A viral video from last month featured New Zealand MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke performing a Maori haka, or a traditional war cry in the parliament. The 21-year-old is New Zealand’s youngest MP since 1853, and she honoured its Indigenous people by performing this segment as part of her maiden speech. She emphasised that contesting elections and becoming an MP was not part of her plan. However, the government “kept tampering with things they shouldn’t be touching, and that’s why I left the mara (garden) to come here.” Maipi-Clarke’s call to arms did not come a moment too soon as Wellington, as well as a dozen other cities in New Zealand witnessed demonstrations organised by the minor Maori Party, that advocates for the rights of Indigenous New Zealanders known as Maori. The agitation called out the anti-Maori policies of the newly elected conservative-led coalition government.
The development in Wellington is mirroring what is transpiring in other parts of the Global North, in the discourse surrounding the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, as well as the reparations that are due. Last year, Hollywood trade analysts had heaped praises upon director Martin Scorsese’s latest release, Killers of the Flower Moon, by pitching the film as a moment of reckoning, not just for the film industry, but for America as a whole. The movie details the bloodlust of the white man, confronted with the prosperity heaped upon the Indigenous Osage community, that strikes black gold in Oklahoma in the early 1920s — after big oil deposits are discovered beneath their land.
In a sign of things to come, actor Lily Gladstone made history as the first Indigenous woman to win a Golden Globe for best actress for her performance in the film. In her speech, she opened with the Blackfeet language, an Algonquian tongue spoken by the Blackfoot or Niitsitapi people in Montana, US. It might look like Hollywood has come a long way from 1973, when during the 45th Oscar awards ceremony, Sacheen Littlefeather represented Marlon Brando to decline the Best Actor award he won for his performance in The Godfather. Brando had boycotted the event to protest against Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans and to draw attention to the standoff at Wounded Knee. The reaction to her speech alternated between booing and applauding.
Let’s not forget, it was only in 2008 that the Office of the Canadian PM issued an apology to former students of the residential school system. During much of the 20th century, over 150,000 children from hundreds of Indigenous communities across Canada were forcibly taken from their parents by the government and sent to these schools, funded by the state and run by churches. Designed to assimilate and Christianise the children by separating them from their culture and community, they were referred to as savages and barred from speaking in their native tongues or practicing their traditions. Many were sexually abused, and thousands perished.
Across the border, the US’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation located in the state of South Dakota, is counted among the poorest regions of the superpower – with unemployment hovering around 85%, and 49% of the population living below federal poverty level. High mortality rates, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse are common maladies in such sacrifice zones of America’s relentless capitalism. One only hopes that the movement for representation and equity does not arrive too late, and deliver too little.