It really aggravates me.
I read yesterday’s New York Times article on New Zealand politics with special interest because of the brewing fight over Maori rights. (Concidentally, Australian Aboriginal politics are in turmoil, too– the deeply flawed Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Commission is not long for the world.) Not a bad article. But at one point it says:
Over the last couple of decades, in an effort to address the past wrongs, New Zealand’s courts and Parliament have extended rights and benefits to the Maori, who make up about 15 percent of the population. This week a Maori television network, supported by government money, began broadcasting, though only 10 percent of the Maori are fluent in their native tongue.
It would of course be awful if only a tenth of Maori New Zealanders were fluent in the language they’ve been raised to speak. But that’s not the case. Only a tenth are fluent (and I doubt that the number is actually that high, if one really means fluent) in the Maori language, which is the native language of very few living Maori. It is, one could say, their ancestral language– assuming that the racially-quite-mixed Maori population somehow ought to be thought of as inheriting a relationship to Maori rather than to English (and there actually is something to be said for that assumption, insofar as the racially mixed part of the population was traditionally understood to be Maori by Maori and Pakeha alike, and so lived culturally-Maori lives). But it’s not their native language, and characterizing it as such stacks the discourse in favor of aggressive language revival policies (about which I’m moderately skeptical, as I’ve written elsewhere ). And it denies the reality that many Maori have always spoken English and lead fully acculturated lives in Anglo New Zealand.
For the record, my skepticism about the Maori language revival project does not make me at all sympathetic to the National Party’s new stance of opposition to all Maori cultural rights. Land rights, seabed rights, the reserved Maori seats in Parliament, and the general sense that New Zealand is in some sense a binational federation created by the Treaty of Waitangi are all justifiable without recourse to myths about Maroi being the “native” language of all currently-living Maori. New Zealand has adopted some of the most successful policies of any settler state in the world toward its insigenous minority, and I think it would be a terrible shame to see those policies discarded.
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