The Haka
Thinkin’ about the haka lately.
If you’re not familiar with haka, and I’m saying this before I check a wikipedia page on it it is a cultural celebration perhaps best compared to a dance, from the Maori culture out of Aotearoa, which I more commonly refer to as New Zealand, because it’s a habit and it dies hard. But yes, you may have seen this before, a scene of a group of usually men, usually rugby players, standing before an opposing team and doing a synchronised performance. I’m reluctant to call it a dance just because I know that dance is an English word, and I don’t necessarily want to distract from what haka are by what you might imagine if I call it just a ceremonial dance.
There’s this story that shows up about the haka, and it tends to be how people in the Northern Hemisphere finds out about it. Someone plays against the Aotearoan team in a sporting event, and the Aotearoan team opens by doing their haka. Then you get some early sports headline like:
Ireland unmoved by New Zealand Players’ War Dance
Followed by a headline an hour later like:
Ireland loses 16-2 against New Zealand.
And this is, to me, very funny, because why would you mention the haka and then why would you mention how Ireland was unaffected by that. And I’ve seen this headline structure multiple times! And part of that is a little bit unfair, because the haka is but one part of that story, where the bulk of the story is that international Aotearoan sports teams are made up of people really good at the sports they play. The footnote though, the thing that always hangs around the edges of it is people trying to express in some way of rearranged words that haka is somehow, bad. That it’s not cool as hell, that it’s inappropriate, that it’s being used at an inappropriate time.
This is, of course, racist as hell.
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