Ae, whakaae. Too much to the brother!

Aroha Nui 🗾🐋🌊

This comment made my day. Thank you for your words 💚

Such a beautiful and resonate phrase. Thank you so much for sharing

Thank you so much!! I will thanks to comments like these :))

“The land doesn’t belong to us, we belong to the land.” So good. Thanks a lot!

@@SamuelSpad A pleasure bro, you're welcome...

You may have heard of her, but I recommend checking out Robin Wall Kimmerer. Her literature on combing indigenous wisdom with her background in botany is so moving. Thank you for your comment. Let's keep learning together :)

Kia ora! I'm so humbled to have had this experience. Arohanui

You are always welcome to my home Ahipara 90 mile beach Aeotearoa 🙏🙏🙏

Wish that were the case historically

Thank you 😊

Tihei Mauri Ora Ehoa

I love this bit of wisdom. Thank you for sharing

Such a great example. I couldn’t agree more

@SamuelSpad if Maori had been left without colonisation - I'm confident they would have soon invented written language and discovered the wheel independently of the white man. We will never know what earth people could have been capable of doing on their own.

I'm good - thanks

Thank you for the information

Thanks for the input

I find solace in the fact that humans can be a life giving force; the Native Americans of Turtle Island (North America) reshaped their environment to support plant regeneration and the buffalo’s habitat expansion. However, modern industrial farming appears to solely benefit humans. It would be misguided to believe that increasing livestock numbers has had a positive impact on our environment. Not to mention the cruelty towards animals and habitat destruction. Returning to our old ways, more in line with Mother Earth, seems more compassionate to me. Nonetheless, I respect your perspective 🤝

​@@SamuelSpadwell said I agree 💯✌️

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Ohhhh lady sthu. You don't know what the hell you're talking about. Ever seen a farm conversion? That ain't capturing the ecosystem. It's altering it. Native fresh water river species have plummeted to near extinction levels and farming has been the biggest thing to bring about their demise. South Island farming used to be like that once upon a time. When they were farming sheep and drystock!! The land WAS being utilised as it stood. Rough and rugged = drystock operations. Then they thought they'd cash in on the milk price and converted them to dairy. Now they have to pump tonnes and tonnes of fertilisers and soil conditioners just to maintain land that was never fit for purpose and in doing so flooded the market with milk products and dropped the Dairy Industry's own pay packets. Farmers have become that dumb to not even know their own have been responsible for their livelihoods dropping and they're bad employers, that not even their own kids want to work in it anymore. It's not the govt policies put in place to clean the waterways up. Cos for starters, they should have never started diverting waterways and draining swamps to begin with. Either work with the land or get off it. "Capturing the ecosystem" 😂.You're making yourself look like an utter idiot.

Hi, I value your feedback. As someone who comes from a position of privilege, I find it very difficult to navigate how to support and uplift other cultures, with dignity and respect. I have strived to do this in my personal reflection to my greatest ability. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the cultures of indigenous peoples. I find it troubling that we do not speak about them enough. In the US, I was raised to believe that the peoples of Turtle Island were all extinct. That nothing of their cultures remained. This simply is not true. And I refuse to be complicit anymore in the erasure of cultures as rich, beautiful and meaningful as I’ve seen in the cultures of earth based societies such as that of the Māori. So I’m speaking out, but thank you for your correction.

@@SamuelSpad Nga mihi nui. I knew you most likely had good intentions. But my inner Aunty felt the need to turn this into a teachable moment. It is a very hard space to navigate for both sides.

Thank you for bringing that up. You should check out this article, i’ve attached some highlights below: e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/are-maori-indigenous-thats-not-the-real-question/

“And while it is true that (New Zealand) Māori people “became Māori” on arrival in our home islands (as people have rightly argued for years), and that this is an aspect of how we understand our specificity, being Indigenous doesn’t hinge on whether people are like an endemic species of plant or bird that only appears in one habitat. If anything, it hinges on a relationship of place and time: Who was where when the colonial project showed up? … Arguing that Māori aren’t Indigenous is logical if you’re trying to appeal to voters who are concerned that Māori shouldn’t receive “special” and “unfair” treatment. Shorter life expectancy isn’t what I’d describe as special, but there you go. There is, of course, a longstanding obsession on the part of some non-Māori about how unfairly good the treatment of Māori people is in our country. In his short BWB text, Māori historian Peter Meihana has done the work if you want to know more about how assumptions of Māori being privileged is not a recent glitch in the system but part of its design from the start. … When we focus on arguing about whether or not we’re Indigenous, we risk not addressing why this is even being questioned, which is to suggest that there’s a sneaky or unfair way that Māori people are getting something that we shouldn’t. (That it isn’t ours. That it belongs to someone else - or should do.) Challenging the idea that we’re Indigenous is a deliberate strategy to reassure certain voters that there are people willing to stand in our parliament and advocate for the deliberate undermining of whatever gains have been made by the blood, sweat, tears and ink of generations. It’s to suggest to the electorate that removing small crumbs that fall from a loaf of bread - a loaf of bread baked in a kitchen that’s been systematically removed from our control - is a heroic, just and fair thing to do.” (Alice Te Punga Somerville)

The Māori, like all Homo sapiens, are imperfect beings. However, their worldview, Te ao Māori, views the land and nature not as a resource to be extracted or exploited, but rather as a living being that we must form relationship with based on reciprocity. Settler colonialism does not operate under this framework. It would be misguided to minimize an entire culture based on one mistake (the extinction of the moa is tragic nevertheless). Settler colonialism however, was repeated numerous times. I encourage you to think more holistically.

No-one mentions the Buffalo....that don't exist anymore because they were mass hunted not by native peoples and not for food, in fact there are pictures, on the internet of piles of their bodies left in the open...and if you tell me the Buffalo that now exist are the same that once roamed the plains of that land, then you need to research...you know nothing about Maori

"Woke" the buzz word when someone has nothing constructive to offer

@@johngraham5948 lol