.
O"Shaughnessy describes the way ethnic minorities, such as New Zealand Maoris, are disadvantaged and marginalized as:.
"The world is divided into different and unequally positioned ethnic groups and cultures; there are many inequalities of power and wealth between these groups who are, consequently, often in conflict both internally and with other groups."(O"Shaughnessy 1999, p.220).
This concept is specifically dealt with in Once were Warriors and it is because of this factor that it can be concluded that the film is directed toward Maori audiences, or toward White New Zealanders in an effort to raise awareness of disadvantages faced by the Maori community.
In Once Were Warriors the history of the Maori people functions as a basis of both future salvation and present degradation. The Maoris are depicted as a people whose history, past, and traditions have been taken from them by colonialism, which forcibly separated them from their past. The degradation of Maori culture and history can by described by cultural theorist Homi Bhabha as:.
" The history of the west as a despotic power, a colonial power, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition The material legacy of this repressed history is inscribed in the return of post-colonial peoples to the metropolis. Their very presence there changes the politics of the metropolis, its cultural ideologies and its intellectual traditions, because they- as a people who have been recipients of a colonial cultural experience- displace some of the great metropolitan narratives of progress and law and order, and question the authority and authenticity of those narratives." (O"Shaughnessy [Rutherford 1990, p.218] 1999, p.224).
This biased representation of history serves to reiterate the eurocentric view of the "primitive savage", such as portraying the Maori culture as static and primitive. The white New Zealanders, in contrast, have a "history" and their history of success and accomplishment allows them to succeed in contemporary society whereas the Maoris have only the history of a conquered and oppressed people.
