9 INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
Black Robe Bruce Beresford (1991) Canada
Once Were Warriors Lee Tamahori (1999) New Zealand
Boy Taika Waititi, (2010) New Zealand
Tamahori, Lee. Once Were Warriors. Fine Line Features, 1994.
Indigenous people are people who migrated to an area before written history. All people migrate. Humans have been moving all over the globe since Homo Sapiens evolved in Africa.
New Zealand consists of two main islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean and 600 smaller islands. New Zealand is more than 1000 miles from Australia across the Tasman Sea. It’s one of the most remote places on earth, and one of the last to be settled by humans.
The Maori people migrated to New Zealand in the 1200s in canoes from Polynesia. This is not pre-historical time. In Europe, it was the Dark Ages, a time of the Bubonic Plague, religious Crusades, and illiteracy for everyone but priests. Abel Tasman sighted New Zealand in 1642. Shortly afterward, colonists arrived. The Maori preceded the Europeans by 400 years, a significant historical period for one culture to claim sovereignty.
The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 between the British and the Maori. There were no Miscegenation Laws to prohibit marriage between Maori women and the English settlers. 600,000 New Zealanders claim Maori descent. Nonetheless, in Once Were Warriors, the Heke family are disenfranchised. Social Services takes their son Mark away because Beth misses his juvenile court appointment. Jake is out of work. Their oldest son joins a gang. Grace is the one family member who succeeds in school and as a creative writer, but her family cannot protect her from the dangers of living in poverty.
New Zealand prides itself on a history of peace and co-existence, but the native people still suffer from poverty, addiction, alcoholism, and violence, like indigenous people all over the world.
The scars of colonization still harm Maori children 400 years after their ancestral homeland was invaded, and their native language and mythologies replaced.
Sherman Alexie, a member of the Coeur D’Alene Nation, a Spokane Indian from the Pacific Northwest writes about growing up in a dangerous party house in his book, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.
My mother and father hosted a New Year’s Eve party in our HUD house on the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1973. Or 1972 or 1974. I was only seven years old, but I knew, with a fundamentalist’s fervor that the party was potentially lethal. Not because of my mother and father’s actions, but because of their inattentions. They were alcoholics who’d get what they laughingly called bottle-blind… So, yes, my bottle-blind parents invited everybody on the reservation to that dangerous New Year’s Eve party, including two Indian men who were widely believed—who were known—to have committed murders.
I wasn’t all that worried about their presence at that New Year’s Eve party. I wasn’t afraid of being killed as much as I was afraid of being sexually abused. I knew there would b