New Zealand’s founding treaty is at a flashpoint. Why are thousands protesting for Māori rights?

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A proposed law that would redefine New Zealand’s founding treaty between the British Crown and Māori chiefs has triggered political turmoil and a march by thousands of people the length of the country to Parliament to protest it. The bill is never expected to become law. But it has become a flashpoint on race relations and a critical moment in the fraught 180-year-old conversation about how New Zealand should honor its promises to Indigenous people when the country was colonized -– and what those promises are. Tens of thousands are expected to throng the capital, Wellington, for the final stretch of the weeklong protest march on Tuesday. It follows a Māori tradition of hīkoi, or walking, to bring attention to breaches of the 1840 Treaty…

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