The laws in the bible about menstruation are pretty harsh. You'd have to have a lot of doves or pigeons in stock.
Perhaps that was why women wanted to get married and have kids.
"Sure, I may die in childbirth, but anything's better than being unclean 50% of the time and sacrificing 24 birds a year!"
I don't quite get why the Canadian ambassador's comments were so wrong. He seemed to be making a comment about human nature under different circumstances. When people need each other to survive, they work together. But as soon as that extremity is alleviated, people's natural competitive forces come back to the surface and yeah, we end up fighting, killing and eating each other, usually over sex, ultimately. It happens over and over in history - the Romans, the Inca, the French, the English, the Germans, the Pitcairn Islanders, and yeah, the Maori, have at different times acted in this way.
Posted by phreq at June 15, 2005 10:27 AM | TrackBackDifferent news reports have highlighted different aspects of what he said. The eating people thing doesn't seem particularly rude, but the stuff about needing to be taught to fish, arriving in canoes by virtue of holding hands - it's a bit too flippant for a diplomat methinks.
Posted by: Rachel at June 15, 2005 10:14 PMI agree, but if you look at the general tone of the meeting (full text: The Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans Evidence you'll see that he is being anything but racist.
Notable excerpts:
"New Zealand has not had a history of being a fishing nation. We have more water around us than any other country in the world. You fly twelve hours one way and three hours the other to find the next piece of land, or nine hours to the Antarctic. We have relied on agriculture as the basis for any economic activity, except for our indigenous Maori population, who used fish, but only for their own food."
"At that time [1985], our Maori population comprised about 13 per cent of our total population. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 with the British government, guaranteed them their fisheries, forests and lands. That was subsequently ignored and they lost nearly all of them. Under this deal there was separate legislation that guaranteed Maori 20 per cent of the fishery, so that was given in the form of quota. In one case, the government bought a fishery company that represented the 20 per cent and gave it to Maori.
Our Maori have done very well since. They now own 60 per cent of the quota. That has been a success story beyond anything ever imagined."
"There has been tremendous growth of Maori fishing, Maori ownership and expertise. They have had increased employment, and of course it is nearly all exported, and the skills have been taught to those people, otherwise they would have gone out in a canoe or something. It has just been fabulous. They have employed their own accountants, lawyers and so on. It has run right through the system. It is not just the crew that haul the fish on board."
" [...] we are very strict about the size of the fish we catch. In the case of the recreational fishers, there is a handbook that every recreational vessel has to have on board. On every beach, every wharf, there is a measuring device set up with a hole in it for the size of the fish that can you bring in. Whether it is lobster or any other particular species, you can measure the size. There is no excuse for leaving to go home not knowing the size of anything. You cannot say, "Well, I forgot to take my ruler."
Every excuse is used. We had one case with a minister of religion on the shore, dressed in his cassock and looking like Moses, and he had all his congregation of Pacific Islanders there strip mining the beach. They were taking everything that moved. He said it was for the Lord. Well, the Lord did not save him.
They were taking undersized fish. They were all fined, and he was fined the most. You have to be strict, particularly in recreational fishing."
"The Chairman: This is one of the areas, Senator St. Germain, that we do want to know more about. It is something I had not really thought of before, that the Maori are quite different from the native people of Canada; they are one group. They are not something like 600 nations.
Mr. Kelly: No. There were seven canoes that came in 740 from Hawaiki, so there are seven tribes. They all held each other's hands to stop them from sinking on the voyage. Once they got to New Zealand, they started fighting and eating each other; so there have been Maori wars ever since then. Now they are learning to get along with each other. They will argue about their allocation of quota for their deep sea or inshore fisheries, but they will not go to war over it."
I mean, some of the comments may be a little ill-advised and flippant, I agree, but he hasn't actually said anything that isn't true. It's just not politically correct.
Posted by: phreq at June 16, 2005 08:44 AM