February 18, 2004
Te Whiti and Parihaka.
Before Gandhi and Martin Luther King, there was Te Whiti; a spellbinding public speaker who persuaded Taranaki Maori that their best remedy to growing dissatisfaction with the British settlement of New Zealand was not traditional warfare, but non-violent resistence.
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Don't forget Henry David Thoreau, who wrote the book on Civil Disobedience in 1849, which is some years before Te Whiti gave up on violent uprising.
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Wow rodgerd, great link! Thank you for posting.
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great stuff, rodgerd... and Skrik, too.
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I'd never heard of him prior. Brief aside: my father's book Out of Sight makes mention of a minstrel troupe singing for Maori tribes in the late 1800's and how well the two groups got along. Suppressed people, suppressed culture. Great link.
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I'll see if I can get the University library to buy a copy, Forks.
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I had never heard of Te Whiti before either. Thanks, rodgerd.
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This is a bit of a tangent, forks, but I've always thought it must have been so wierd for segregation-era black American musicians to go to, say, France (where Jazz was and is regarded as America's great contribution to culture) and to be treated as artistic heros, and then to go back to the States and be treated like dirt.
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Yeah, the book deals with that paradox in depth. The newspaper articles of the time are absolutely astonishing in their condescencion, but the writing is also fascinatingly cutting and evocative. Pops has gone on at length to me about how they really knew how to write about music then, at a time before recording when the only way to hear tell of a great musician was through prose. Based on what I read, he's right. Incidentally, the French seem to think that all black american music is blues or jazz.