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Come Saturday night it\u2019s doubtful any player will be more emotional than Harata Butler when she walks onto the field for the One New Zealand Warriors\u2019 historic NRLW Indigenous Round clash against Canberra in Hamilton (Kirikiriroa).<\/p>\n
Fiercely proud and passionate about Waikato and her M\u0101ori heritage, the 32-year-old had the honour of taking the One New Zealand Warriors onto Accor Stadium for last Saturday night\u2019s encounter with Canterbury Bankstown.<\/p>\n
That meant so much to her but it will cut even deeper this week when she heads onto FMG Stadium Waikato to celebrate the second week of the Indigenous Round – and more special still with the Warriors debuting Te Kahu Here, the club\u2019s first-ever Indigenous Round jersey.<\/p>\n
Butler was exceptional in two potent stints in last Saturday night\u2019s club record 34-6 win over the Bulldogs, marking a deeply personal occasion by making more metres (143) and post-contact metres (68) than any other player on either side.<\/p>\n
Later Butler\u2019s feelings about the meaning of the round came to the fore at the media conference when she was what it would be to play in Hamilton in the first of three home games there.<\/p>\n
Clearly emotional, Butler paused, her voice breaking a little, as she said: \u201cThat\u2019s my home and it\u2019s our home away from home.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t get any better than playing at Go Media but to bring it back home to the Waikato in Hamilton, in Kirikiriroa, and to be able to celebrate Indigenous Round as well \u2026 I don\u2019t think I can find the words right now. If anything, it\u2019s a feeling that I\u2019m going to bottle up and keep for the rest of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Griffiths: From day one we’ve bitten down on the mouthguard<\/p>\n
Sitting beside her in the conference head coach Ron Griffiths, a proud Gommeroi man who grew up on Awabakal and Wonnarua country in New South Wales, was full of empathy and admiration.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday (before playing the Bulldogs) we went down on the Parramatta River and had a bit of a yarn and H (Harata) said to me: \u2018Do you want to talk about this area and what it means to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people?\u2019,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said we could probably leave that to celebrate it next week when we\u2019re over in New Zealand.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe said no, so her leadership told me that I really needed to talk about what it means and then she spoke about our relationship \u2013 the Maori people with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people \u2013 so it\u2019s fitting to have her sitting alongside me because her leadership qualities in our team are second to none. We\u2019re proud of what she has done.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Butler followed up: \u201cGoing on the back of what coach said, Indigenous Round is something to embrace and (to) celebrate indigenous peoples of every whenua, every land, and out of respect, whether here in Australia or we\u2019re back in Aotearoa, it\u2019s just a respect thing to always acknowledge the people of the land.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou stick to protocol and, hey, you\u2019ll be looked after so on behalf of our tuakana I just want to thank your tupana, your indigenous people here, for looking after us on their whenua and I welcome them to our whenua next week.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Come Saturday night it\u2019s doubtful any player will be more emotional than Harata Butler when she walks onto…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59825,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":["post-59824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}