Oriini Kaipara, the imposture of the presenter ‘pure Maori’

The New Zealand presenter Oriini Kaipara is a thoroughbred. Five years ago, a DNA analysis showed that their genes are 100% Maori. “I am a purebred Maori”, it aired to the four winds, as if it were a human race superior to the others and as if that gave different qualities to the rest.

To distinguish herself, she used the ancient aesthetics of the tattoo, marking her lips and chin with the characteristic “moko”.

She is 38 years old and on December 25 she saw her second great dream come true premiering on the newscast at 6:00 p.m., the most watched on Channel Three in New Zealand.

She regularly presents the news bulletin “Newshub Live”, which is broadcast at 4.30 pm, but that Christmas day she had to switch to “prime time”. She just lost her mother and was especially excited.

In 2019 she was the first woman in the world to report with a moko on her face. Going out now in prime time has been for her “a great victory for this generation and the next ten,” she wrote on her Instagram.

Her image is going around the world and revalidates that indigenism is in fashion. The tattoo makes her feel big and powerful: “It signifies the mana of a Maori, the strength of an inheritance and an ancestral treasure that is a source of pride.”

The writer Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, who also wears one on her chin, describes it as the sign of “who we are and who we come from; where we are going and how we choose to get there”. Actually, the brand that Kaipara wears defines people according to their race, line of consanguinity or certain physical traits.

“Indigenism is a blatant form of supremacism, we do not dye it romanticism,” warns a reader at the bottom of the news.

People who received a tattoo on their face were possessors of a high social status. It began as a rite of passage based on submission and was expanded, so that you could read in it its entire lineage, human condition and suitability for marriage.

The man covered his face completely and the woman wore it on the chin and lips, as the presenter has done, symbolizing the union with a warrior. In the rest of the male body, the designs highlighted the shoulders, thighs and buttocks, almost always in a spiral to highlight their sexual virtues.

For Kaipara it is a way of honoring their ancestors. It was also in their culture to preserve the heads of the great warriors once carved, boiled and smoked, but in this nostalgic and delusional adherence to indigenismo, savage customs are never mentioned.

The Maori are a native people of Polynesia, who arrived in what is now New Zealand almost a thousand years ago. It was an aristocratic organization with large tribes independent of each other.

They lived in isolation for years and created a fierce culture in connection with nature, to which they gave sacred character, and an extreme spirituality based on numerous deities. That Maori culture, which denies miscegenation as social wealth, is still very much present in New Zealand life.

Indigenist currents are gaining ground especially in Latin America. Beyond respect for the past, it is exposed as an exotic, mystical and suggestive legacy. Visually it is very impressive.

It is appetizing and is very well received. Indigenistas leave from three to fourth and the left has been attached to this type of trend that merges indigenism, feminism and postmodernity.

The political scientist Gloria Álvarez Cross reproaches the traps of her ideological manipulation and her speeches based on sentimentality to support social movements without self-criticism and blaming the enemy.

Indigenism emerges as the new imposture and serves as a throwing weapon for some leftist governments. On her last trip to the United States, Díaz Ayuso defined them as “the new communism” and criticized the Manichean revision of history.

“Indigenism shares ideas with the Nazis,” said Argentine professor Marcelo Gullo Omodeo, whose opinions are costing him boos, threats and insults. Revaluing the idea of ​​a good Indian, an oppressive white, is as absurd as dividing people into good or bad, leaving it, as Oscar Wilde did, to be charming or tedious.