With the recent lecture tour by Barry Brailsford it is an opportune time to reconsider the question of indigenous peoples. Of course many on the "Right" will immediately sneer, or see the term in itself as being Politically Correct. However the NEW Right by definition is based around the concept of IDENTITY. By New Right , I mean a specific post-war political and cultural genre that manifested first in France. This has spread throughout the West and Eastern Europe. It has no relationship to how the term is misused by Political Scientists and journalists mainly in English-speaking countries such as New Zealand, as being synonymous with free trade economics. The very raison d’etre of the ‘New Right’ as a political genre is opposed to free market economics.

Identity is the primary means by which the New Right resists globalisation ; the latter being the push for a nebulous mass consumer culture replacing all traditional folk cultures, nations and peoples. The Left is quite useless in its opposition to globalisation and its associated Americanisation because it does not recognise the value of these traditional and timeless concepts. The Left is in accord with global capitalism in seeing such traditional concepts as nothing more than expressions of economics.

New Right in recognising Identity as a core issue should recognise the value of indigenous cultures and nations. These are based on tradition and are therefore bulwarks against the mass onslaught of ‘modernisation’. They are ages’ old means by which world tyranny is resisted, suggested in the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel and the God-ordained creation of separate nations and languages when a tyrant sought to create a world dictatorship and set himself up as a God. (Shades of the present New World Order and Pres. Bush?).

While the Left makes noises about indigenous rights as a cynical strategy to win over disaffected ethnic minorities due to its failure to win over the ‘proletariat’, its double-standard should be evident in that it only recognises such indigenous issues when they relate to non-Europeans. NR in championing the concept of Identity needs to consistently recognise the value of indigenousness per se; i.e. including white indigenes, such as the Afrikaners, French, Britons, and all others threatened by genocide whether Tibetans, Palestinians or Ainu, et al.

As for New Zealand and our commitment to New Zealand nationalism, an opportunity exists to transcend the present travesty being perpetrated upon New Zealanders under the name of ‘indigenous rights’ via the Treaty of Waitangi, resting as it does not on justice but on an anti-white guilt complex. The very question of NZ nationalism, NZ identity and NZ culture has been referred to when at all in the most obscure ways. Our youthfulness as a nation far from being our strength, has not permitted us to come out of national adolescence and now we find ourselves, having been cut off from Britain, being subject to a pervasive subversion by Americanisation and global consumerism.

The work of Brailsford in championing the identity of the Waitaha folk provides a new basis for nationhood and identity upon a distinctly New Zealand foundation.

I first read of the Waitaha when researching the second edition of my book Lords of the Soil in 1999. Brailsford had published Song of Waitaha in 1994, having been entrusted with the hitherto unpublished legends of the Waitaha by their elders.

According to the legends the Waitaha are a nation comprised of three races, two of which are clearly Caucasoid. The Starwalkers are called Uru Kehu, the navigators. Uuru Kehu is the traditional Maori name for a red haired white folk that lived here prior to the Maori, according to their legends. Legends of the "kehu" exist throughout Polynesia. They are also called in NZ Turehu and Patupaiarehe. A specific tribe, the Ngati Hotu, is recognised as historical fact by the Waitangi Tribunal. They apparently thrived in NZ in great numbers until a final battle of extermination ca. 1450.

The Uru Kehu in Waitaha tradition came to NZ under a chief named Kiwa. He is described as ‘fair skinned, his hair ‘fired by the colours of the sun’; ‘ his eyes reflected the blue waters of the sea.’ A Waitaha elder describes Kiwa as ‘a white man, with blue eyes and red hair.’

Another race were the Stone People or Kiritea who from a distance looked like the Uru Kehu , except that they had a slant to the eyes, however their hair was fair or red, their eyes hazel and their skin pale. They built numerous stone structures in NZ

The third component was the Maoriori, which presumably is not the same as the Moriori.

These three peoples converged to form a nation, and achieved a high degree of civilisation until their decimation by Polynesian invaders.

Waitaha have generally been denied their very existence. They are not recognised by the Treaty, nor do they seek to jump aboard the treaty money scramble. Waitaha are not enthusiasts for the Treaty settlements, which they see as undermining their own indigenous status, and as lacking dignity.

Their culture has been relegated to being pre-Classical Maori rather than belonging to a distinct ethnicity.

They don’t try to impose their will upon anyone, but in recent years have simply desired to make their traditions and distinction as a people known. They have preserved their traditions through a quiet dignity unknown to either Maori or Whites in NZ.

Having recently met several of the Waitaha at Upper Hutt’s Spring festival, where they were publicising new books on their traditions, I asked where they ascribe their origins. They stated Tibet, Egypt and South America.

While it is now supposed that recent DNA mapping has proven a Taiwanese origin for Maori (i.e. the generic term haphazardly for all people here before colonial Europeans) Brailsford states that what the DNA mapping actually shows is the Taiwanese connection is only discernible in 20% of Maori male and 50% of females.

Other findings such as the age of the Polynesian rat show that human settlement reaches back well before the ca. 1000AD Polynesian invasions, thereby giving supporting testimony for Waitaha legends of settlement in NZ reaching back thousands of years.

Waitaha also state that there were other people here before them who created the so-called Kaimanawa Wall (or pyramid) for e.g. However, Waitaha are the only discernible living descendants of any folk that can truly be called indigenous. The Turehu and Ngati Hotu are no more than legends of an exterminated folk which had presumably co-existed with the Waitaha for centuries prior to the Polynesian arrivals.

NZ Nationalists should consider the implications of Waitaha as the indigenous people of New Zealand. Of course this would require for many a giant leap away from Americanised racism. It would offer the prospect for providing a foundation for a specifically NZ Nationalism which gives our nationhood an ancient attachment to the land and a spiritual basis as antidotes to the globalisation that is intent on destroying all traditional cultures and peoples in the quest for profit.

Dr K R Bolton, Ph.D.