The iwi of which I'm a member, Ngai Tahu and Ngati Whakaue, are quite anal about documenting descent for membership. Ngai Tahu in particular had me jump through lots of hoops with birth and death and marriage certificates to prove who I am and who I'm descended from.
That opens up another can of worms though. Large numbers of my family members remained on or near that which had been iwi land before it was stolen. There are marae in the Bay of Plenty and Canterbury and Otago that I can walk on to and give a mihi and be welcomed like I live there because people to whom I'm related have stayed living there. But there are urban and ex-pat Maori who have absolutely no connections to any given place. Their ancestors lost access to land entirely and their grandparents moved to the city and now their parents are dead and they don't know their whakapapa and they can't prove shit. What do we do for those brothers and sisters? How do we accommodate a world in which Whitey McWhiteface from Parnell can claim uncontestable "indigeneity" because zhe knows the magic wipipo words to use when announcing zheir identity to the scholarship panel, but an illiterate brown primary-school dropout in South Auckland or Brisbane can't?
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Originally Posted by DrTiTus
Maori scholarships I imagine are funded by iwi, so it's really up to them to decide.
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Can't wait for unsuccessful Whitey McWhiteface to demand an iwi be cancelled for its refusal to acknowledge zheir identity.