silken threads and silver strings

Hana-Rawhiti Kareariki Maipi-Clarke, the youngest MP in Aotearoa, starts a haka to protest the first vote on a bill reinterpreting the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi

Goes insanely hard

To provide further context from what I understand the bill wanted to take the rights guaranteed to the Maori in said treaty and expand them to all New Zealand citizens. The issue with that is that it sort of defeats the point of the protections of the treaty.

The Treaty of Waitangi is not even that good of a treaty. But it is better than any treaty the Crown signed with indigenous peoples

And it absolutely was not meant to be

The treaty as written screws over Māori, and was written in Te Reo Māori and English with deliberately misleading translations to Te Reo Māori. I'm not an expert by any means, but basically the Te Reo Māori version has clauses that promise much more independence and sovereignty, while the English version does not

However

The English version promises them rights as Citizens

From what I remember from University 10+ years ago, this clause, this sentence, was added last minute by the writer of the treaty. Like, right before the big signing at Waitangi.

And the Crown was PISSED

Because now they had a legally binding document that promised, in their own language, to treat Māori with the same rights as they would English. Which was absolutely not the goal. The goal was to trick Māori into signing away their lands and that honestly still did happen. The treaty was not a good faith proposal by the Engliah.

But its still better than anyone else got, and it's better than no treaty. And because nowadays we can't just ignore the Te Reo Māori side of the treaty, the government's of the past few decades have been honouring Māori sovereignty, honouring their stewardship of the land, and undoing a lot of the bad faith "sales" or straight up stolen land.

Except our current fuck nuggets, who want to make Te Reo Māori an endangered language again, and steal back that land because they want to mine on it and sell it and they hate that Māori stewardship is so environmentally focused and not profit driven.

So, in a way, the current government is more true to the intentions of the Crown who initially came up with the treaty.

But since those guys were colonising bastards, I don't see "honouring" them as anything good.

Even with criticism of the treaty, without it, Māori would lose a lot of protections to their lands, their culture, their language, and as a country we would go backwards to a time when they were even more discriminated against

Toitū te tiriti

Uphold the treaty

A full explanation of #reviewbombgate, a major scandal that broke on Booktwt this week.

Please support the books and authors impacted the most:

Kamilah Cole - So Let Them Burn

Bethany Baptiste - The Poisons We Drink

Molly X Chang - To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods

Frances White - Voyage of the Damned

KM Enright - Mistress of Lies

RM Virtues - the Gods of Hunger series

(PS. I know people love to jump to "YA authors are always acting up" and assume any author with a femme-sounding name writes YA so lemme say right now that this author writes adult sci-fi.)

So in case you’re not following the Dakota situation too carefully, the companies drove the dozers about 20 miles away from their stated planned construction to specifically doze over areas of interest (burial sites, prayer sites, etc.), covered in the survey submitted to the court the day before. Their course exactly followed the identification of the scared sites on the survey sent to the court, and did not follow the plans for the pipeline.

I guess people didn’t know. I thought that was common knowledge by now and was pointedly asserting thee purposefulness towards a few mutuals of mine.

Thing is, if you follow aboriginal politics, this isn’t unexpected, and in fact, would assume this particular scenario to be the case in the pipelines plans already. The Northern Sioux, unlike some others though, have *never* surveyed the land. When people actively hate you, Legal protections < people not knowing what to destroy. Read: they refused to survey even before it was declared private land (something which really doesn’t stop them, btw), because this was an expected outcome. If they HAD previously surveyed the land, it’s a damn good guess that the original pipeline plans would’ve already been on track to destroy their cultural heritage, and honestly, that’s what me and many others assumed was already the case. When I heard they hadn’t surveyed because of private land, I thought that meant they had an survey submitted that they couldn’t get legal protections for because of the private land concern. Guess they were smarter than me. There are many aboriginal peoples who have refused to survey or list their cultural sites for the same reason. If you ever had a reason to come across the relevant law, you may remember that some provinces/states have laws or considered laws that would make aboriginal cultural sites, once given legal protection, secret, even to owners, (where applicable). And then denied permits can be given other valid reasons, like ‘damages the water supply’, or occasionally have to let loose that there are cultural sites on the land. (Astute readers will note that this is similar to how permits are denied for forgotten graveyards or other such not-really-secret sites) Among things like this, it is also quite the common anti-protester tactic to set fire to cultural sites to distract protesters from construction zones. (If you’ve read about aboriginal protest tactics before and heard about ‘fire groups’/’fire squads’/etc., those folks are there to hit up nearby cultural sites, check that they’re not on fire, and put them out if still small. They are not, as some radio hosts have insisted, there to brandish firearms) TL;DR: If you were horrified at humanity before…

i don’t really understand what i just read can someone please explain?

Any particular part? Okay, so long story short: 1st post: 1) There is a pipeline currently being built across native land & sacred sites 2) To block the pipeline across their sacred sites, the native peoples submitted a amp of their sacred sites 3)The company then drove miles out of their way to bulldoze the sites on the survey, making sure to use the long weekend to avoid court orders to stop 2nd post: 1) It is quite common for pipeline or other development projects to specifically choose sites that require demolition of aboriginal sites. 2) Me and others thought that the company had already purposefully done this 3)They couldn’t have because the sites were never mapped out before for the gov’t 4) As soon as they were mapped out, to gain legal protection, 1st post happens 5)Many aboriginal peoples have never applied for legal protection of their sites for fear of people using the legal protection as demolition site maps. 6)Other tactics often used by companies include burning down other sacred sites not in the pipeline/other thing construction route, to distract protestors from the construction site so it can proceed over *other* sacred sites 7)The tactic is common enough that it has a dedicated proactive  preventative countertactic Hopefully that’s easier to read than my rambly posts before