I would have crapped my pants.
The Speaker sure looked like he wanted to.
Wider angle video showing the whole scope of it plus his reaction, which was priceless.
I think maybe he actually did.
Ah, at more or less frequent time spans I end up searching the internet for all these amazing ritual performances (forgive my ignorance, I am from North Europe so don’t really know what it is exactly or what it should be called) of the Māori.
I get so captured and enchanted by them, it’s so powerful but often also beautiful and somehow extremely sorrowful or whatever emotion the display is intended to signal (or at least ends up signaling to me as a complete ignorant foreigner), I always end up wondering that had Christianity not crusaded our lands and bloodily murdered and genocided our cultures, might we have something equally powerful and captivating to preserve? It’s not a far fetch because we do have a lot of remnants and first party findings on the old Norwegian and Danish and Swedish cultures of around the Northern European Iron Age for example, that had similar sort of rituals or even just musical tastes and conventions. Our peoples neighbored those, though were distinct and entirely different on most fronts, though a lot of people today fancy conflating us with the “Vikings”. We were their looting ground for the most part and any influence from their culture on ours would’ve been likely equally bloodily brought. But I digress.
Had the southerners not crusaded and killed most of us off, snuffed out the light of our culture, forced everyone brutally to follow whatever flavor of Christ each crusade was bringing, maybe I shouldn’t feel so amazed by the amazing cultures far away. But maybe we didn’t have anything as powerful in the first place, who knows at this point…
But these shows of force and unity are always so captivating, I end up bingeing videos of them for hours on end, even if I don’t really know what they are about and what each of them mean.
I love this. It’s so close to my heart somehow, feels so close to home, yet it’s a faraway thing.
I totally get where you’re coming from, and I agree Christianity did snuff out a lot of that, but not necessarily the way you may be thinking of it. Christianity was a face, tool, and motivation of empire, and empire seeks to standardize culture for the sake of stability. Christianity has deeply powerful cultural performances too. There are traditional catholic rituals that by their nature as a force of colonizing power and as part of globally dominant cultures (and as part of our own cultures) we see differently from this.
This haka was powerful and beautiful, and part of that is by its own merit, but part is that it is people and culture resisting colonial power.
Also, the modern era has been immensely destructive to culture and ritual except where it is intentionally preserved. While it would be easy to pin it on Christianity and the protestant reformation, the reality is that it’s also caused by the formation of nations (the unification of Italy for example created a shared culture between Venice and Rome for the first time since the fall of the western empire), the advent of mass travel and communication, the rise of industrialized lifestyles, and the shift from generation after generation living in the same spot to the normalization of living somewhat far from your family, all of which combined to more or less radically weaken local cultures.
You make sense, it’s easy to reduce these things into a couple of easy “villains” to point my finger at, but in reality things are always much, much more complex.
For whatever reason, it’s a touchy topic for me and often takes a few steps taken back to see it straight so to say.
Thanks for the perspective!
might we have something equally powerful and captivating to preserve?
…no. As in: That’s not the kind of cultural practice Christianisation wiped out or we wouldn’t be burning stuff come spring, dance around maypoles, and whatnot. The Faroese are still into singing sagas as an actual community practice. Missionaries back then weren’t trying to regiment people into factory workers, make them sit still on chairs and such.
It’s kind of a grass is greener on the other side kind of situation. There’s a good reason stuff like Heilung is captivating, but that’s because they’re modern-day shamans speaking to instincts buried by modernity, not because they’d be historical in their music or practices. Norse folk music indeed sounded pretty much like Norse folk music does today.
I get your sentiment, but I’m talking about Finnic heritage and culture, we have some stuff preserved, though a lot of it warped by Christian stuff bleeding into them, but no real knowledge of what the music around here was like. From the Scandinavians, we have even primary sources and good findings, but I am fairly certain what we had here was much different, just not preserved. A lot of the crusades were from the Scandinavians, former “Vikings”, which means we do have some amount of warped cultural traditions similar to theirs, but that is most likely a result and the outcome of hundred years of crusades, annexation, occupation and conquest. So in a sense it’s true Christianity alone didn’t result in our lost cultural traditions, it was the more powerful cousins we have from the West as well.
But I do not agree that it’s entirely just “grass is greener” kind of situation and that the influence and violence from the faiths and the peoples from the South and the West (and the East!) played no critical part in silencing whatever we used to have around here. If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too. But everything, the entirely different language origins, the cultural merging more with the Siberian and Sami peoples on top of our own original foreigness among these Scandinavian neighbors, everything points to it being unlikely our customs were the same. Our religion was entirely different to those of our Western cousins. You would assume the customs, traditions, rites, the music and all, would’ve been entirely different as well, since most of them leaned into those two things: the language (as in the preservation of:) and the all-encompassing nature of faiths of that time as sort of the merged “science”, culture and religion.
But I was vague in my original comment, which probably lead to this tangent. While I’m not an academic in the histories of our culture, I have been interested in it and consuming all kinds of content regarding it (the little we have…) all my life. I feel like I am in line with the current consensus. But maybe not. Take it as you will.
If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too.
I guess what I want to say overall is that you shouldn’t confuse the impact of Christianisation with the impact of being neighbours for millennia. Of course you both have Saunas, why wouldn’t they copy you, long before the crusades. There’s indubitably lots of influence in areas such as administration, but folk dances, music? Which tax collector has ever cared about that, that kind of thing travels from village to neighbouring village, the occasional travelling musician, not via state structures.
The Catholic Church definitely had influence on music as they had their stuff standardised but then not every village had a church much less a choir much less organ, nor would you want to dance to their chants. They didn’t unify Europe musically, why would they care to. What they did do is popularise polyphony.
On the flipside: Tradition is not praying to the ashes, but passing on the fire. If there’s some specifically Finnish spark that makes you produce the amount and quality of metal that you do then, by all means, do blaze on. Why go backwards, how would that be more authentic.
Fair enough, those are good points.
I might have gotten a little defensive there for no real reason. It’s a thin line to walk, and unfortunately I find myself often approaching the forbidden (and rightly so) lands of some variation or cultural exceptionalism, and even worse, based on nothing actual or concrete, just vague “what-if”s and imagination.
Sorry about all that
Fuck the King
Like the French do.
So who can regale us on why the current coalition is running cover for colonialists in New Zealand. I thought that was usually a losing move there.
Can you elaborate? Which country is invading or colonializing NZ? This is genuinely news to me, I assumed NZ is a free country.
Yeah, gotta export that freedom to them Maori and ignore the rule of law by treaty with them yeah? What’s that got to do with colonialism? Can’t even be related. Who would even think such a thing? I am truly shocked.
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We got the project 2025 test run when a three party far right coalition got elected in 2023. Most regressive, cruel and mean sprited government in a generation.
USA, NZ, Australia, Canada, UK and beyond. They all coordinate, they use the same consultants, the same messages, their AstroTurf political advocacy groups all share info and coordinate policy to make our lives worse and the rich richer. Tailored slightly for local conditions but the same overall goal.
They really are a cancer all over the Western societies.
