Huh. That's an interesting link, thank you. I'm sorry to have offended, it wasn't intentional--myself and friends have used the term referring to ourselves (all of us being part Maori) and I didn't realise it was such a loaded term with that kind of history.

(Now that I think of it--in New Zealand, one of the largest gangs is actually named the Mongrel Mob, which may have had some impact on normalising the word for human usage, at least when we were in school.)