Never call it New Zealand again.
A petition, launched by Te Pāti Māori (literally "the Maori party") calls for the Pacific Ocean country to be renamed to take on a Maori name and thus erase some of its colonial past.
The text calls on the House of Representatives to call New Zealand “Aotearoa” (pronounced au-te-ah-ro-uh) from now on.
And the political party does not stop there since it also invites to review all the names of "towns, cities and monuments" to give them back their Maori name by 2026.
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The text has already collected 70,000 signatures.
According to the online media Quartz, this number is sufficient for the parliament to consider the proposal.
It could then be voted on or submitted to a referendum.
“This should allow us, not only to recover our language, but also to erase a little of the trauma of colonization,”
said MP Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, co-leader of the Te Pati Maori party, in an interview with NPR. American.
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A name already present on the banknotes
Discovered in 1642 by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman (who gave his name to Tasmania), New Zealand was first named "Staten Landt" then "Nova Zeelandia" in reference to Zeeland, a southern province -western Netherlands.
"Nieuw Zeeland" then became "New Zealand" when the country became part of the British Empire in 1840.
According to the leader of the Maori party, the word Aotearoa refers to the clouds that would have directed the first Polynesian navigators to these distant lands.
The term is increasingly used in the country: it appears on certain official documents, passports and even banknotes.
As the Wall Street Journal explains, a most official statement issued jointly by New Zealand and the United States in May even mentioned Jacinda Ardern as the "Prime Minister of 'Aotearoa-New Zealand'.
Since 2018, several petitions and counter-petitions have successively requested that the name of New Zealand be changed or, on the contrary, remain the same.
More generally, the country has been working for several years to reconnect with its origins by encouraging the use of Maori – one of its three official languages along with English and sign language.
This fight does not stop at the language.
In 2015, the New Zealand government launched a competition to redesign the country's flag, marked with the British Union Jack symbol.
But the new version of the flag was ultimately rejected in a popular referendum after months of heated debate.
A question of generations?
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, co-leader of the Maori party, sees this procrastination as a generational conflict.
“The Maori population is young: 70% of them are under 40, 25% under 20.
On the other hand, the generation before, brought up in a system from which the Maori were absent, has a much more 'monocultural' vision”
.
For her, New Zealand,
"one of the last nations to have been colonized"
, will
"live episodes that other countries have already experienced to regain their identity".
Take the example of Swaziland which, in 2018, officially changed its name to become Eswatini (the country of the Swazis, in the Swati language).
Australia, for its part, changed its national anthem because it was not sufficiently representative of Aboriginal culture.
