May 09, 2024
Ratana credited for UNDRIP roots
The author of a biography on prophet Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana says valuable information has emerged since the book was first published in 2006.
A revised edition of Keith Newman’s Ratana the Prophet has just been published by Oratia Books.
It’s 100 years since the church founder set off on a world tour to the United kingdom, France, the United States of America and Japan with petition containing signatures from two-thirds of Mäori – 34,000 people – highlighting breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi.
Newman says a 2011 article in Australia’s Griffith Law Review credits Ratana’s attempt to put that petition before the League of Nations – blocked by Britain, Canada and New Zealand – and a similar petition from Chief Deskaheh of Canada’s Haudenosaunee as being the political roots of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
“The quote is ‘Deskaheh and Ratana – though unsuccessful in their advocacy – provided a pathway for the contemporary global indigenous rights movement’. And I just went wow, okay there it is,” Newman says.
Ratana: The Prophet goes on sale this week.