I admit it would be completely unheard of to have a Waitangi Day without a protest of some kind. The legacy of a flawed yet utterly unique document, derived from a Victorian sense of preservation for the "natives", continues to mingle uneasily with the adaptions of a European society and values, which has always possessed a very obvious advantage over Maori culture.
And that is intrinsically the problem. Three principles in the Treaty of Waitangi are never enough to define a culture and what is truly important, when Western civilisation continues to be an unstoppable force, doing things its own way, as it has done for thousands of years.
A stone-age civilisation, if it's not virtually steamrollered or protected in part by a document like the Treaty, is at least going to be damaged as change happens all around them.
It is in our nature, as humans, to adapt to survive.
My difficulty is that in the preservation of a culture and its values there lies distortions and extremes that don't sit well with European values. Concepts such as ownership of water is one example. The idea that there are, for Maori, different rules around taking food from the sea.
