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| History |
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Tourism Auckland ©
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According to Maori legend, Kupe, the great Polynesian navigator came to the South Pacific around 1,200 years ago. His first sight was not of the land itself but of a long white cloud that hovered above it, and so he named it Aotearoa, which in Maori means the Land of the Long White Cloud. The country was later called New Zealand .
Today New Zealand is proud of its identity as a Pacific nation, based on a partnership between Pakeha, as New Zealanders of European origin are called, and Maori. At the heart of that partnership is the Treaty of Waitangi, an agreement that lives on as a national symbol for unity and understanding between cultures. |
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