Subject:
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Re: New Zealand (was: Re: Latter Day Saints (was:Re: God and the Devil and forgiveness (was Re: POV-RAY orange color)))
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 10 Sep 1999 10:57:42 GMT
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Viewed:
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1503 times
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Christopher Weeks <clweeks@eclipse.net> wrote
> So what is the relationship between the Maori and the English there now?
More or less amicable, I think. Put it this way, our "race issues" are more
about why relatively few Maori get elected to parliament or go to college
than why so many get killed by racist thugs. And we have agitation around
the treaty settlement issues, but compared to Australia, say, Maori are more
like the Jewish or Greek communities than the Aboriginal one. Although
there is less of a cultural melting pot in some ways, I think that's more
to do with a small country not having the numbers to have distinct subsets.
I mean, if 10% of NZ was ethnically Greek that's a whopping 300,000 spread
over the area of Great Britain. Lots of small towns and tiny cities, so
you get things like the Italians in Nelson (2-3 thousand out of maybe
30,000) being noticable mainly because Elco Boswick(sp?) runs a famous
Cafe and the Wearable Arts Awards which are a nationally televised event
now. It's hard to maintain a chinatown when there are only 200 ethnic
Chinese in Nelson...
> Are they all interbred and one big happy family?
Pretty much, we're all mongrelised to a huge degree. Over in Oz people
seem to know their ethnicity, while in NZ most people are "generic European
mostly", while people with some Maori ancestry frequently knowing that
side of their ancestry because it's quite important in different places
(government wants to know it every two seconds). I know mine for a few
generations so I could tell you what mine is, but I still write "kiwi"
in the "ethnicity" box, like 75% of the country does. I was born in NZ,
my parents were born in NZ, what more does anyone need to know?
I'm a bit stunned still about how comfortable people over here are with
the idea that they fucked the aborigines over big time and still do. I
mean, what's wrong with this picture? It's like they say "Oh, but I
personally have never killed an aborigine, so it's nothing to do with
me". Really? Tell me again how you got that land you "own".
The other comment I've heard from the occaisional black american I've
met is that kiwis are much more inclined to take them for who they
are, and in fact they get more hassles for being american than being
black. They're more likely to get pulled over for driving on the
wrong side of the road than for DWB, shall we say.
Moz
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