Grappler Truth Teller Feller wrote on Dec 18
th, 2024 at 9:36am:
Well - if there are no rules on how we define 'Indigenous' - your Maoris say they are not despite long tenure - so clearly the only Indigeneity possible is to Planet Earth - in which case it has no meaning in terms of segregating groups in any given nation. Given also that the Australian Aborigine (let's just call them the AA for short so as to avoid confusion with other 'aborigines' in Borneo or South Africa or whatever .. the hill tribes in Vietnam etc) is a product of endless waves of (gasps) Invasion by ever more separate groups arriving here - it is in fact impossible to establish who is or is not Indigenous to this land and even the first arrivals were Africans anyway .... so the entire issue is moot, and thus is merely a matter of identification or appropriation.
I'm Indigenous - so is the Blue-tongue in the garden!!
Those Maoris who argue against their own NZ indigeneity do so because their arrival in NZ (around 1300) is known to all Maoris, having been preserved by their oral tradition.
These stories of arrival, regardless of tribe, are remarkably consistent and almost identical, with none disputing their arrival, the method of travel, or the timeline.
They even agree on the names of the canoes that successfully arrived in NZ.
The islands they left can be traced to eastern Polynesia with the Indigenous Tahitian language being so close to Maori, they are intelligible to each other, despite hundreds of years of no contact.
The modern use of the term, Indigenous, requires that there be no sense of originating from anywhere else, (other than mythic Adam-and-Eve-like stories ), and there is no evidence that can determine where they arrived from, or specifically when.
And, yes, the Blue-tongue in the garden is indigenous!