Almost one in five Maori now live outside New Zealand, with most calling Australia home.
New
statistics released at a population conference in Auckland show 151,000
of the 815,000 Maori people in the world live overseas.
All but
11,000 of them are in Australia and an increasing number were born there
into families who had been there for two or even three generations,
said demographer Tahu Kukutai, a research fellow at Waikato University.
The
report was collated using census data from Australia, Britain, the
United States and Canada, and is believed to be the closest estimate of
New Zealand's indigenous population movement in the past decade.
Dr
Kukutai said Maori living in Australia had not lost their sense of
being Maori and were quite unlikely to have taken up Australian
citizenship, The New Zealand Herald reported.
Nevertheless, she did warn that the shift would require a rethink of what it means to be an indigenous New Zealander.
"Are
there ways of being Maori away from home?" she asked. "How many
generations can you sustain that? What about land succession?"
She
said some iwi were struggling to keep up contact details for members
living overseas, many who had land rights, and suggested Maori would
need to come up with modern ways to keep the connection with their home
country.
"Are we going to have podcasts, or password-protected whakapapa websites?" she asked.
NZN