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November 20, 2024 - 4:00pm
Last week, a video went viral of Maori politicians in the New Zealand Parliament performing a silly piece of political theatre. In protest against a proposed bill that would revise the terms of the 184-year-old Treaty of Waitangi, which makes unique allowances for Maori people in exchange for British rule, MPs tore up copies of the bill and did a traditional haka dance in defiance. The politician who proposed the bill, David Seymour of the libertarian ACT party, argued it went against the principle of equality in favour of special group rights. This week, more than 40,000 protestors demonstrated in Wellington against the bill.
The premise of the treaty presumes that New Zealand is a binational state composed of a white Anglo-settler community — which, due to recent waves of mass immigration, has become much more multi-ethnic — and an indigenous Maori community. The Maori are a confederation of various tribes who have to share sovereignty with each other, especially over land rights and political representation.
Some on the very online Right have mocked Maori protests as an odd show of ethnonationalism. There is clearly some truth to this claim. A lot of indigenous rights activism is premised on romantic notions that people like the Maori are noble savages who have a “unique” way of life and relationship with “the land” by dint of their ancestry that ought to be recognised and preserved by the state. As Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, the MP who led the protests, stated in a recent rally: “We are the kingmakers and the sovereign people of this land”. But those on the Right aren’t objecting out of any honest liberal principle. Their opposition is pure hypocrisy: it is simply because it is against their ethno-national group (white Anglos).
The concept of “indigeneity”, which has been trendy among some parts of the Left, post-colonial academia and decolonial activists for some years, has become toxic. Both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict use this rhetoric as the basis for their people being the “true” proprietors of the Holy Land and it has legitimised a racial war mindset. Its use has allowed for racial essentialism and outright racism for a generation. It is simply reactionary, as it posits that particular pieces of land “belong” to a particular volk, and a particular volk “belong” to a piece of land because of a supposedly unique ancestral-spiritual connection only they have. This notion, it mustn’t be forgotten, was key to proto-fascist nationalist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It is no surprise that the proponents of the Great Replacement Theory and the French New Right have long appropriated Left-sounding phrases to rebrand their racism as “ethnopluralism”. This idea, almost acceptable in our times of multiculturalism, suggests that each group should have its unique and ancient heritage preserved against global capitalism and liberalism which are nefariously diluting them through mass immigration and globalisation. Here, you can see ethnonationalists adopting the tone of victimised minorities by claiming that “indigeneity” is sacred.
The Maori protests have revealed the strangely unthinking currents on both extremities of the political aisle. One’s liberty and sense of belonging to a land does not and should not depend on “racial” ancestry or an ethnocentric understanding of sovereignty, but on the simple fact of being human.
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SubscribeIDK. I don’t feel more informed about this issue after reading this.
It’s a complex issue in NZ. To massively (overly) simplify it essentially the Treaty of Waitangi was a peace treaty between Māori and the Crown, and it gave Māori some special privileges (ownership of land, natural resources etc) in exchange for accepting the Crown as Sovereign of NZ. However due to the English and Maori versions of the document not being an exact translation of each other there’s always been a few arguments over certain aspects of the Treaty.
The MP in question was proposing some changes to the Treaty (under the guise of clarifying the parts which are contended) which would essentially take away the privileges Māori receive (and in my view earned) as a result of them fighting the British Empire to a standstill all those years ago. This was the reason behind the large nationwide protests.
Unfortunately all anybody sees is the posturing in Parliament. The Maori Party who performed the Haka, and Seymour the MP who proposed the changes to the Treaty originally are all minor parties who achieve nothing but attention seeking
Thanks BB. I feel better informed now.
Misinformed.
The Treaty was an agreement motivated by several things but there was no “fighting the British Empire to a standstill”. The desire, by all, to end the intractable pre treaty intertribal wars was a big factor – they were worse proportionally than the Rwanda genocide. An estimated one third of the native population killed at the hands of fellow Maori. My ancestor chief Hongi Hika was one of the worst; his warriors almost completely de-populated the entire Auckland isthmus and wreaked havoc over much of the north Island. There was no rule of law and nothing to legitamise it if there was. The Treaty addressed that.
The proposed bill is intended to provide for a binding referendum to democratically define principles absent from the Treaty itself. The interpretations to date have been developed, and given, an authority by our courts entirely absent from either translation. It is most definitely not a nullification of the Treaty.
It is now up for public submissions, the three principles of it are:
PrinciplesCivil government—the Government of New Zealand has full power to govern, and Parliament has full power to make laws. They do so in the best interests of everyone, and in accordance with the rule of law and the maintenance of a free and democratic society.
Rights of hapū and iwi Māori—the Crown recognises the rights that hapū and iwi had when they signed the Treaty/te Tiriti. The Crown will respect and protect those rights. Those rights differ from the rights everyone has a reasonable expectation to enjoy only when they are specified in Treaty settlements.
Right to equality—everyone is equal before the law and is entitled to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination. Everyone is entitled to the equal enjoyment of the same fundamental human rights without discrimination.
I think the main objection to David Seymour’s bill is that it is something that could go to a referendum. This I think is where the fear is, that a simple majority of NZ voters could effectively ring-fence the power of the treaty.
And the issue is?
In my opinion a treaty is different to a law. If you want to alter a treaty then it has to be agreed by a majority of both parties rather than just a simple majority, especially when one party has a much larger population than the other
Maori made the treaty via the agency of the missionaries, who were mostly from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) emerging out of the influence of the Clapham Sect (Wilberforce et al). The treaty could be described as a reification of the trust that existed between many Maori and the mission movement, which largely had as its goal to minimise the awful impacts of colonisation that had occurred as a result of exploitation elsewhere. A large proportion of the Maori population had embraced the Christian gospel, as a way out of the intertribal cycle of retribution enabled by the weapons of the settlers. But there were inevitable issues of mistreatment of Maori by the 1860s and 1870s – mostly dishonest land appropriation outside of the spirit or terms of the treaty. Maori felt betrayed and abandoned. So there is a natural and understandable suspicion that the greedy powers want to play the same games again, and the gains made by treaty settlements that recognise the well documented historic grievances since 1840 will be minimised and swept away. The argument is that a referendum is far too blunt a tool for such a nuanced and complex subject.
The “power of the treaty”, it’s principles and their implications have been interpreted by the courts and those interpretations have unquestioningly found their way into legislation without reference to those affected – the governed.
It is very unsatisfactory and there is considerable discomfort with the two tier system that evolved and the implementation of race based rights that resulted. The referendum would most likely succeed and result in an overdue ratification of the treaty but with it’s principles finally defined.
The idea of indigenous rights distinct from the rights of the rest of the population may have some value for those living an isolated pre-industrial tribal lifestyle. That is most definitely not the situation in modern day New Zealand. One can only imagine the horror if the indigenous of Europe were to introduce laws favouring themselves over others. Didn’t someone attempt that mid last century? It didn’t work out well then either.
The discursive frame of Nazi Germany does not seem to apply to the Māori, considering that they have legitimate and provable grievances, whereas the Nazis did not. Moreover, the Nazis were a major European industrial power.
‘Hitler, though!’ seems like, frankly, a hysterical way for you to make your point—no offense.
Thanks Manu, I don’t think the allusion is as inappropriate as it might appear.
“Legitimate and provable grievances” have been, and are being dealt with, through the Waitangi Tribunal and courts. That doesn’t change with the proposed bill – that is not what this is about.
The clamour for the widespread institution of racially separatist governance, as presented in the previous government’s He Puapua report/agenda and as pursued by the Maori Party and allies, is pure ethno nationalism. This toxic identitarianism should have no place in a multi racial democracy. As former NZ PM David Lange had it in a 2000 speech:
“democratic government can accommodate Maori political aspiration in many ways. It can allocate resources in ways which reflect the particular interests of Maori people. It can delegate authority, and allow the exercise of degrees of Maori autonomy. What it cannot do is acknowledge the existence of a separate sovereignty. As soon as it does that, it isn’t a democracy. We can have a democratic form of government or we can have indigenous sovereignty. They can’t coexist and we can’t have them both.”
Sir Apirana Ngata:
My understanding was, having been told this at the Waitangi museum, that the Maori wanted the treaty as they were very worried about the French and figured a deal with the UK was less bad.
But that was a long time ago and surely it is time to aim for equal treatment for all.
Finally isn’t it a bit odd that the Left fight for the Maori to have special treatment as they were in NZ first but want the brand new, and illegal, immigrants to the UK to have special treatment over the long established Natives.
Odd, but wholly unsurprising.
Billy, that wasn’t an objective appraisal for a non-NZ audience. The proposed law explains the Treaty by way of describing its “principles”. It does not “change” the Treaty. There has never been a definition of the Treaty in NZ law, which has increasingly led to it being defined by the Courts.
The proposed principles tend toward equal rights/treatment of all citizens, and Billy Bob is correct that some Maori fear this ends special privileges:
Principle 1: The Executive Government of New Zealand has full power to govern, and the Parliament of New Zealand has full power to make laws, (a) in the best interests of everyone; and (b) in accordance with the rule of law and the maintenance of a free and democratic society.Principle 2: (1) The Crown recognises, and will respect and protect, the rights that hapū and iwi Māori had under the Treaty of Waitangi/te Tiriti o Waitangi at the time they signed it. (2) However, if those rights differ from the rights of everyone, subclause (1) applies only if those rights are agreed in the settlement of a historical treaty claim under the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975Principle 3: (1) Everyone is equal before the law. (2) Everyone is entitled, without discrimination, to (a) the equal protection and equal benefit of the law; and (b) the equal enjoyment of the same fundamental human rights.
Billy Bob is honest in signalling his view that Maori deserve the privileges because they “fought the British Empire to a standstill”. Even if that was true, the Treaty came before those fights: it was signed 1840, whereas the infamous “land wars” were from 1843 and again in the 1860s.
The interdependence and irony of freedom and belonging! Historically, a free man, in England anyway, was defined by his detachment from the land, as compared to a peasant’s entailment to it. He who strives to free himself shall find himself clamouring for bondage? Yes, it’s silly but informative too, and might explain where some get confused?
Spectacularly clear and truthful insight.
Evidently not many here agree!
I don’t think I agree with this, not least because there are multiple ways of ‘belonging’. My identity is strongly bound up in being native English – my ancestors lived here. But I know people whose ancestors came from other parts of the world who also are English, not just in the nationality of their passport, but in the sense of feeling and expressing Englishness in their attitudes and behaviour. And some of those people also have a strong identity as belonging to another nation or ethnic group eg Armenian, Indian, Mexican, Serb. I think the writer, like too many commentators today, has a rather simplistic either/or view of nationality and identity.
I think we need to stop fighting the ideological battles of the last century and look at what is happening now. What I see happening is an effort to demolish the idea of nationality and of belonging – at least for those who are white and British!
I don’t think you can compare Britain to newer countries like Canada, NZ, Australia and America. Large indigenous populations were displaced in these countries. For that reason, I believe there should be some form of recognition. Natives were mistreated in Canada back in the day. The pendulum has swung wildly in the other direction though with genocide narratives etc. However, natives should not have a defacto veto over national projects that impact the vast majority of people living in a country.
That’s part of the problem. In NZ the left largely wants to put the natives on a victimhood pedestal, throw money at them and blame every negative outcome they face on colonialism, even on issues to which it’s completely unrelated. The right then swing wildly in the opposite direction, and flat out refuse to acknowledge that they were often mistreated in the past, suffered financially and generational poverty can be a hard trap to escape from, as a thousand years of the British class system can verify.
In an ideal world you’d treat everybody equally, but throw extra money at the poorer areas to improve schools, infrastructure and job prospects. This would disproportionately help the native groups as they tend to live in the poorer areas, but also stop ridiculous situations whereby a rich Maori kid at a good school is eligible for certain benefits while a poor kid if a different ethnicity born to a single mother on a council estate is denied them
“1,000 years of the British class system”. Actually Britain has had rather high levels of social mobility compared to most other complex societies. I don’t know why it is so often lazily treated as the example par excellence of a calcified unchanging rigid class system. I can’t think of any post agricultural society which doesn’t have significant levels of social inequality. I think it’s a pretty good bet that such power inequalities are actually necessary for any realistic society to function. Certainly, the disastrous experiment with Marxist Leninism doesn’t lead one to think otherwise
So, what exactly is the definition of ‘Canadian’ today?
Currently Canada is; peak Woke, peak Justin, post national, its institutions like the Supreme Court, the CBC, and its Universities are decolonizing themselves, its people have forgotten their history and are learning “Other Ways of Knowing”. Next year there will be a federal election the results of which; Justin will cease to reign, members of the Supreme Court ( all appointed by Justin ) will wish to retire, the CBC will be defunded, Universities will rediscover the Enlightenment and abandon DEI policies in pursuit of Federal grants ( to replace the hefty tuition fees charged to foreign students whose visas have been revoked ), and finally from the South The Eye of the Dark Lord will turn upon North and demand fealty or extinction.
The Dark Lord wants your water and the women who aren’t ugly.
Willing dupe.
All such edifice of the past just lead to racism. They are all fighting over the payoff, government handouts.
It’s how democracy fails.
Spot on. Where it gets sticky is when you have to decide what form that “recognition” will take. In Canada, where I live, it presently takes the form of fatuous “land acknowledgements”, which, as some native comedian pointed out, is like stealing someone’s truck and then yelling “sorry I stole your truck” while driving by in it.
I completely agree with you and would further point out that very often it isn’t “natives” objecting to some policy, but progressive political activists talking on their behalf!
If you read pages 72-73 of Adam Rutherford’s book ‘How to Argue With a Racist’, you will learn that the global isopoint means that every white person living in New Zealand today is descended from people living in New Zealand , 3400 years ago.
The ‘settlers’ were literally returning to the lands that their ancestors lived in.
Nobody was in NZ 3400 years ago. The Maori (and possibly Moriori) were the first settlers on the islands, and they’ve only been there for around 700 years
I might be wrong about this, but I thought the Maori wiped out the true indigenous population of NZ.
I don’t think there was a true indigenous population as most of us would understand the term (Aborigines in Australia for example).
I think the Moriori arrived a similar time but the Maori have always been dominant and possibly wiped out the few that were here, and the Moriori only really exist now on a small group of islands off the east coast. Again though it’s all contested history as there was no written language amongst either people until the British turned up and put the language to paper
Probably a succession of such .
Thanks for the info. I never knew that! Such ignorance! I stand corrected. (What I and Adam Rutherford said still applies to Australia)
700 years.
That’s less time than the Anglo-Saxons have been in England.
Do we get to call ourselves Indigenous?
I’ve always classed the white British population as indigenous personally. We may be mongrels in the sense the blood is a mixture of Celt, Roman, Saxon, Viking and Norman but as an ethnic group there’s a continuous lineage of a few thousand years so I believe that’s classed as indigenous
Leave out the Romans. They contributed no detectable ancestry.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
“The Aqueduct?”
No. We don’t get to call ourselves ‘indigenous’ because that means ‘blood and soil’, which is acceptable for particular peoples of colour, but not particular peoples of pallor…
I think you are right to point this out. I’m sympathetic to the Maori who are a minority in the land they dominated before because my ancestors were also a minority culture perpetually. However there seems to be a level of hypocrisy involved on the part of the left.
You can find posts on X getting traction saying that Jews don’t belong in the middle east because their DNA is not tied to land. They don’t even know of those mizrahi jews who always lived in the middle east.
But it is saying the same as nazism that said Jews didn’t belong in Germany because they weren’t aryan.
Only yesterday I saw a post of a image of a DNA test proving that a Palestinian should be the actor of mother mary in a film rather the Israeli they picked as Palestinians were closer genetically to a single dna sample of a person who lived in that region 2000 years ago.
How far do you take this? Should the now majority Bengali tower hamlets remember the cockneys that dominated there before?
If the final sentence of the article is correct:
“One’s liberty and sense of belonging to a land does not and should not depend on “racial” ancestry or an ethnocentric understanding of sovereignty, but on the simple fact of being human.”
then why is the author descibing himself as British-Nigerian at all ? Surely it no longer matters ?
Though it’s not actually correct to assert that anyone automatically belongs anywhere simply by moving there. And it’s intellectually dishonest to use an article about New Zealand as cover for pushing such a specious argument. Which I suspect was the main purpose of thios article.
To the article – it’s often overlooked that the Maori only arrived in New Zealand after 1300AD, so while they were certainly there before Abel Tasman in 1642, it’s arguably not by that much in historical terms.
There was no Treaty of Waitangi for the poor Moriori people, who lived on the Chatham Islands. The Maori killed off or enslaved them in the 1830s. Some were even cannabilized.
What’s your point? History is full of examples of one group dominating another, it’s how most ethnic groups came into being. How is it relevant to protests a spat between Māori and the Crown today?
Not hypocritical at all, no
So because a group mistreated another 700 years ago that means others should be free to mistreat them today?
By that logic, this current treaty bill is just another example of one group dominating another – so what’s to worry about?
The various branches of my family arrived in NZ in the 1860s, 1880s and 1920s, from Ulster and Lancashire. I don’t have a drop of Māori blood as far as I know. My uncle married a (wonderful) Māori woman and that gives his descendants significant advantages in modern NZ, including — as things stand — an unelected seat at the table of many if not most local bodies, planning decisions, public policy, the right to switch electoral rolls to strategic advantage etc etc. Exacerbated by Adern overreach.
Māori did not fight the Brits to a standstill, though they did mighty damage to each other, pre-Treaty, with one of the first gifts we gave them — firearms. Our second, disease, did more.
I think the 1840 treaty was probably well meaning on both sides, but how could either side possibly understand the world view, or ideas of justice, property etc of the other? On the Māori side the hope for some relief from the internecine warfare of the musket wars may have played a part; also the understanding by some of them of what they could see coming. Who knows. Not me.
There was much nefarious dealing by the Brits post-treaty, and maybe my own family benefited. There were land wars and confiscations. There was also arguably well meaning colonial dispossession of Māori culture and language. There have been major efforts since the 1980s to make amends.
The problem now is that over the same period politicians have legislated about “the treaty principles” without defining them. That hole has been filled by the courts, lawyers, attention seekers, activists and special interests. The ACT party Bill attempts to remedy that deficiency by defining them. It has already been amended. There is a six month period where we can have a debate about the understandable disagreement. So far so not good. But if we can’t debate it this won’t end well.
Thanks Ian, probably the most valid insight in either the article or comments.
Thank you
Interesting facts:
Maori arrived in NZ approx 1250 ad
Europeans arrived in NZ approx 1650.
So 400 years later
The Maori successfully perpetrated the Morioro genocide 1835-1863
Remind me, who are the settlers and who are the indigenous?
I’m not sure what you’re driving at, Claire. To trade in gross generalisations, NZ was one of those countries where Europeans said, “ Hey, that place looks promising — let’s move there.” So the European population went from a tiny fraction of Maori to at least five times in the space of 50-60 years. Isn’t that what, before the term was politicised, was meant by “settlers”? Whereas in say India it was just an admin/commercial presence? And FWIW weren’t Moriori themselves “Māori” — just isolated and developed a culture over time that made them particularly vulnerable to the mainlanders?
The author says, “the sense of belonging to a land does not and should not depend on “racial” ancestry or an ethnocentric understanding of sovereignty, but on the simple fact of being human.”
Weak position.
People don’t feel that they belong to a land without having a familial legacy in that land. And constellations of families become a “race,” or some other larger inherited identifier, because they interbreed.
And as for “sovereignty,” there are no happy people who feel that they belong to a land but the land does not belong to them.
Being “simply a human” without a place and people is intolerable.
Agree, but a key issue seems to be how progressives globally are blatantly ‘selective’ (hypocritical) about the societies to which they bestow their scientifically socialist legitimacy in making such claims. Societies they rate as ‘good’ have this right, societies Marx claimed had blotted their history books, from his chauvinistic perspective, have no such right.
Yes. Some assertions of ‘blood and soil’ are better than others…
Is the author British or Nigerian? Just curious.
“It is simply reactionary, as it posits that particular pieces of land belong to a particular volk, and a particular volk belong to a piece of land…..”
Indeed so, and quite right too.
And this is the self-evident, inconvenient truth that is never, ever spoken.
Every ethnic group around the world protests intrusions against their own group. Maoris are protesting what they see as an outrage against them. Nigerians protest against intrusions against Nigerians. Chinese protest against anti-Chinese discrimination. Why are you so outraged that white Europeans (“white Anglos”) protest against intrusions against their rights? Do you feel that it’s time for whites to go sit in the corner, or go to the back of the bus, or be otherwise excluded?
The Māori make a deal with the British Empire which grants them specific privileges on their own land in exchange for allowing the British to settle on that land. The British settle on that land, set up liberal bodies, which disproportionately neglect Māori people (as is evinced by countless metrics) and then after the white settler population reaches a certain numerical threshold, they vote to rescind the initial treaty under the guise of “all being humans”. Meanwhile, Maori continue to disproportionately take up space in prisons, poor health outcomes, and overall lower socioeconomic well-being. The liberal solution of “we are all equal” is horrific as it discounts for the realities that marginalized groups will disproportionately be targeted by liberalism, particularly when capitalism reaches moments of crisis. The ethnic essentialism also has its own issues with regards to the Māori – but short of advocating for an overhaul towards communism or socialism – it still strikes me as the lesser of two evils within the context of the issue at hand. Particularly as the special privileges that they are granted are relatively benign to begin with, considering that they are falling behind on virtually every metric associated with wellbeing. To take such “special privileges” away, during the rise of a populist libertarian government implies something more sinister in my view.
Oh and briefly, I don’t see any comparisons to Israel/Palestine as being pertinent. European Jews citing a history going back thousands of years is completely distinct to something as recent as a treaty signed in 1840 with correspondingly difficult racial relations remaining since. Granted, I do see your critique with regards to ethnic essentialism. However, I still would posit that it is quite easy to find a myriad of differences in the struggle between liberation for Māori in comparison to say, the Britain-first movement. Theirs a long history of anti-colonial revolutionary groups being equated with white-nationalist politics from western leftists. Broken treatises, and systemic racism, are all things which are legitimate grievances for the Māori whereas the grievances of a group such as Britain First are not comparable. Māori groups often advocate for climate protections that benefit all people. I see no equivalent from “Indigenous” ethno-nationalist movements in Europe. Considering the specific circumstances on the ground and historically, critical support for the protest movement seems like an entirely reasonable leftist position to take. If the Maori were seriously advocating for an israeli-type of genocidial solution, then sure, rescind the critical support. But for now, the movement has a broadly positive platform and should be supported.
“A lot of indigenous rights activism is premised on romantic notions that people like the Maori are noble savages who have a “unique” way of life and relationship with “the land” by dint of their ancestry that ought to be recognised and preserved by the state”
Many on the left wish to preserve indigenous cultures so they can feel good about themselves and so they can see them, visit them, like creatures in a zoo. They are a slice of the past we advanced humans can observe while enjoying the benefits of modernity ourselves. I wonder if it is fair to discourage modernization of such indigenous cultures for that reason. Subsistence living based on rights, for example to take a certain amount of salmon in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska is maybe not a fair trade.
When Māori tribal interests are arguing, seemingly without irony, that they have a traditional right to the 5G cellular spectrum, perhaps it’s time to revisit the Treaty of Waitangi and put down a few boundaries, if only to stop people taking the P.
How unfortunate that there are no treaties that can be interpreted to mandate that all authority and discourse in Britain be divided 50:50 between the Welsh and the Sassenachs. And earlier between the Welsh and the Beaker Folk, before that between the Beakers and Cheddar Man, etc. etc. in infinite regress.
This article strikes me as having been written by a globalist technocrat who just finds all such discussions of indigeneity, spiritual ties to land, and ethnic claims to land, vexatious and inconvenient. Questions that the article raises resist being answered by the technocrat’s preferred tools: computer models, statistical analyses etc., aren’t much use when discussing cultural/spiritual issues, so in the end, the author just throws his hands up and says it’s enough to be human, go anywhere you like, it doesn’t matter where you’re from.
The Great Replacement theory is a fact. Just look at demographics and the Democrats opening up the border to allow replacement levels of immigration.
I often like Ralph Leonard’s articles but he’s just wrong on this. The vague notion of being Human is not enough to build coherent and stable societies, as Europeans today are rapidly coming to find out.
He also makes an assertion without any evidence that ..”those on the Right [in New Zealand] aren’t objecting out of any honest liberal principle. Their opposition is pure hypocrisy: it is simply because it is against their ethno-national group (white Anglos)”. He provides no evidence for this whatever.
The thing with the Treaty is that it seems like a very static thing to have, in the context of inevitability changing societies.
Over hundreds of years, ethnic groups change. Nobody identifies as a Jute or an (Anglo-) Norman or a Norseman anymore in Britain, because over hundred of years, those identities ceased being meaningful. By the same token, nationalities change as well – I’ve yet to mean a proud Burgundian or Savoyard.
Enshrining ethnic identities and structures in law almost always leads to absurdities when you fast forward a few hundred years. Even if you cry assimilation and try your best to resist – the likelihood of holding the line over centuries is pretty poor.