to this day I'm still pissy about how much discourse there was about this cover 'whitewashing' a Māori character, I am begging Americans to understand what Māori people look like.
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This is so real, the damn Americans always do this about paler Maori, like my bro we've been fucking Europeans for hundreds of years now, of course a lot of us are going to be pale cunts.
Maōri people in the US constantly get mistaken either for middle-eastern or latinx -- I grew up in the 2000s when Hollywood couldn't stop making terrible movies about the Middle East and a significant chunk of the regular actors they called in were Māori
Not to mention Kāi Tahu (my tribe, and the tribe Gideon has always felt strongly coded as) tend to be *much* more pale – lower population density, a lot more intermarriages with the Scots/Irish who showed up.
Semi tangential but could you elaborate on Gideon being Kāi Tahu coded? I'm from the south island so most of my interactions with Māoridom are Ngāi/Kāi Tahu (but tbf I'm Pākehā) and I wouldn't have been anywhere near guessing an iwi.
like idk, I don't expect Americans to fully be in the know about the nuances of Māori identity, but "somebody with lighter skin can't be meaningfully Māori" is in fact an argument commonly used by racists to divide the community and to alienate many of us from our own heritage
I have been surprised by coming across a lot of discussion from elsewhere that has strong divides between people based on lightness and darkness after hearing māori discussion focused on if you whakapapa then you whakapapa.
I’ve occasionally thought (grumpily) that if people want to deny that I’m Māori cos of skin colour then it doesn’t matter cos they can’t take away my tīpuna and my iwi/hāpu/all the cuzzies/aunties/uncles. Māoritanga has always been about whakapapa anyway…
With the caveat that I'm an Anglo-European Australian (& am willing to be educated when I'm wrong), I wonder how anyone who isn't Māori themselves could possibly determine what constitutes being "meaningfully" Māori, or even feel they have the right to do so.
As a pākehā, that firmly isn't my right to decide, if someone tells me they're Māori then they're "meaningfully" Māori. It doesn't matter what they "look like" because that isn't the standard Māori use to decide it, so it would be wrong for me to use it.
We need to normalise pointing out to people that you cannot make any assumptions at all about anyone, anywhere, on what their ethnicity or cultural identity is. Like that Balinese dancer.
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