Te Kōrero o Don Selwyn: Taking a stand to retain integrity as Māori

Kia maumahara ngā kupu o tēnei rangatira, ko Don Selwyn, Nō Ngāti Kuri, Te Aupouri.  Speaking at the AUT Māori Expo:

It's a kaupapa driven thing. All of us contributed to the kaupapa. It wasn't an individual whakahihi thing. We are very humbled we've been given this possession to help each other.

It's all part of our whole kaupapa whakapiripiri, e tū pākiritanga. In that we ought to be able to share and rejoice in it. At the moment we are going through a very terrible racist perspective within this nation. We have to start to take some stand to retain our integrity as Māori for a start, and we have a lot of Pākehā people who feel the same. So we need to actually bring those two elements together. It doesn't matter what field we work in...

What we have to understand within each of the Iwi here, each of us have our own kawa, we have our own history, we have our own tikanga. And what we ought to be doing, is ensuring that those people, those tamariki are grown up within that environment by, from our old people so they can take control and have a stake in their own tikanga and kawa within their own particular Iwi.

Now this world is not interested in that. This world, wants to be able to take a real culture and make it into a sub-culture because it's going to make a lot of money. That's the danger that we have.

For me, people turn around they saw Once We're Warriors. Everywhere in the world they thought it was a culture. It wasn't. It was a sub-culture that's been created since colonisation. A sub-culture remember. Now as far as I am concerned there are other films that reflect a sub-culture as well.

We are there for our point of difference and our own point of tū pākiritanga and rangatiratanga. It's nothing to be ashamed of, it's nothing racist, it's nothing separatist, it is an identity that everyone has a right to own and have a stake in.

Moe mai e te rangatira. Ka nui te mana i roto i tō kōrero. 🤙