Di and Corina from Mana Wāhine Kōrero - unfiltered and unapologetic.
Two Māori women and I sit down and chew the fat.
Today’s climate in New Zealand is growing increasingly fraught with tension about Māori issues, which manifests explosively in some quarters, and resentfully in others. I could put that more diplomatically, of course, but that’s the honest truth of it.
The ordinary person in the street is likely seeing a lot of chaos, confusion, and unfairness surrounding those issues - irrespective of which lens they’re looking at them through. So, I sat down with two Māori women, Dianne Landy and Corina Shields, whose insights and evaluations I respect, to begin a conversation about what is happening.
The conversation goes to many places, including the strange adoption of gender ideology by Māori academics. These academics insist that gender ideology was a part of Māori culture, before colonisation put a stop to it. It’s pretty much established that gender ideology came out of American universities, so, as Di has opined before, to adopt it into Māori culture is incomprehensible, and only damages the future for Māori.
A single conversation doesn’t go into all the corners and plumb all the depths, of course, but no honestly held conversation is ever a waste. There may be parts of it you don’t agree with, and that’s fine. I expect that neither Di, Corina, or I agreed 100% with every single utterance made in this chat, either, but we had it, and we very much like that we did have it.
Di and Corina from Mana Wāhine Kōrero - unfiltered and unapologetic.
This is so good and it’s infuriating the types of initiatives you discuss aren’t in place already. So much funding is redirected to the already well-off, and window-dressing and navel-gazing. People have “Māori fatigue” from being hectored by the establishment of all stripes. Cut all the bureaucrats and the politics, and redirect the money to grassroots initiatives providing housing and rehab.