Benjamin Armstrong’s family and friends surprised him and his bride Aaliyah with a haka at their wedding reception in Aukland, New Zealand, last week. Aaliyah was moved to tears by the performance. After Benjamin and one of the bridesmaids joined in, the bride did, too. Josh Starks gave us a little background in the comments:
This Haka is called Tika Tonu. It is a Maori haka and was written in the Hawkes Bay, New Zealand in 1914 by a chief named Waimarama Puhara. He wrote it for his son and it is about the transition from boy to man.The lyrics and translation are in the description of another YouTube video. (via Boing Boing)
2 comments:
The aboriginal people of New Zealand cling to their ancient customs like a rat clings to flotsam after the ship sinks.
I am all for embracing one's history and culture, but there has been a covert government agency tasked with making the native's language main stream.
So now we have government departments and many businesses using native words on their letterheads, signs and elsewhere.
All well and good but of the native people, only about 5% have a working knowledge of their native language.
And they themselves only make up 12% of the population, so the vast majority of the people, 99% maybe, have no idea what the words mean.
I used to embrace the native language, least the few words I knew, but my 'oppositional defiance' means I, and a vast chunk of the population, push back against this forced belittling of the English language, this forced native tongue upon us.
So you now have people going around spraying over the signs written in the native language on rubbish bins, charity bins, street signs and road signs.
Recently a few thousand of the native people held a march to protest their special rights maybe being taken away.
A sea of mainly brown faces chanting about 'getting' the white supremacists.
The fun fact is every one of these native people are part European, there are no full blood natives anymore.
The NZ government has to honour a treaty signed hundreds of years ago by some British army people, and pretty much does so, to the detriment of the population as a whole.
Most of the beneficiaries of the treaty are the unelected leaders of the tribes, the everyday part native person gets nothing apart from the chance to protest.
I've lived in New Zealand for a long time, and have friends and neighbours of many different races, native and other ... but this push to make the NZ natives special, or at least those that get the large lump sums of money, is causing a huge rift which will have anyone with a part native background at loggerheads, or in a racial war, with the rest of us.
Shame, we are a few largish islands with boring names 2,000 kms off the coast of some big desert island, ... you really can't get much further away from the turmoil of the world and still find civilisation, where we are.
2,000 kms is about 1,200 miles in ancient speak.
Or 400 leagues.
Lol.
"I have friends who are native, but..."
Post a Comment