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TEHRAN, August 11 -Five years ago, law graduate Pania Newton and her cousins got together around a kitchen table and agreed to do everything in their power to prevent a housing development on a south Auckland site considered sacred by local Māori.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -Newton, now 29, is today leading thousands of protesters occupying the land at Ihumātao, one of a number of grassroots movements spearheaded by young, educated and tech-savvy Māori women.
Using social media and crowd-funding websites, the groups are mobilizing community support to demand land rights and other reforms for Māori in the highest profile indigenous rights campaigns in more than a decade.
“When you look at our campaign you’ll see the majority of us involved are women and that’s because we feel this great sense of connection to Mother Earth,” Newton told Reuters.
“We are the nurturers, we are the carers. We’ve had to overcome many, many challenges for thousands of years and we’re strong, we’re resilient, we’re feisty and we’re fierce.”
In another demonstration, thousands marched in the capital Wellington last week protesting the removal of at-risk Māori children from their families.
The issues have become proxies for a wider discontent among young Māori about modern New Zealand, and disenchantment with the government which some say has done little to break cycles of poverty and violence.
Māori, who account for about 15% of New Zealand’s population, were dispossessed of much of their land during colonization by Britain in the 19th century.
A legal settlement process drawing on the nation’s founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, has restored some rights and assets, but many Māori say those measures have not gone far enough.
Without their ancestral lands, with which people are spiritually connected to in the Māori world, and with the erosion of many cultural rights until the late 20th century, Māori families are disproportionately affected by a raft of social problems from imprisonment to homelessness.
NEW WAVE
While eating a hot lunch of bacon bone stew, Iru Iti, a Māori language orator with ancestral ties to Ihumātao and related to Newton, waited out the pouring winter rain beneath a large tarpaulin covering a makeshift meeting ground at the protest site.
The 53-year old said his nieces’ leadership and knowledge of how to navigate both the Māori and Western worlds was revitalizing his people’s fight for social justice.
“Until very recently I never believed we could do what we did. If my father were still alive he’d think this is amazing,” said Iti, sitting on a plastic chair between the protesters’ campsite and a line of police.
Source: reuters
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