Letters
TE KARAKA welcomes letters from readers. You can send letters by email to tekaraka@ngaitahu.iwi.nz or post them to: The editor, Te Karaka, PO Box 13 469, Christchurch.
BE READY
I read with interest your article on “to fish or not to fish”. I’m a commercial fisherman in Hawkes Bay of Ngäti Kahungunu and Ngäi Tahu descent. My company owns and operates two fishing vessels. We have problems getting access to quota and it is our number one problem. We are more than willing to pay market prices or higher to secure quota. Catching and selling the fish is not a problem as our quality is good and we do not sell fish to the companies who do not pay well. I suggest you get in behind your fishermen and let them take the risk of catching the stuff. They are the experts; they just need the security of the quota. Get some switched-on wholesalers/exporters to market the product and form a relationship so everyone from the CEO to the cadets gets a
share in the profits. Most fishermen fish for the opportunity of making big money. The quota system has taken that away, and as you know fishing vessels need lots of money. Let the fishermen train your young people so in the future you have lots of your own professionals – it doesn’t cost you a cent. The problem with concentrating on the highvalue species is that it does not last forever. You are better off having your effort spread over all areas so you can cash in on opportunities that come up within the fishery. Leave the bean counters to do bean counting. They should not be making strategic decisions. I have brought my company through some very difficult times in the past few years and I am looking forward to the future. We are making good money on some of our species now and
the white gold they talk about will not only be milk. We have to be ready. Matt Douglas Napier
McSTAKEN
Though tempted to not dignify it with a response, I nonetheless write in reply to C.C. McDowall’s letter in the last edition of TE KARAKA. Firstly, like too many other contributors to the K v Ng “debate”, McDowall commits to a false binary whereby southern Mäori is essentially held to be either entirely different to, or exactly the same as, the standardised North Island language. My reading of a variety of 19th century archival manuscripts during postgraduate research, combined with words and idioms that still prevail in my hometown of Bluff, leads me to believe that the truth lies
somewhere in between. I regret the way in which this area of our tribal knowledge has been reduced to a screaming match of mantras and one-liners, as I do the absence of comprehensive dispassionate scholarship that could inform and clarify things greatly. Mostly though, I want to address McDowall’s audacious claim that Käi Tahu are in effect not authentically Mäori by virtue of our long history of intermarriage and European acculturation, and that it is only mistaken “Päkehä law” which deems us Mäori. This is patently ridiculous. Iwi membership, and thus being Mäori, is rightly determined by whakapapa, which is not a Päkehä concept. Furthermore, for the better part of its existence, the settler state steadfastly opposed this idea. To my mind, “[o]ur Päkehä-ness” is only an “inconvenient truth”