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Rawiri Waititi, leader of the Maori party: "We are a Polynesian country, we are Aotearoa"
Photo: Ben Mckay / AAP / imago images
A Maori party has filed a petition in New Zealand to officially rename the Pacific state "Aotearoa".
The word used by the indigenous peoples, which translated means "land of the long, white cloud", is already often used as a synonym for New Zealand.
However, the term has a controversial history and is said to have originally only been used for the North Island and not for the whole country.
The Maori Party also wants to reintroduce the Maori names for all cities and place names by 2026, as its chairmen Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer emphasized in a statement on Tuesday: »It is long overdue that Te Reo Maori (the Maori language) regained its rightful place as the first and official language of that country.
We are a Polynesian country, we are Aotearoa, ”said Waititi.
Ngarewa-Packer explained that the name changes and the "imposition of a colonial agenda in the education system" had resulted in fewer and fewer Maori being fluent in their own language.
The rate fell from 90 percent in 2010 to 20 percent.
A change in the country's name would help "restore the status of our language," said Ngarewa-Packer.
Many companies and government agencies in the island nation already use the name Aotearoa, which is also found on citizens' passports.
Te Reo Maori became an official language of New Zealand in July 1987.
The islands' first settlers were Polynesians - their arrival is dated by historians to the first half of the 14th century.
The Maori culture emerged from this first wave of immigration.
They named their kingdom Aotearoa.
The Europeans only came to the islands east of Australia in the era of the great voyages of discovery in the 17th century.
The Dutch Abel Tasman was the first to sight Aotearoa;
however, he did not go ashore.
That was what his compatriot Hendrik Brouwer did a year later, who named the islands "Nieuw Zeeland" after the province in the southwest of the Netherlands.
oka / dpa