Dear all,
Here's the long-awaited result to the September pic of the month !
This image comes from the article “Sailing Maori Journey, New Zealanders Rekindle Indigenous Pride”, The New York Times, April 30th 2018.
The original caption reads:
The haka powhiri, a chant and dance of welcome.
The article begins:
Centuries before the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman and Britain’s Captain James Cook arrived in what became New Zealand, there was Kupe, a 10th-century navigator from Tahiti.
The first Polynesian to reach the then-uninhabited island, Kupe and his wife, Kuramarotini, are said by Maori to have given New Zealand its Maori moniker*, Aotearoa, or “land of the long white cloud.”
A long time later — this past February — a group of sailors recreated Kupe’s journey, steering the double-hulled canoes known as waka hourua in New Zealand’s indigenous Maori language. The waka, whose crews included a group of teenagers from Maori language schools, were billed as the main attraction in the opening night of the New Zealand Festival, a three-week arts and culture event that began last month and runs through March 18.
… In previous generations, Maori were discouraged from speaking their indigenous tongue at school, and efforts to revive it in the past few decades have sprung up out of fears that the language would die out.
The significance of the mass haka was not lost on some of the teenagers performing it, who said they keenly followed public debates over whether Maori, an official language of New Zealand, was worth preserving.
The photographer is Matthew Abbott.
* a moniker = a nickname (slang)
Source : https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/learning/whats-going-on-in-this-picture-april-30-2018.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Flearning-whats-going-on-in-this-picture&action=click&contentCollection=learning®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=collection