SCWIL_Tagline_white

Doing the ‘Haka’

December 5, 2024

SHARE

The video has gone viral, and it’s easy to see why: a young woman who is the youngest member of New Zealand’s Parliament performing the scary ‘haka’ dance to protest a contentious bill that would re-interpret a 184-year-old treaty between the British and the indigenous Māori people.

If you haven’t already viewed the clip, take a look. It will do your heart good after watching U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, the second woman ever nominated for President by a major party, lose the 2024 election.

Back in New Zealand, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, 22, led the Māori ancestral war dance on the floor of Parliament as she literally ripped up a copy of the controversial bill. She and several other Māori legislators chanted loudly, stomped their feet, stuck out their tongues, widened their eyes, and graphically displayed their disapproval of the bill that was seen as undermining their rights.

One can see how in ancient times, enemies of the indigenous Māori, who today make up about 20 percent of the country’s 5.3 million people, would have been mightily intimidated by this show of power and energy.

Maipi-Clarke is the great-great-great granddaughter of a Māori warrior who became New Zealand’s first indigenous minister in Parliament more than a century ago.

Here at home, women who were disappointed by the outcome of the national and state elections should remember there will be another Presidential election in just four years and midterm elections in two years. In the meantime, we can channel the attitude and energy of Maipi-Clarke as we advocate for more women to run for elective and appointive office at all levels.

Truth be told, there were some good outcomes for women in the November elections. A record 13 women will serve as governors in 2025, breaking the record of 12 set after the 2022 elections. Women won the majority of seats in the New Mexico Legislature. The U.S. Congress will seat its first transgender member, Sarah McBride. Two Black women will serve together in the U.S. Senate for the first time, and SC’s Congressional delegation will now include two women, Republican Nancy Mace, who was re-elected to her third term, and Republican Sheri Biggs, who will be the newest member of the delegation.

In South Carolina, Democrat Heather Bauer was re-elected to the S.C. House of Representatives, and lawmakers elected the third female justice, Letitia Verdin, to the SC Supreme Court. Verdin’s election means that the Palmetto State will no longer have the nation’s only all-male high court.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Having just one woman on the five-member high court is not enough. And next session, South Carolina will have the smallest number of female state senators in the country – just two women (of 46 members) after having six in the last session.

We have much work to do.

Jan Collins 2021-circle-crop

Jan Collins is a Columbia, South Carolina-based journalist, editor, and author. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard and former Congressional Fellow in Washington, D. C., she is the coauthor of Next Steps: A Practical Guide to Planning for the Best Half of Your Life (Quill Driver Books, 2009).

Related Articles