Protesters dressed in traditional Māori attire performed hakas while marching alongside tens of thousands of people through the streets of the nation’s capital, Wellington, on Tuesday.

Booming Indigenous Maori "haka" chants rang out across New Zealand's capital on Tuesday, as tens of thousands rallied against a conservative push to redefine the nation's founding treaty. Protests have been swelling throughout New Zealand after a minor party in the conservative coalition government drafted a bill to redefine the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.

A fight for Maori rights drew 42,000 protesters to the New Zealand Parliament in the capital Wellington on Tuesday. A nine-day-long hikoi, or peaceful march – a tradition of the Maori – was undertaken in protest against a bill that seeks to reinterpret the country’s 184-year-old founding Treaty of Waitangi,