Maori Culture in New Zealand

The past week, we saw a movie called “Whale Rider” this particular movie, shows the story of Pai, the descendent of Paikea, the whale rider. The Maori traditions say that only a male can inherit the leadership, and the current leader, Koro, who’s also paikea’s grandfather, tells her, that she cannot lead because she’s a female. The story shows a big part of how the Maori culture is. 

The Maori culture nowadays is an important part of New Zealand’s culture. This one has been shaped by the tradition of its rich cultural heritage. It’s said that the Maori people arrived to New Zealand in the thirteen century AD.

14.6% of the total New Zealand population is Maori descendent. And it has a big influence in the country. Even when the main cities do not have aboriginal names, there’s a important part that use the native names.

Something really interesting is that the Maori culture has not being lost, due the whole cultural change that lot of other countries  have had with the aborigine people inside their boundaries. For example, the Maori language, is one of the three official languages in New Zealand (www.maori.com/language) and some schools teach the language to their students. 

There aren’t many countries where you can say that the aboriginal people live peacefully with the rest of the country. New Zealand is an exception, because the cultural diversity has been accepted. Maori people in the country have their own traditions and rituals, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem with the rest of the country.

Do you think that the Maori culture has being accepted in New Zealand in a good way? What happens when we compare this to Chile? Are the different aboriginal cultures accepted? 

http://www.newzealand.com/int/maori-culture/

http://whales.fieldmuseum.org/behind/people/maori-whale-riders

http://kidworldcitizen.org/2012/06/21/maori-culture-shines-in-the-film-whale-rider/

http://www.maori.com/

Emmett Till's Death

Emmett Till

The Afroamerican Civil Rights Movement was impulsed by several figures, some of them were activists, some of them were just victims of the segregation and discrimination present in The USA during the first half of the twentieth century.

Emmett Till’s death changed the direction of the movement, it encouraged the already unsettled mass to keep fighting against the violation of their rights, only because of their skin color.

On August 24, 1955, while visiting his relatives in Mississippi, Emmett told his friends that he had a white girlfriend back home, none of them believed it and dared him to flirt with a white girl who was working in a store and he agreed. No one witnessed the event, but Carolyn Bryant claimed that Emmett that he grabbed her, made lewd advances, and then wolf-whistled at her as he sauntered out. (www.history.com)

Carolyn Bryant

When Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, arrived home a few days later, Carolyn told him that a black boy flirted with her in the store. Next he went to Emmett’s uncle house with his brother in law J.W. Milam, and demanded to see the 14-year old-boy, after a struggle, he took Emmett to his car, beat him and then shot him in the head, finally he threw his dead body to the Tallahatchie River.

When his body was found the authorities suggested that it should be buried quickly, instead of it, Emmett’s mother decided to do an open-casket funeral to show what the killers did to her only son.

Less than two weeks later, Milam and Bryant went on trial and found not guilty.

This case helped the movement to go on, it showed how black people didn’t have any right, and how necessary was to stop racial segregation inside a country that claims that every person must bre treated equally.

That being said, how do you think that cases like this encourage people?

How does it connect with the reality of our country?

Sources:
Emmett Till Biography
The Death of Emmett Till

Maories sexims

The Maoríes are descendants of warrior aborigines, and are the real owners of these lands. Of indigenous facial features and brown skin, robust for nature, resistant and strong, as their warrior roots indicate it. This difference make that they speak and walk different than the New Zealanders. Probably they were players or ex-players of rugby at some time in their life, because they are named the group of the strongest men of New Zealand, and not only for their physical aspect and personality, but also for the way they give more value to the man than to the woman. The Maoríes venerate the man for being the ones who gives the orders in the family, whereas the woman is the one who has to obey him, remaining quiet and taking little part in the custom of their culture.

An example where this Maorí sexism appears, is in the movie “Whale Rider”. In this film we can perceive the difference between being born as a man or a woman inside this community, and how this factor determines the future life of many people.

The movie talks about agreeing or rejecting the cultural changes  the society faces nowadays, showing a grandfather that remains anchored in his ancient beliefs, and his granddaughter, who from her birth was raise by him and his wife in response of the death of the girl’s mother, and the decision of her father in travel abroad to forget his pain, the grandfather, being the Chief of the village, does not want to recognize her as the heiress of the tradition just because she is not a man.

Other prominent characters are the ones who show their own features. For example; a grandmother who understands maleness, but does not accept it in her believes; adults moving away increasingly from his traditions when adopting other customs, and teenagers who just think of going away of the village without taking the sentimental weight. With everything against the tradition, there arises an unexpected interest in this girl named Paikea in keeping their customs and learn how to recover the harmony of the village.

Sadly for Paikea, she is despised by her gender, being not recognized as the natural inheritor to lead her people. Moreover, her grandfather thinks she is the reason ofr all the problems of his tribe since the moment of her birth.

Meanwhile, the grandfather creates a school in order to look for the inheritor, but among ancient chants, tribal rites,  and the warrior techniques, the future leader will be reveal, demonstrating to her village that she is the legitimate inheritor as a whale rider. The scene in the minute 36, shows the maleness in the grandfather where he says to Paikea "you sit behind, because you are a girl" and Pai defies him by having a sit in front of him, and as a result, the man ends expelling her from the ceremony.

 

Stolen Children

We know that every country has a story; most of the time is a bad story, full of suffering, screams or blood. We watched a movie (Rabbit Proof Fence) which showed us part of the Australian story and it really captured my attention so I searched for more, that’s why I’m going to share what Stolen Generations or Stolen Children means.

Some decades ago (between 1909 and 1969) the Australian Government started kidnapping Aboriginals children because of two reasons:

- First of all because they didn´t want to mix different racial groups (Aborigines and British), they didn’t want miscegenation.

-And because they thought that the Aborigines couldn’t take care of their children. Some of those kids were abused or abandoned but the thing is that the Government still taken the children even though they were find, most of them were find, they had a normal life, they were safe without any big trouble. But P. McGarry, a politician, said that those people should still being stolen to prevent any dangerous situation.

They sent the children into institutional care and there they received food, education, religion, etc. but they really wanted to get away and come back with their families. The worst thing is that they thought that they were doing the right thing. So they did that until 1970 in some cases. 

On February 2008 the Prime Minister of Australia gave a speech to apologize to Aborigines for all the things that they lived. Nowadays there are a lot of people who still alive and there are a lot of testimonies if you want to look up for more.

I also found a video similar to this but this happened in our country, Chile.  Now I would like to know if you liked this and what do you think.

http://www.elciudadanotv.cl/cortometrajes/cortometraje-animacion-selknam/

THE DREAM IS STILL ALIVE

Baltimore is an independent city and the largest city in the US state of Maryland. This, along with other US cities, has been marked by controversy regarding the civil rights of African Americans in this country.

 Indeed, in 1968, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, which is known as The Holy Week Uprising, the people took to the streets with a lot of violence, which left a total of 6 people dead. 700 injured, 4,500 arrested and over 1,000 fires set. More than a thousand businesses had been looted or burned, many of which never reopened. 

Today, despite the achievements of activists of the aforementioned period, the struggle for civil rights is still present due to the injustices by the police against African Americans. Since 2009, there are 12 killed by the police, 7 of which were African Americans and only 3 cases allowed imprison the guilty policemen. One occurred precisely in Baltimore in Sandtown neighborhood, where six officers arrested the young Freddie Gray by simply running from the police the April 12, 2015. 

 After this unwarranted detention, the prosecutor who handled the case, Marilyn Mosby said that according to a medical report, Gray’s death was a homicide, resulting from spinal injuries by the officers who took him prisoner. His death sparked protest against police in Baltimore, where citizens went out the streets in a violent way, in order to end the police abuse against African Americans.

 Beyond justify the violence, in my opinion, this was crucial to understand that it is the lives of people, something that has nothing to do with race of people. Despite the contradictory opinion by the Mayor Rawlings-Blake and President Obama, in my view, the facts accelerated the trial in the death of 25 year old Freddie Gray, in which already defined that the police are guilty. 

 What is the logic to establish superiority of race in some people? Which suggests an officer overlooking human rights? What are we doing wrong? The dream is still alive. 

By Jorge Vidal Salinas

 List of web pages that I used for writing this post:

• http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32400497
• http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/01/us/freddie-gray-who-is-he/
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/noticias/2015/04/150427_baltimore_disturbios_protestas_freddie_gray_fp
• http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/04/_1968_baltimore_do_the_riots_after_martin_luther_king_jr_s_assassination.html
• http://noticias.univision.com/article/2321541/2015-05-02/estados-unidos/noticias/manifestaciones-por-baltimore-en-la-costa-oeste-derivaron-en-disturbios-y-detenciones

    

What does racism look like today?

As a matter of fact, the days where racism inhabited the minds of the young and the ignorant are slowly fading away, but they are not over yet. We talk about equality and end of segregation in public places, but the true origin of discrimination lies inside us, in our everyday actions.

Of course we, as a generation, have grown and evolved beyond the racist conventions that polluted our society in the past, but still, we might not realize of what we do and even teach those kind of practices to the upcoming generations, merely disguising the damage by making it look normal.

 “Over two hundred years of racial prejudice in the forms of slavery and Jim Crowe laws have worked their way into American consciousness.” –Kevin Hannon for The Beacon (2012)

Now, some may argue that there is no such thing as racism nowadays, that we live in a fair, inclusive society ruled by the acceptance of our differences, but that idea might sound a little bit overoptimistic for other people. Here's a example:

Last year, in Houston, Texas, local police arrested two African American dancers, both men who were escorting a 13-year-old white girl to an event, which was cause enough for police to react. “They just pulled us out of the car and put our hands behind our backs like we were criminals,” said one of the men.

The two dancers explained that the girl was their student, and even offered to show officers a notarized letter stating that they had “full guardianship” while they were in the state. But police didn’t budge. They brought the two men to the station and took the girl into Child Protective Services.

Cases like this one occur everyday, all around the world, when will we come to the realisation that the struggle is not over yet?

Elizabeth I, Queen without a King

Elizabeth Tudor was a Princess, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. She become a Queen after the dead of her half-sister Maria I.

Scene from Elizabeth (movie 1998)

Her reign is considered one of the most important in English history and it lasted for 45 years, but one thing for she is remembered is because she never gets married.

Why is so important this? Well, for this time, the royal marriage was something merely politic, it was a best way for alliance between 2 countries or 2 allies and produced an inheritor was a proof of the alliance, but Why Elizabeth I chose never to marry? There are some theories about this, one theory refers she had a loving trauma and she didn´t believe in love.  I think that she had a father who commands to cut off the head of his wife; probably I would not want to marry either.

Scene from Elizabeth (movie 1998)

Other theories are that she was a man, she was lesbian or she had a genital malformation, but officially, she didn’t marry because if she had chosen a foreign prince he would use to England for his own purposes and she had chosen an English subject could have a division inside of the country.  

Scene from Elizabeth (movie 1998)

In England she is recognized like a woman who sacrificed her happiness for the good of the nation, they said that she didn’t marry to a man because she was already married to England.

Scene from Elizabeth (movie 1998)

Finally Elizabeth was a Queen, she didn’t need a man for to reign and probably she had some hiding lovers, but still is called the “Virgin Queen”.

Reference
http://www.royal.gov.uk/historyofthemonarchy/kingsandqueensofengland/thetudors/elizabethi.aspx