Originally Posted by
Logen Ninefingers
The ‘colonisation’ process demonstrably started on the day of contact. To try to say that it’s a process that only started on an exact date to be decided by you is tantamount to stating that you own facts, and you don’t. ‘Colonisation’ began on the day that European tools, weapons, food stuffs, methods etc began to be introduced to, and adopted by, the Maori world.
I find you to be aggressive, arrogant, and abusive. You think you are a smartsa*se when you repeat your little sentence time and time again. My contention is that contact and colonisation have not produced ‘appalling outcomes’ for contemporary maori people, and I fully stand by that comment. If there had been no contact & no adoption of European food stuffs and methods then it is possible that maori could have died out altogether in these islands. With very little quality protein sources since they wiped out species such as the moa, at the very least maori would have faced harsh and miserable lives, fully borne out by the fact that their pre-contact like expectancy was 28 - 30 years.
The astonishing thing about you is that you equate one side of a debate over history with ‘racism’. Not once have I said that the maori ‘race’ (anthropologists state that ‘race’ is an artificial construct) is physically or intellectually inferior to Europeans. This is the only basis whereby someone can be called a racist. The rest is a debate around historical facts. The only recent instance I have seen of any individual or group being racist is when the Maori Party website stated that maori are ‘genetically superior’ to others.
Likewise, saying that prior to the arrival of Europeans, maori were a ‘stone age’ culture is not racist, it is historical fact. You come along and say “but they adopted European tools and methods”. Yes, they did. And prior to getting their hands on European tools and methods they were a ‘stone age’ culture.