There are three new features that come to Rotorua for the first time, like us:
a widespread and intense sulfurous aroma, the great concentration of native inhabitants and an unexpected profusion of Maori cultural spectacles.
The last two, more than the first, attracted us to the city, but we were still kilometers from its entrance when the sulfur particles in the atmosphere invaded our nostrils.
Section of the historic building of the Rotorua Museum a colonial building detached from the center of Rotorua.
Mile after mile, we delve into New Zealand's most dynamic thermal zone, dotted with geysers, hot springs and explosive mud pools.
The foul odor takes over the interior of the car, our clothes, luggage, and also the streets and the room where we are staying.
That same roadside shelter sets a limit to the idiocy we found ourselves in months ago, carrying a purchased camping tent, in Perth, in the distant western end of oceania.
The tent had already made us suffer enough to avoid paying airline fines for excess weight. We decided to get rid of it. The Cash Converter we found seemed perfect.
“It seems to me that they didn’t use it very much!” says Jonas, the young Maori waiter, after the inevitable kia ora of welcome, with good cheer and a strong sparkle in his eyes. “Sorry, but I’m still going to have to examine it.”
As he does so, the employee frantically continues the conversation.
Under the famous passion Maori by the korero (chatter), talks about himself and his family, without any ceremony or complexes. He asks us, in an innocent and interested way, about us and ours.
We lost nearly $70 on the deal. We profited from the confirmation of the friendliness and vivacity of the Maori people, a notion we had begun to form in Hobart, and on Tasmania, in contact with Helena Gill, an immigrant hostess at the back doors of Australia.
And, in other contacts in the vast South Island, where both the general and Maori populations are much smaller than those of its northern neighbour.
We only knew the Maori from these first contacts, like most people who set foot in New Zealand for the first time, from “Piano"Of Jane campion.
With Harvey Keitel playing Baines, a retired sailor and game warden who has adapted many indigenous customs including the eccentric facial tattoo still worn by many Maori.
Historical photograph of a Maori woman dressed and tattooed according to tradition.
It was time to find out more.
Rotorua, a Volcanic and Pestilent Heartland of the Nation
Even if it is a business, nowhere else in the country do the Maori display their customs and rituals as much as in Rotorua. Faced with the lack of a real festival or ethnic event at that time, we settled for one of their local shows.
At the entrance to the themed village, warriors armed with sticks confront us with warlike movements and frightening grimaces, used over time to keep unwanted visitors away.
Maori warrior showgirl stars in a secular warrior ritual.
Once the threat has ended, a village chief greets the newly appointed representative of the visitors with a welcoming brush of noses.
Maori and European Colonization of Aoteraoa
Once our presence was confirmed, we wandered from house to house in the supposed town. We admired various customs, arts and crafts, some narrated and explained by their protagonists.
This is followed by a musical and dance show that includes the most sought-after of performances, a haka carried out by men and women.
Moment of an ethnic show but something conceptual starring young people Maori.
Today, less than 40% of Rotorua's nearly 70 inhabitants are Maori, a percentage well above 15% of New Zealand's total.
New Zealand is believed to have been the last stop for a diaspora of over two thousand years aboard large canoes. waka that led the Polynesians from Southeast Asia to Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, French Polynesia islands and Cook, Hawaii e Easter Island.
Maori ceremonial canoe at the site of the Treaty of Waitangi, North Island.
In the centuries following their arrival in Aoteraoa – as the Maori call their archipelago – they forged their own culture, differentiated from the rest of Polynesia by its isolation, its temperate rather than tropical climate, and its natural surroundings.
After the landing of James Cook in 1769 – 127 years after the pioneering arrival of Dutchman Abel Tasman - depending on the zones and heights, relations between the Maoris and the Europeans fluctuated between a convenient cordiality and the New Zealand Land Wars.
This particular conflict was unresolved in 1840 by the controversial Treaty of Waitangi.
In it it was established that the settlers recognized the Maoris as the true owners of their domains and properties and that they would enjoy the same rights as the British subjects.
The natives remained in the rural strongholds of their tribes. By 1930, work in the fields was already scarce. Many indigenous people migrated to the cities founded by Europeans.
This confluence led to the abandonment of tribal structures and the Maori assimilation of Western ways of life.
And the Intricate Ethnic Coexistence between Maori and European Descendants
Even if less obvious than in the big cities of Auckland and the capital Wellington, when we drive around Rotorua and Taupo – where we take small steps towards humanity, lost in the sulphurous mist of the Craters of the Moon – we notice the imbalance in which the coexistence of Maori and descendants of the settlers has evolved.
Visitors walk in the fog of Craters da Lua, a highly geothermal surface located in Taupo, in the heart of the North Island.
Despite the agreed upon in Waitangi, the settlers had already seized the best lands, with an obvious advantage in the modern life that they imposed on the nation.
This supremacy left the Maori in social and economic trouble, starting with the difficulty in accessing higher education and obtaining qualified and well-paid jobs.
Instructor examines the work of a Maori wood crafts apprentice.
Accordingly, most native families are concentrated in peripheral neighborhoods with far more precarious living conditions than those of the middle class of British descent or of many Asian and other immigrants.
In too many cases, they rely on welfare checks. They are more prone to illness and domestic violence, and they make up more than half of the prison population.
Growing Respect for Native Territories and Rights
But since 1960, the situation continues to improve. In that decade, a court declared colonial land confiscations illegal.
Shortly thereafter, the government returned to the Maori people their sacred places and natural resources.
Autumn setting on the Waikato River, near Taupo, heart of the North Island.
For many Maoris who consider themselves guests of the whites, only then did the long Earth Wars end.
The number of Maori representatives in parliament has increased. The value of Maori culture and the Te Reo dialect – which now appears on road signs, maps, etc. – has soared with the sharp increase in foreign visitors at kiwi islands.
A recent network of kindergartens, schools and universities now ensure Maori language education complemented by a national chain of radio stations and TV channels owned and managed by the Maori themselves who are gaining more and more notoriety.
The World Notoriety of the Maori People, for Their Mighty Rugby
As we were writing this same text, the rugby world championship was taking place in the land of the old English settlers. As is almost always the case, New Zealand was the team that stood out and attracted the most.
It even makes us interrupt its creation to watch the French massacre at the arms of the All Blacks (62-13) in the quarter-finals. Seven of the All Blacks players present in the competition are Maori.
All games in the national team Kiwi start after haka exuberant that the Maoris granted that they were also danced by players pakeha and that even intimidate us.
In fact, a few years ago, when the Maoris decided to introduce a new haka, the whole community pakeha rugby got involved in the debate.
It is something that helps to exemplify the seriousness of the interethnic engagement that we witness day after day, throughout New Zealand, this when the Maori identities themselves and pakeha they dissolve under the fusion of genetics.
Young New Zealand surfer contemplates the Pacific Ocean on a beach in the north of Hawke's Bay, in the east of the North Island.
On the way out of some beach showers in Whangarei, we meet Renee Lee. In the middle of the verbiage, the young tattooed surfer asks us the complex question: “Maori...?
I never really know if I'm Maori or pakeha. My father is Maori and my mother is Dutch.
My daughter is blonde… Tell me, what do you think I am?”
