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CUSTOM MEETS COLONISATION R ENE BURTON & ER ENA WILLIA MSON DESCRIPTION
MAKER / ARTIST
REFERENCE
Men of the 28th (Māori) Battalion with a gift of kai for Christmas, 23 December 1944
George Frederick Kaye (1914–2004)
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When whānau in Aotearoa sent barrels of tītī (muttonbirds) as a Christmas gift to their sons, brothers, cousins, fathers and uncles in the 28th (Māori) Battalion they were making a statement about whanaungatanga and kaitiakitanga.
He manawa tītī, me tōhuna hiringa. With the famed strength and perseverance of the tītī.
The image here, taken in Italy during the Second World War, records 28th (Māori) Battalion soldiers embracing their Christmas gift, barrels of preserved tītī. Also known as muttonbirds or sooty shearwaters, tītī have for centuries been harvested in April and May from locations in southern Te Waipounamu and preserved to provide food in winter months. Upon their arrival in Aotearoa, Māori began to form physical and spiritual connections with te taiao (the natural world), and amassed a significant body of mātauranga (knowledge) about this unique environment. From these connections came the concept of kaitiakitanga, or guardianship, and with that came tikanga, meaning customs or the correct way of doing things. For Māori,
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harvesting and preserving birds is kaitiakitanga and tikanga in action — a centuries-old customary practice. Colonisation disrupted all this. Māori struggled to have their rights acknowledged, let alone enacted by the colonial government. In some respects, this is a struggle that continues to this day, despite kaitiakitanga and customary harvest being examples of the rangatiratanga (self-determination) guaranteed to Māori through the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840. Between 1861 and 2013, the government created a staggering 609 different pieces of legislation around the protection, hunting or harvesting of taonga in Aotearoa. From early on in our shared history, there was friction between Māori rights to tino rangatiratanga and Pākehā
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