They’re usually jumping online yelling about how white boys are speaking Māori and that’s not right and it’s like, first off we are Māori. It usually comes from someone who might be thinking they’re trying to do the right thing but maybe aren’t very well informed. We do get the odd negative comment - particularly us using Māori. HDJ: It’s been mostly positive from everywhere I think New Zealand especially. On how indigenous people and Māori people in New Zealand have responded to your music It’s fantastic for us to see that it has a wider reach than New Zealand. It’s really amazing to see people connecting with music sung in a language they don’t speak but they know where they’re coming from. I feel what we’re doing resonates with Native Americans here in the U.S. HDJ: It’s interesting that you brought up Native Americans here in the US specifically - a large part of our fanbase in New Mexico and Arizona are Navajo and every time we play there it’s almost like going back home.
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You still do experience racism, discrimination, oppression - those things are still issues in every part of the world. We’re better than where we were 50 years ago.
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New Zealand is still quite a few steps away of where it should be. LDJ: It’s definitely better than it was, there’s always room for improvement. On the difficulties Native Americans still face and how it compares to the treatment of the Māori people in New Zealand
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HDJ: For us, it has been a strange journey because we’ve realized through doing this that you don’t actually hear Māori being spoken much at all in New Zealand which is the reason we forgot how to speak it after our Māori schooling. Writing in Māori is helpful to get back into that more. Henry covered a lot of it but we’re trying to spread the language and the culture and it’s also a way for us to reconnect to it - we lost some of the language when we went to English speaking schools and when you’re not speaking it regularly you lose the ability to communicate. LDJ: We grew up with it, going to a Māori school and it was being able to relate to our Māori side. On filming the video for the title track “Tangaroa” In the video it says Ka Mate Te Moana … Ka Mate Tātou which means if the ocean dies, so do we.
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For us it’s a song about something we grew up around and it’s hard to see all of the negative impacts that human life has had on the ocean in the past decades.Īs far as deciding to name the album Tangaroa, we felt like it was something that encapsulated everything that we do because everything is affected by the ocean.
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HDJ: In Māori culture, he is the God or energy of the ocean so that song is about how we’re killing him and how we’re desecrating the oceans. On the album Tangaroa and the meaning behind the title This tour is really a dream tour not only because we’re playing with some awesome bands but they’re really awesome people. The guys in Knocked Loose are really good, as well, and we get to chat with them when doing changeovers and hang out in that sense and all of our crews get along really well. HDJ: We toured with Gojira as support a few years ago, we played a few festivals over here, and had a few good chats with them.