Five hundred thousand Maori are making clear progress with the 3.1 million non-Maori in New Zealand, just as Hawaii's 225,000 Hawaiians are making progress with more than 900,000 other residents here.
Activists say it's much too slow, but even they agree the pace is picking up.
You start with democracy where protests are allowed and the legal methods of change exist, beginning at the ballot box and carrying on into the courts and government. You can wave before everybody the painful fact that your people who were overrun haven't all adjusted to the new order and culture imposed by whites in the 19th century. They have much higher unemployment than others, die much younger, drop out of school at much higher rates and are imprisoned at much higher rates. The record also shows that Polynesian populations in both New Zealand and Hawaii shrank by the mid-1800s to only about 40,000 from several hundred thousand in the previous century because of the introduction of Western diseases to which they had little natural resistance. You develop an academic foundation for your cause.