Originally Posted by
davflaws
Ya what? You do some reading (I am delighted - do some more) and come up with some precontact life expectancy estimates - which incidentally are arguably better than pertained for common people in Europe at the time of first contact -and use the fact that Maori figures have improved as an argument to deny the deleterious efffects of colonisation on Maori Health in the context of a discussion about the gross and disgraceful current disparities between Maori and non Maori life expectancies. You consistently conflate European contact with colonisation. That is what is stupid, ignorant, and racist.
Of course Maori statistics have improved. I doubt there is anywhere in the world where statistics haven't improved in the last two hundred and fifty years. But the fact that Western technology and forms of political organisation has generally improved people's lives is not the same thing as colonisation and it is ignorant, stupid and racist to deny the disastrous effects of indigenous people's loss of land, cultural, political and social hegemony that characterises colonisation as distinct from contact and adoption of technologies and practices on more equal terms.
It is possible to have the advantages of contact and the technologicaland social change that goes with it without the bad effects of colonisation, and in the context of a discussion about the current disparities in Maori health, it is misleading to conflate the two.
You cite some atrocious behavior. I could cite many further instances and incidents. You can deplore them, and I join you in that judgment, but they are not relevant to the issue of the effects of our history colonisation on current Maori health.
Cannibalism, tribal warfare, and slavery were all on the wane by the time TOW was signed, and effectively eliminated before the wave of colonisation that swamped disenfranchised, and disposessed Maori from the 1850s to late in the century. Again, cultural and social practices change over time, faster with the adoption of new technology, but the equation you are claiming between those changes and colonisation advances a false argument in the service of racist position.
You have confused my posts with someone elses. I have never claimed that European contact was bad, or that Maori were noble savages. Life in all pre industrial societies tended to be ugly, brutal and short. Read Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature", Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel", Belich's "New Zealand Wars", "Making Peoples" and "Replenishing the Earth", or dig further in the Te Ara site.
I do not demonise the settlers. My forbears on both sides came here in the 1860s as part of the wave that swamped Maori. Some of them were good people, but at least one was a very successful fraud and cheat. Some of them worked hard, but at least one was a "remittance man" sent to the "colonies" to avoid a scandal.
They did not find a "stone age civilisation" here. They came to a place where social, political, and economic conditions were changing rapidly, and some western technologies and social practices were being eagerly adopted. And they effectively disposessed and subjugated the indigenous people. They were not individually evil, wicked, mean or nasty, but the disposession had and has ongoing effects. The fact that you deny this, along with your "stone age" characterisation, is what is ignorant, stupid and racist.