An interview with Alan Duff;
Frontier Centre: The experiences of New Zealand’s Maori, Australia’s aborigines and North America’s Indians demonstrate remarkable similarities – European conquest, the withdrawal into protected and impoverished redoubts and subsequent cultural decline. Was tragedy an inevitable result of that civilizational conflict? Could it have happened differently?Alan Duff: Well, of course, it could have happened differently and it has happened differently for most of the Maoris in New Zealand. They didn’t quite go into that decline. Despite all of the statistical figures, they are no longer in that state of decline.
FC: Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand have all become multicultural melting pots in which different ethnic and linguistic groups have pooled their identities. Yet minorities have still retained a large measure of their individual identities. Would integration of indigenous peoples into the eventually dominant culture have served their interests better than separation?
AD: Yes, I do believe that integration would have served us better. I think this obsession with being separate because we have lost our identity has become an excuse. It’s a deeply engrained excuse and we should stop using it.
[...]
FC: What is the role of government?
AD: I think they’re a bit like ugly people. They do exist and we all live in the village and therefore we have to try and find room for them. But I don’t think governments fix anything or solve anything. The only thing they do is create problems. Of course, whenever they’re there, even for the short term, they walk away with a whole lot of money and leave behind a whole trail of destruction.
Amen.
Two odd omissions from the Duff interview: no mention of the Treaty of Waitangi tribunals and recent struggles over the foreshore and seabed. And, when asked about racism in NZ, he simply sidesteps it.
Duff concentrates mostly on attitudes, correct vs. incorrect, while much larger issues seem to swirl around him unseen. He's beloved by conservatives because he thinks that individual efforts are all that are required for success in life. But I do like his literacy initiatives--it's not as though he made it and left his people in the dust. He and my friend Darcey over at Dust My Broom would get on like a house afire. He's not a half-bad novelist either, although not in the first rank: he inclines towards a too-obvious moralism. One Night Out Stealing is a good read.
Duff is actually Maori on his mother's side, Pakeha on his father's, with all of the conflicts that entails; he preferred, by all accounts, the Pakeha side of the family. I'm not sure he speaks much of Te Reo.
I suspect that Kate knew I'd be here for a comment.
It's not so much "that individual efforts are all that are required for success in life", it's that individual efforts are all that exist. A collective does not exist other than as a sum of the efforts of the individuals that comprise it. The whole is not greater that the sum of the parts, the whole is exactly equal to the sum of the parts, nothing more. All hail the parts.
Of course the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's what synergy is all about. Anyone who's attended a productive brainstorming session knows what I'm talking about.
Anyone who's attended a productive brainstorming session knows what I'm talking about.
I would really be interested in finding one of those. Any i've attended ended up just being the boss saying there,there. Noe you can all feel better for your input,even thought I have all ready thrown them in file 13, and it's my way. Sorta like leftard gubermints,actually, ANY gubermint!
Please excuse the spelling errors in previous. Been a long day :)
Dr.Dawg: "That's what synergy is all about. Anyone who's attended a productive brainstorming session ..."
Curious ... went to a lot of "brainstorming sessions" none were productive. "Doing" sessions worked a whole lot better ... less wanking.
Duff on the Maori: "As a society, they all f**ked up. Their concepts are never a maturing thing, they stay fixed. If you're a non-reading, non-consciously advancing people, it will inevitably be the same tomorrow as it is today."
Heck ... his statement might apply to more than the Maori.
Duff can get away with this sort of thing because he's (part)-Maori. But it doesn't explain the continual updating of the language to produce technical and scientific vocabulary (Te Taura Whiri i Te Reo Mäori)that is not simply loan-words made to sound Maori, but part of the living language. It doesn't explain the existence of organizations like NAMMSAT: http://www.nammsat.org.nz/. Nor the burgeoning literature in Te Reo. There are too many other examples to list.
It doesn't seem to matter what group you refer to, Canadian Indians, Maori, Palestinians or black Africans, the common source for the majority of their problems is the liberal mentality of dumping large amounts of money on it then creating an ever-growing aid industry to supposedly administer it.
Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need.
Its the liberal guilt mentality in full bloom. The waste and destruction of millions of people is just collateral damage, best not talked about in polite society.