At the Inflection Point conference in Wellington earlier this year, something special was in the room.
It's hard to put words to; just thinking about it brings a bit of hope, as though the soul of New Zealand as a nation was in there, standing up against gender ideology for our women and children and our future.
For those who weren't able to come, below is the text and the video of Di Landy's speech, which brought everyone in the room to their feet, and most precious to all of us at Mana Wāhine Kōrero, a mihi called back to her in acknowledgement of her words and the truth she spoke.
Thank you Di, for all your courage always.
Speech Text Below:
Tēnā koutou katoa.
Ko Di Landy ahau. Ko Ngāti Kahu tōku Iwi.
I am co-founder of Māna Wāhine Kōrero - national &
international Rōpū of Māori Wāhine and Whanaunga.
Michelle Uriarau and I started MWK as we saw an urgent
need for strong Māori Wāhine voices speaking the truth about
trans and our culture.
To our knowledge, we are the only native group in the world
fighting against Woke ideology. We absolutely reject that
‘gender identity’ was ever part of our culture.
I will put our disclaimers out now.
I do not speak for all Māori. Nobody does. There are 103
recognised Iwi in NZ, and historically many more.
Like many Māori, I don’t speak fluent Te Reo.
This has no bearing on what I see and hear happening to our
language and what I will say here today.
Before I go on, I would like to share with you a short article I
wrote a few years ago, called, ‘Born In The Wrong Body’.
I wrote it after attending a Speak Up For Women event, where
a young Pakeha man with pink hair claimed that the place
name “Whakatāne” commemorates a man born in the body of
a woman.
It doesn’t.
It commemorates Muriwai, or other tribes refer to her as
Wairaka, and this is my response to that man.
“This statement,
‘Born in the Wrong Body’
, is in direct
conflict with Māori creation and spiritual beliefs.
We are who our Tupuna called for.
We are created for a purpose of greater good.
We are our Tupuna.
Our rich history is full of love stories between the sexes.
This love is clearly recorded as LGB, not ‘LGBT QIA Plus,
Plus, Plus’.
There is no evidence of transgender ideology in our past.
Māori societal roles were decided by sex.
There are always exceptions, and our stories point to
these as exceptions, not givens.
Māori wāhine were not born in the wrong body:
When they were Chief of their tribe
When they Signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi
When they Signed the Suffragettes Petition of 1893
When they dug Te Maara (the gardens)
Māori wāhine were not born in the wrong body;
When they fought side by side with the men in battle, or
When they commanded war and raiding parties
And Muriwai was not born in the wrong body, when
according to Whakatohea history, she was to save the
Waka ‘Mataatua’
, and called,
“Kia whakatane au I ahau!”.
They were all Wāhine Toa.
They never needed;
To be recognized as men
To have unnecessary body modifications
To usurp anyone from their tribal placing
To seek constant validation
To have unnecessary titles or pronouns.
They were Wāhine Toa in their own right.
To suggest that we are now born in the wrong body is an
insulting and disgraceful fresh attempt at undermining
the very core of our culture.
The men were away looking for land. Muriwai didn’t want
to be a man. She wanted to gain the strength of a man. To
break those certain tapu that restricted women from
doing certain things on a waka.
As I hope you will all now agree, Muriwai, or Wairaka, was
a wahine, not a tāne born in the wrong body.
Today, the gender ideologues are stealing all our stories of
our wāhine toa, crying fake tears about colonisation, at the
same time that they are literally trying to recolonise us.
And the Māori elites in universities, media and government
have sold us out for Rainbow blankets and thirty pieces of
glitter — while our real problems go unaddressed.
My sisters and I were born and raised in Wellington, three of
seven. We remember the Wāhine disaster, and lived for a
time in the second-oldest house ever built in Wellington.
It’s hard to describe how we felt when we were told by the
Mayor of our City; a modern elite Māori wāhine, that we are
not welcome here, and that we and our views are ‘grotesque’.
She said this in public when we were applying for a permit for
the ‘Let Women Speak’ event with Kellie-Jay Keen in March
last year.
And again, just this week, Mayor Tory Whānau has said that
everyone in this room is not welcome here - Well too bad Tory,
we are here and we are speaking.
My main topic today is the serious issue of made-up Te Reo
Māori being used to force Woke ideology into our everyday
lives.
To be crystal clear, there are:
No waiata, no haka, no carvings
No karakia, no Tā Moko, no mōteatea
No clothing items or any other cultural artefacts or inherited
knowledge in our history, describing anything like ‘gender
identity’.
Older words such as takatāpui (intimate companion of the
same sex) have been redefined by the gender ideologues.
They have turned our historical Māori acceptance of
homosexuality, into something that promotes the sterilisation,
lifelong medicalization, and surgical mutilation of our tamariki.
All through history tyrants have twisted the stories and
mythology around them, and changed the meaning of words
and language to suit themselves. So do cults.
‘Wokeism’, is a tyrannical cult, the worst of both, and its
membership and power grows by speaking and thinking their
Woke language.
This is happening in both New Zealand English and Te Reo
Māori.
Wokeism began in universities, as an academic exercise, and
mutated, hijacking three grassroots social movements and the
political left:
Critical Race Theory took over the U.S. Civil Rights
movement, and became the ‘Diversity’ of DEI.
Queer Theory took over the Gay Rights movement and is the
‘I’, for ‘Inclusion’, for men in women’s spaces.
Social Justice Theory took over the political left, hijacking the
Leftist principle that raising the weakest among us
strengthens the whole, and represents the ‘E’ for ‘Equity’.
‘Intersectional Feminism’, (which includes men's rights) took
over the Women’s Movement and kneecapped women’s
resistance, forcing women to adopt all of it or be punished for
being unkind.
This is DEI in action. Academics theorising about race,
sexuality and equity, changing our laws and language, and
convincing women to collude in our own erasure.
PhD holder, ‘Doctor’ Elizabeth Kerekere, another Green MP
famous for bullying, is also another elite Māori DEI academic.
She has her name all over these language changes,
alongside a few of her Queer Theory mates:
● Mr Jamie Veale at Waikato University
● Dr George Parker, female academic at Victoria University
● Mr Ahi-Wi-Hongi at Rainbow Org ‘Gender Minorities’,
among many others.
These people and their ideas about race, sexuality and
children feature repeatedly in the changes to our legislation
and policy guidelines.
Dr Elizabeth received her doctorate in 2017 for her thesis on
sexuality, which quite honestly reads like an X-rated Mills and
Boon holiday affair.
It's called:
“Part of the Whānau - The emergence of takatāpui identity:
He Whāriki Takatāpui”, and on Pg. 82 she clearly writes that
there is no evidence of ‘trans’ in pre-colonial NZ.
She refuses to discuss this, pretending she never said it,
while using her credentials to back up her lies since then.
It is enraging to us that our language is being misused and
bastardised by academics and politicians to affect changes
across all spheres of society.
From Govt departments to sports teams, buildings, corporate
departments and boats - everybody wants a Te Reo Māori
name.
They call them ‘gifted’ names, but most of them are made up
by people who got paid to do it, so they're not really ‘gifts’.
Neither Māori or Pakeha can remember or understand them,
and they're everywhere and in everything.
I don't need to be fluent to hear and feel their ‘wrongness’
against everything I know.
When I double-check, all of these words actually mean
something different, or the selected meaning has been
‘DEI-washed’ and the other concepts that belong with the
word in Te Reo are missing.
Whenever this happens, the new made-up, symbolic meaning
becomes the only recorded meaning, spread everywhere by
marketing and policy.
You may think you're speaking Te Reo Māori - but you're not.
Our words are being used to mislead people and this is being
called progress.
The ideologues are raiding our dictionaries and our
vocabulary for old words and meanings that have slipped out
of common usage, and are repurposing them for their own
ends, making them as useless as Latin.
The whare we are in right now is called ‘Tākina’.
According to the website, this means they are invoking,
summoning and bringing forth the power of the “unique and
diverse Wellington winds”, which Te Papa says are
themselves a metaphor, for quote: “Magic, exuberance,
sharing, and ideas. The winds express the shift of knowledge
from one generation to another. They move things forward.
They carry truths and viewpoints here from the universe and
move them on to others, thousands of miles away”. End
quote.
You won't be surprised to learn that I don't believe tākina
means this. I have checked, and found no reference to their
definitions anywhere outside of their own statement - but I
have found completely different ones.
I also don't believe that the people who use these words value
or understand our culture.
All languages have in-house jokes, pronunciation, and a
common known understanding.
There are different sounds, facial expressions, gesticulations,
cadence and understandings within familial groups.
Words have practical, tangible, useful meanings.
These new words and phrases have none of this, and no
practical meaning - instead we are fed back these poetic
phrases and soundbites.
And as you all know it's not just our event centres. It's our
essential institutions.
In recent years our District Health Boards were united under
one entity called ‘Te Whatu Ora’.
This means nothing to anyone. The word ‘whatu’ is most
commonly translated as the word for eye, among other related
meanings.
Yet according to the government, after getting a ‘gift’ of an old
entry for ‘whatu’, related to practical items such as fishing nets
and clothing, Te Whatu Ora means: “The weaving of
wellness”.
The ‘Weaving of Wellness Department’.
It sounds just as strange and meaningless in Te Reo as it
does in English.
‘Wellness’, is not ‘woven’, in either of our languages.
Another example is ‘Kahu Pōkai’, now the new ‘gifted’ term for
midwife.
Kahu and Pōkai have several similar meanings, hawk, birds,
host, flock, swarm, albumen, membrane, wrapping and more.
None are to do with being a midwife - although there is a
disturbing mention of stillbirth under the entries for ‘Kahu’.
The word ‘whānau’ is being used by the Midwifery Council, to
mean extended family, women and babies, all at once.
Mothers and babies are not whānau, they are mothers and
babies - some women are not surrounded by whanau, and
others are safer away from their families.
No matter how much the Council want the word whānau to
mean woman, it doesn't.
And let's not forget that while the Midwifery Council are
working on their vanity projects, mother and newborn baby
death statistics have remained the same.
To reiterate, all of these ideas are coming from universities.
Academic ideologues are indoctrinating our youth, teaching
them that they’re either oppressed victims, or oppressors who
must perform penance - and they're teaching them to speak in
Wokenese.
They are churning out weak-minded malcontents who are
taking this new language back and spreading it around our
marae.
Our brainwashed youth are schooling our elders and shaming
them. A never-seen-before phenomenon.
Māori never learnt our way of being from an institution. We
learnt at the feet of our elders.
We never trusted the government.
We are wary of authority.
And with good reason.
One need only look at the current Green Party and Te Pati
Maori to see a living, practical day to day example of the DEI
theories mentioned earlier.
The language they use is inflammatory and lies.
“Genocide, exterminate, hateful transphobes, transwomen are
women” - these are insane statements and destructive
untruths.
To you Te Pāti Māori, we say, it is you that is exterminating
whakapapa by forced state-sanctioned sterilisation of our
rangatahi. It is you creating a genocide of people by severing
the gene pool, by brainwashing the most vulnerable, children,
into unrealistic imported ideals.
Te Reo should not be forced on people. It is not for everyone.
Nor should it be.
Te Reo is a protected language in NZ. It is protected for
Māori. It is protected for us, to guard against further abuse for
speaking Te Reo, or for being Māori.
It is our living and ancestral memory. Te Reo Māori is an oral
language from a language family stretching back thousands of
years. That's the memory that we hold.
Today we find ourselves in a time where you can do a six
week course in Te Reo and use that to say you have Maori
knowledge on your CV or secure a position on a board.
This linguistic appropriation is damaging our language.
My elders do not understand the new form their language has
taken; Woke Te Reo is unintelligible to them.
It may not be possible to fully undo this damage.
Woke Te Reo, like Woke English, carries false concepts and
rewritten history with it into the minds of everyone who speaks
it.
Many people may now always believe that pre-colonial Māori
had gender identity issues, and that kahu pōkai means
midwife.
They are changing the message and cultural characteristics of
what it actually means to be Māori.
Elite Māori and Pākehā alike are excusing and explaining
every new language change by pointing to the Treaty of
Waitangi as the reason for it.
This cannot be defended. We're angry that this ridiculous
reasoning is being so eagerly swallowed by so many people.
We stress to the Crown and to everyone that the Treaty of
Waitangi does not say, imply, suggest, encourage or permit
the meddling of Government in our language, or the deletion
and redefinition of any of our words.
By changing meanings of words and using them for their own
ends the government is legislating a fraud - and our culture
should not and cannot be recreated in legislation.
So in closing I would like to say, words matter. They matter
very much.
Avoid the trap of using Woke language. Keep your words,
refuse to give them up or change them. Use them all instead.
Start keeping a diary. Record your life, record the changes
and madness you see. Look for old histories and stories of
who we all are in second-hand bookshops.
If we speak and record faithfully, we can both defeat the
ideologues and ensure all our descendants will have the truer
history to call upon.
Kia ora and thank you.
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