https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/132910835/mori-are-not-indigenous-winston-peters-claims
The NZ First leader told a crowd of supporters, "you go back 5000 years, we came with our DNA from China. Not like 55,000 years in Australia."
He's really trying, but chain smoking for a few decades really does fuck with your lung capacity
How long does a people need to have been some where first before they're indigenous?
According to Peters more than 700 but less than 55000 years.
What's the threshold Mr. Peters?
Depending on whose definition you use, he may have a point. It's well understood that Maori came from elsewhere to NZ, and quite recently in historical terms. Thus, are not "naturally occurring".
Of course, they did get here first though, and we signed a treaty guaranteeing certain rights regardless.
Mostly this is just Winnie being Winnie.
I mean, Homo Sapiens is only "naturally occuring" in Africa. We may have spread to Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas (much) earlier than to NZ.
But if you think of the Maori as a people of Oceanian (more specifically east polynesian) descent, you can absolutely make an argument, that they are a native group spreading in their native territory.
You wouldn't call a north american native people "not native", just because they began settling some remote part of Canada nobody had been to before only in 1250 CE. The only difference would be that one is separated by water while the other is not, but "separated by water" loses all meaning in Oceania.
The problem with arguing this is that it ignores the things he isn't saying - Maori aren't indigenous which means colonialism wasn't a crime, and the treaty doesn't need to be honoured.
You can argue the semantics about what indigenous means all you want, but that's not the argument he is actually making.
While he's right about the timeframe, he's wrong about the country of origin.
The best hypothesis of the Polynesian expansion is that they left from Taiwan sometime after 3000BC. They are decendants of the Taiwanese aboriginal peoples, not Han Chinese settlers. So even if you ignore current geopolitics, saying "China" is grossly misleading.