New Zealand’s indigenous people — the Maori — were traditionally gatherers, crop farmers and hunters, who got…
Emoticons — Who doesn’t love them? Nowadays we can hardly imagine social networks and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp to work without emoticons. And honestly, how would someone 100% know whether you are being ironical or serious when you text him “It was terrible”? Over the past…
After I watched a video, which shows how to cook traditional Maori style “Hangi”, I really wondered why Maori were cooking in the ground and what were their some traditional foods. Whereupon, I read a magazine about it, it gave me a kooky outlook on their different foods and I also learned why they…
Last week in class we discussed about the Maori language, te reo maori, and about how it dramatically becomes less and less a spoken tongue. After it experienced a revival in the 1970s after people became concerned of it decaying into a dead language, we are…
What do these two pieces of artwork have in common? They both come from artists born in New Zealand!
The first picture, a wooden carving, represents traditional Maori art carving, or as Maori would say “Toi whakairo”. Using wood, stone or bone…
I wrote many posts about NZ in the past 2 months.. But i realize that i never write about the Maori. Maori culture is so rich with wisdom, and the Whakataukí or Maori version of proverbs is one of them. Whakataukí play a large role in Maori culture. Maoris used Whakataukí as a…
In almost every culture people tried to explain phenomena which were hard to grasp by developing myths. Thus, there are hundreds of different stories about how the world was created and what happens to dead people’s souls, for…
While most New Zealanders speak English, very few still use the traditional Maori language. Only around a quarter of the Maori can speak it fluently. Traditionally, “te reo Maori” was an oral language until 1814. From 1930 to 1960…