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8 Dec, 5 tweets, 3 min read
1/4I hate the antiseptic orderliness of supermarkets, but I love Auckland's Indian grocery stores, with their surreal juxtapositions of unlikely goods from several continents, their vials of holy water & cow piss, & their dancing Hindu gods. A strange new item's arrived in stores ImageImage
2 Werewolves Blood Incense is made in Bangalore, for export only. It joins the more traditional incense sticks, which are dedicated to deities like Shiva & Vishnu, in Auckland's grocery stores. The new brand seems to involve a Hindu reimagining of Western occult imagery. Image
3 The text on the product invokes Hindu notions of symmetry & order, claiming that werewolves bring balance to the universe. But it also describes the creatures as 'blood suckers' who need to be kept at bay. ImageImage
4 Several years ago in Vanuatu I became fascinated with the way that notions of vampirism had been brought to the capital Port Vila by Western movies & TV shows, & had led to a riot & to criminal trials. books.scoop.co.nz/2017/11/22/loo… Are werewolves colonising India? Image
5 P'haps Hinduism is simply appropriating the werewolf, & placing the creature inside its vast cosmos. Unlike Christianity, which has sought to extirpate rivals, Hinduism has tended to incorporate rival religions, even against their will: Image

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Scott Hamilton RTM Profile picture
9 Dec
1/7 Sam Linden has a letter in the Dominion Post condemning the Maori Party's co-leader for claiming that Maori suffered a Holocaust at the hands of colonising Pakeha in the 19th century. Linden thinks that such language is insulting to Jewish victims of Hitler. I disagree. Image
2/7 The term the Shoah refers specifically to the extermination of six million Jews in Europe between 1933 and '45. It should not be used in other contexts. But the term Holocaust has a longer & much more complex history. It has been used to describe many catastrophes.
3/7 The great English poet Geoffrey Hill, for example, called the devastation caused by the War of the Roses a 'Holocaust'. Holocaust seems a reasonable description for the devastation - invasion, land theft, steep demographic decline - Maori suffered in the 19th C.
Read 25 tweets
Scott Hamilton RTM Profile picture
17 Jun
1 For a dead guy, Captain Hamilton has caused a lot of trouble. Lately protests have forced the removal of his statue from the city named after him. Back in 1864 a report on Hamilton's death prompted 80 angry sailors to attack central Auckland. (short thread)
2 Captain Hamilton perished during the rout of British forces at Gate Pa, just south of Tauranga. The British charged straight at Maori defences; 31 of them died & 80 were injured. An anti-war Auckland newspaper added insult to defeat.
3 The New Zealander was a paper established in 1845 by John Williamson. Williamson became an MP in 1853. He supported the Maori King movement & in 1863 opposed the invasion of the Waikato. His newspaper's anti-war stance caused its co-owner to split & establish the NZ Herald.
Read 7 tweets
Scott Hamilton RTM Profile picture
9 Jun
1/4 Some on twitter's alt-right say the Pacific slave trade is a mirage created by 'woke academics'. I don't think that phrase fits John Coleridge Patteson, the 1st Anglican bishop of Melanesia & the William Wilberforce of the Pacific. Patteson died fighting the slave trade.
2Patteson ran the Melanesian mission in Auckland & later Norfolk, where young men were trained in Christianity & various trades. In the 1860s he began hearing terrible stories from them, of 'catch catch boats' & stolen villages. Patteson began to write & speak against the slavers
3 Thanks to the Anglican church's Project Canterbury, we can now access some of Patteson's denunciations of slavery. They make sad reading, with their accounts of canoes run down & their passengers seized, & islanders made to sign contracts they could not read.
Read 10 tweets
Scott Hamilton RTM Profile picture
7 Jun
1/3 In the US & UK momuments celebrating slavery are coming down. The people of Bristol have thrown the statue of their slaver Coulston into the sea. Here in NZ we have a popular restaurant & bar whose name is a tribute to the most notorious of all the Pacific's slave traders
2 Akaroa's Bully Hayes Restaurant & Bar takes its name from the American slaver, sadist & pedophile who preyed on the islands of the Pacific for years, from bases in Apia & the Marshall Islands. Hayes stole islanders & sold them to the plantations of Tahiti, Fiji, & Queensland.
3 Hayes raped many of the girls & young women he abducted. In his meticulous book The White Pacific, African American scholar Gerald Horne shows that the slaver was protected by high-placed relatives in Washington DC.
Read 6 tweets
Scott Hamilton RTM Profile picture
9 May
1 Rutger Bregman's written a fascinating account of a group of castaways on the Tongan island of 'Ata for the Guardian. But the story has a much darker historical background than Bregman's article lets on. (thread)
2 Bregman tells the story of the group of Tongan teens who stole a boat from Nuku'alofa harbour, got caught in a storm, were wrecked on the remote southern island of 'Ata, & survived for many months before a fisherman rescued them. But how were the boys able to survive?
3 The story of the 'Atan castaways was first told by Keith Willey in his book Naked Island nearly half a century ago. Willey's book includes a crucial detail that Bregman leaves out of his article.
Read 11 tweets
Scott Hamilton RTM Profile picture
18 Feb
1 Like many commentators, Martyn Bradbury thinks the people digging for the remains of a mythical white civilisation in NZ's backblocks must be seriously mental ill, the victims of our 21st century conspiracy culture. This view is understandable, but it's badly mistaken (thread)
2 The pseudo-archaeologists who desecrate urupa searching for the bones of a non-existent white tangata whenua are not a contemporary or marginal phenomenon. They are of a mainstream tradition in Western thought & scholarship.
3 A century ago nearly every scholar of NZ history held some of the assumptions of today's grave robbers. They believed in higher & lower races, thought human progress came thru cultural diffusion across the globe, & researched by ransacking Maori wahi tapu & traditions.
Read 19 tweets

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