MaxQ maintains that
"pakeha" comes from "pakepakeha", a sort of white-skinned leprechaun, more commonly know as patu paiarehe. Apparently, the pakepakeha were suppose to have giant waka (canoes), with sails on them. The first Europeans semeed to fit the bill. The term "Pakeha" is not as derogatory as "tauiwi", but more controversial in its application to immigrants from non-European countries. I found a really great atrticle anout this online a ye or so ago, but it seems to have vanished.and which article he later found and posted a URL for. However, while I have no opinion on the Maori etymology of the word's origins, I have very definite views on the use of "pakeha" and "tau iwi". Pakeha is one of those words, not at all uncommon, and of which examples have been aired above ("gringo" being a good one), which metamorphoses in meaning very much depending on who is using it and the context it's being used in. If one of my Maori friends uses it to refer to me when talking to a mutual friend, I have no problem. He's really just saying "that guy over there that we both know and who isn't a Maori". If he uses it when he's talking to someone who doesn't know me, Pakeha or Maori, he's actually being quite pejorative and is clearly no friend of mine. He is in effect saying "that whitey fellow over there." Not nice.
Pakeha and Maori (note the capital letters) can be and often are used quite neutrally. I've never heard of Pakeha being used to refer to a specific New Zealander of non-European origin, but that's a point I'm prepared to concede. I don't know everything! Even so, the Maoris I know who can actually speak Maori well use explicit names for foreign ethnicity rather than using "Pakeha" as a catchall, i.e. there is a Maori word for Chinese or Japanese or whatever.
In an official context, reference to Pakeha and Maori is, however, simply a verbal tic, a lazy person's differentiation between Maori and everyone else. That it is generally used by politicians who are too ignorant to know better (and who usually shouldn't be allowed out without parental supervision in any case) doesn't make it any better.
Now, where was I? Oh, yes. I was dragged willy-nilly to a meeting being held (or at least spoken to) by a group of Maori activists led by one Dun Mihaka. Mihaka is one of the worst kind of hate-engendering activists; he's well-educated and he should know better. It may also enthrall you to know that he mooned the Queen of England when she visited NZ's fair shores one year not so long ago. He should have known better then, too. I don't believe that making your point is a reason to be impolite to that level!
Anyway, back to the meeting. Dun, disably supported by a group of Maori activism fellow-travellers, worked himself up into an almost Hitlerian lather bemoaning the long list of the injustices that the colonists inflicted on Maori in the 19th Century and,
inter alia spat the word "
Pakeha!" out in what I can only describe as a less than endearing manner. Up until then I had been fairly neutral about what he'd been saying, because by and large he was right. But then he started abusing everyone who wasn't Maori, and anyone who didn't agree with him, Maori or not, dead or alive. He never once used the word "maori", referring to them as "tangata whenua", i.e., people of the land.
The silly thing is, we're all tangata whenua or maori in the direct sense of the words. We are/were all born in New Zealand and, with some exceptions in both racial camps, we're all quite ordinary.
As for "tau iwi", well, I'm not one. I was born and brought up in New Zealand.
