A bizarre blog post on The Stranded contains some extremely odd thinking. During the debate about Matariki, ACT MP David Garrett asked Chris Finlayson in Parliament:
Is the Minister aware that Dr Paul Moon, a professor of history at the Auckland University of Technology and a well-known expert in pre-European history, is of the view that many of the claims about the festival of Matariki are tenuous at best, and that with regard to it supposedly being linked to planting times Maori had much better natural science to rely on and “did not need a three-month advance warning of when to prepare for kumara sowing.”?
Marty G comments angrily:
There was a chorus of outrage from Labour at the racism that lies behind this kind of claim that seeks to invalidate Maori history and culture … the Maori Party MPs just sat there. One would have expected them to have been leaping to their feet to rebut this slander against their culture.
Research into Matariki by Paul Moon essentially points out that much of the discourse around Matariki is simply modern viewers looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. Different tribes had different ideas about Matariki too. For some, Matariki probably wasn’t a celebratory time because it was the middle of winter; a time when elders often died and food was rationed. Even war was temporarily put on the back burner. In general, it would be a poor signal to start planting kumara; pre-European Maori knew when to plant crops without using the rising of the Pleiades as a signal.
It seems to me that Garrett’s comment actually gives Maori more credence than the standard “noble savage” post-modern discourse about Matariki being promoted by the other politicians. “Oh, look at this warrior race, using the stars as a calendar to plan crops! Isn’t that cute?”
I welcome the Matariki celebrations. Any excuse for a party is OK with me. 
But the ideas around making Matariki an official holiday just don’t reflect reality – and when Garrett questions the PC version of things he is immediately smacked with the ‘racist’ label and accused of invalidating Maori history – when in fact Moon’s research is aimed at making ideas about Maori history more accurate!
Of course Maori culture should be celebrated, but making official holidays and erecting bilingual street signs makes Maori culture into a humourless bureaucratic exercise. It becomes another box to tick on a government form, and that’s just sad. Perhaps leftist intellectuals like Marty G think Maori culture is too weak to survive by itself.
Marty G is many things, but I wouldn’t classify him as an intellectual.
Left by BK Drinkwater on July 30th, 2009