I am Maori and very proud of my heritage. I have lived in Boston for twenty years but travel back to New Zealand four to six times a year. I am fortunate in that I have a business with offices in both countries. This is an excellent article that, apart from raising the awareness that, to Maori, the "ta moko" is sacred and has significant spiritual meaning, it also reveals that Maori culture is re-emerging and very much defining a new and distinctive culture - much like a renaissance - that is New Zealand in the 21st Century. For too long New Zealand was depicted mostly as a British Colony, which it was, with largely a "borrowed" British culture. Most New Zealand people when they speak, including Maori, are often mistaken for British. It has been the young Maori, some two and a half centuries later, who have re-discovered the power of their andcestory and brought it to the forefront, in art,theater, film, community,education, politics,and government at home ... and more recently onto the international stage. Maori of the past were a warrior nation. They went to war against the red-coat British Army, like the colonials in America at the arrival of the British, and like America, never surrendered. Peace only came at the signing of a treaty, the Treaty of Waitangi, that led to a one of the few countries where natives and european settlers evolved as a single nation, Maori and Pakeha (white settlers) largely in harmony. And now young Maori are recognizing the power and strength of the customs and culture that their ancestors lived and survived by, and they are finding inspiration in re-discovery and a "re-birth", a renaissance, that is shaping the new New Zealand. There is much to be proud of about this tiny South Pacific country.