The following is an excerpt from the book “Peace Action, Struggles for a Decolonised and Demilitarised Oceania and East Asia”, edited by a wonderful ally, Tangata Tiriti and tireless advocate for peace and justice, Valerie Morse. Valerie and I sat and spoke at length about the application of the Doctrine of Discovery within Te Moananui a Kiwa and the importance of that as background context for its subsequent colonization, the following chapter is the result of that conversation. Kei te mihi nui rawa ki a koe e hoa, nahau i to mai tenei korero i awau. I’m further honoured to be sharing this publication with others I greatly admire, including Arama Rata, Qiane Matata-Sipu, Emalani Case, Mengzhu Fu, Tuhi-Ao Bailey and many others whose essays in this publication uplift and inform us all. I’ve often reflected on disconnection being a definitive characteristic of colonisation, and reconnection therefore being a definitive, non-negotiable characteristic of re-Indigenisation. I’m hugely grateful for this opportunity to connect our narratives through our shared oceanic ancestor that reaches out from all of our shores, to each other, and our shared space in between.

The book can be purchased here from Unity Books Wellington.

Setting The Scene

To set the scene for the invasion and subsequent colonisation and militarisation of Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa beginning in the late 17th century, it is necessary to review the history unfolding simultaneously

in Europe, focusing particularly on the Crusades and the Doctrine of Discovery that followed it.

The Holy Crusades were a series of invasions of and claims to the Holy Land (now known as Israel/Palestine) in the name of the Roman Catholic Church in the 11th and 12th centuries. Pope Urban II called upon the monarchies of Europe, including the British, French and Norwegian Kings, and the Holy Roman Emperor, to militarily seize these lands for Christendom, and to convert the people who lived there by force if necessary.

The Pope exercised the singular religious or divine authority to excuse people from the punishments of mortal sins that were customarily carried out as acts of war in the name of God and the Bible; he issued Papal Bulls—Church laws—that sanctioned these crimes. In order for it to be a Church-ordained Crusade—not just murder, not just theft, not just dispossession, not just rape—permission from the divine authority of the Vatican was essential. Thus, the Vatican authorised these Crusades to be carried out in the Holy Lands against the Saracens, i.e., the Muslim community. It’s important to understand this targeting throughout history

by the Church, because the relationship and the persecution of various communities are a consistent theme throughout this story.

Fast forward from the Crusades to the 15th century in Portugal where King Alfonso and his uncle, Henry Infante (so called “Henry the Navigator,” although he was neither a seaman nor a navigator, but a religious crusader and supporter of imperial voyages), wanted to break into the lucrative slave trade in West Africa. Henry asked Alfonso to petition Pope Nicholas for permission in the form of a Papal Bull to extend the Crusades into West Africa commencing the trans-Atlantic slave trade that ultimately claimed the lives of 30 million African people.

Three Papal Bulls were issued: first, Dum Diversas, then Romanus Pontifex followed by Inter Caetera that gave permission to invade, to subdue, to dispossess and to commit to perpetual slavery any people that these Crusaders encountered. These Papal Bulls later became known officially as the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. These religious law documents were about things that could be done to the bodies of people, as well as what could be done with their lands and their waters—their bays and their harbours. This is another key point to remember: among the crusaders and their benefactors, there was a real fascination with the bodies of waters they encountered and water as property.

A crusader could commit people to perpetual slavery for use and profit. The concept of profit is the third really important thing to keep in mind about the story of invasion and colonisation of the Moana. Even in the 15th century it was a central motivation. Although religion was the noble goal cloaking the Crusades, it was always an economic project that utilised the power and the resources of the Church and Christiandom to obtain resources, both human and material.

It was the application of these three Papal Bulls, Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex and Inter Caetera, beyond West Africa to the “New World” that initiated the subsequently named “Age of Discovery.” These laws didn’t just give permission; rather, they imposed a Christian duty on the kings and queens of Europe to send people out to acquire these lands and souls.

Those kings and queens resourced an entire cadre of men with ships, crews and weapons; most importantly, they were armed with the protection of these Papal Laws to undertake their voyages. The Doctrine of Discovery was formally integrated into specific orders from Kings and Queens to those voyagers to justify their actions. The Spanish El Requerimiento, the “notice of requirement,” was a “divinely ordained right to take possession of the territories of the New World and to subjugate, exploit and, when necessary, to fight the native inhabitants.”1 In some instances, as soon as land was visible on the horizon, they would read El Requerimiento—it wasn’t even within earshot of the Indigenous people of that land who would not have been bilingual in any case, nor have any idea what they were talking about.

While not knowing nor consenting to this requirement, those to whom it was directed were forced to give up their lands and to submit themselves to the yoke of the ‘Cross and the Crown’—the specific terms used in El Requerimiento and numerous other European proclamations of discovery.

The Requerimiento explicitly states that the crusaders, ‘will do such mischief as we may.’ What they meant was that they would take women and children and do to them whatever they wanted—assaults upon women and children featured as a part of that process. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Franciscan monk who accompanied Christopher Columbus, kept a detailed record of the things that he observed Columbus and his men doing. These are some of the darkest records I’ve ever encountered. It is deeply traumatising to read what was done to people in the name of the Church.

Along with Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Colombus, early imperialist seafarers included Hernan Cortez, Francisco Pizarro and Ferdinand Magellan, all sanctioned ultimately by the Church. Magellan was the first one to sight Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa and to call it the “Pacific.” By this point, of course, we already had three thousand years of our own Moana traditions; our own names for this area, our own regulations, our own ways of working together to care for Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa; but Magellan happened along and renamed it the Pacific.

This is how the Doctrine of Discovery arrived in Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa.

Applying the Doctrine in Te Moana

By the time of James Cook’s first voyage in 1768, European explorers had been navigating around the region for a couple of hundred years. Cook’s three voyages to the South Pacific were his second naval posting: his first posting was in the Seven Years’ War in Newfoundland. It was here that he learned two skills critical to these later voyages: how to map, and how to act with unconscionable barbarity.

In that war, James Cook was mentored by Jeffrey Amherst who became known as the father of germ warfare. He is famous in military history and notorious within First Nation circles for distributing smallpox-infected blankets to deliberately thin out the native populations in areas before he invading their territory. Amherst was also a fan of what he called the “Conquistador method,” which involved training dogs on the taste of human flesh and setting them to hunt and kill native peoples. Joseph Banks was also stationed in Newfoundland during the same period and, while chiefly a botanist, was also involved in and oversaw studies on the cloth transmission of infectious diseases.

Cook was rewarded after this posting with command of the HMS Endeavour and a commission for three voyages of exploration, and he was joined by Banks who was granted membership to the Royal Society off the back of his research in Newfoundland. On the first of these, he was to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti. He was also given another set of secret instructions to open only after he got to Tahiti. These said that his actual mission was to sail south, to find the supposed rich, southern continent of “Terra Australis” and to take note of its resources. Specifically, he was to take note of medicines, plants and minerals observed. Even then, minerals were a dominant concern.

Cook was instructed to treat natives with civility, but that he should not suffer “trifling,” and was given permission to take possession of all lands encountered. HMS Endeavour was a naval vessel, and Cook was a Royal Navy lieutenant. There were 10 four-pound cannons, 12 swivel guns and multiple muskets onboard. Firearms were issued to the crew wherever they landed. They distributed pieces of cloth infected with smallpox and influenza to natives when Banks and Cook knew from research and experience that this would result in transmission to the natives, with deadly consequences. They were armed in the same way as any military endeavour, excuse the pun. It was a very deliberate and purposeful decision that this was a military vessel.

Cook arrived in Aotearoa on 9 October 1769. Apparently it was a very calm, sunny day at the headwaters of the Tūranganui-A-Kiwa river. In need of fresh water and firewood he sent a crew on a pinnace (small boat) to assess the area. His crew entered a whare that was empty at the time. They helped themselves to some things and then made their way back to the ship.

My tīpuna, including a man called Te Maro, encountered them and began the wero—the ceremonial challenge to ascertain an intruder’s intentions—when one of Cook’s crewmen simply shot and killed him. Te Maro was an important person whose lines of whakapapa converged to enable him to serve as a peace arbiter and upholder of a covenant amongst our people. A lot of hope had been vested in him; with his violent killing, that covenant, along with the future vision shared by the local people, was shattered.

Before Cook and his men left, they had named the landing Poverty Bay, as they obtained neither fresh water nor firewood, and killed more than a dozen people. For much of the following few weeks of Cook’s first voyage in Aotearoa, he rarely passed more than four or five days without killing people. In some cases, he knew that he had killed someone outright; in other cases people were shot and wounded. The records do not reveal whether they survived.

Cook’s modus operandi was to abduct the leaders of communities to force the local people either into doing something for him or as a means of collective punishment. In Tahiti, he abducted Poetua, the young pregnant daughter of the local ariki, Oreo, in order to force the local people into bringing back two of his men who had absconded of their own free will in order to evade Cook’s increasingly irrational behaviour. Cook carried out these kidnappings numerous times across his three voyages; finally, he was murdered while trying to abduct Kalaniʻōpuʻu, the high chief of the island of Hawai’i.

Over Cook’s three journeys, his actions became increasingly brutal and violent. There is a record of him carving a cross into a man’s arm down to the bone simply for stealing. There is a lot of kōrero about Cook being a “gentleman” and a “kind coloniser,” but his record of murder, rape and torture speak for themselves.

Cook was probably the most prolific practitioner of the Doctrine of Discovery on behalf of the English Crown in our region. His journeys were an extension and continuation of the story that began with the Crusades and the Papal Bulls. It was quite simply an imperial invasion, an act of war.

Toxic, imperial masculinity and infection

It’s useful to reflect on two specific issues that are both recurrent themes in discussions of colonisation and militarism. One is the use of infection as weapon and the other is the sexualisation of women and children.

Cook’s first landing in Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa was in Tahiti. Upon arrival, the disease-infected crew sexually assaulted the local women. The men on Cook’s boat carried common sexually transmitted infections (STIs) of the day, specifically syphillis and gonorrhea. Medical records from the voyage show that Cook himself did not have venereal disease when he left on his first journey, but he certainly had it by the time he returned. The same was true for his crew (many of his crew already had it when they left and some also caught it enroute). There are numerous historical claims about Cook’s strict command; however, in reality he permitted these violations and indeed, participated in them.

At minimum, Cook’s sexually infectious behaviour was unconscionable; however, it was also potentially deliberate. We know from native historians that he infected Lelemahoalani, the daughter of the ariki of Kaua’i when she would have been age 14 or 15. The Kanaka Ma’oli historians record in their ‘mele (songs) and their ‘oli (chants) that when the local women saw Lelemahoalani bedding down with Cook, they interpreted that as tacit approval to do so with Cook’s men. Consequently, STIs were widespread in their communities, and there was significant loss of life and the loss of reproductive capacity. Those infections set the scene for mass dispossession and injustices that endure today.

The early accounts that were sent back to Europe described the women in a hyper-sexualised, exotic way, noting that they “ripened earlier” and were “easy.” Cook and his men repeatedly and regularly had sexual intercourse with children as young as nine.

Responses in Europe to these reports included evenings in brothels with themed orgies based around perceptions of Moana peoples. The hyper- sexualised view of our Moana region and its relationship to militarism is a theme that has endured over time. It has its roots in those very early contacts and invasions by Europeans.

Mare Liberum: Free Seas

Cook also came armed with what was the first international maritime law from Europe, called Mare Liberum, literally the free seas. Written in 1609 by Hugo Grotius, it stated that the sea belonged to everyone (a refrain that will sound all too familiar to Māori regarding freshwater) and that everyone had a right to free passage and the ability to trade by way of the sea.

Today, freedom is used as a code word for oppression, as in free trade, free speech and in this case, free seas. This deceptive notion of “freedom” of access to territories has never, of course, extended to territories owned by monarchs of Europe, only to areas inhabited by non-white, non-Christian peoples, and thereby carries forth the assumptions held within the Papal Bulls underpinning the Doctrine of Discovery. This is an early example of European laws that were developed to enable invasion and to enable people to be able to take ownership of land and to dispossess native peoples.

By the time of Cook’s arrival, the Europeans had two- to three hundred years of operating under these laws that normalised their sense of entitlement to disposess and dehumanise Indigenous peoples around the world. Then, it was completely acceptable to claim land where others lived and to kill in pursuit of that end.

The name “Pacific’” as a reference to peace is ironic when in reality this space is a war zone; it is a military training ground; it is a weapons testing ground; it is a weapons dumping ground. It is a violent place with sanctioned acts of brutality against native peoples.

For Europeans, Mare Liberum was not about the ocean as a space that Indigenous people occupied. From a Māori perspective, of course, the ocean is our connector and mother, our ancestor, Atua and provider. Families were created on the ocean. Women gave birth on and in the ocean. People were traversing and living on the ocean. Thus the idea of the ocean as a neutral zone to which no one has rights, that only exists as a border and as a separator of land, is completely at odds with Moana perspectives and relationships to the Moana.

The Eurocentric perspective dominates today: the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is built upon the assumption of Mare Liberum, has continuously allowed for the Moana to be bombed, to be dumped upon, to be overfished, to be drilled and to be mined in a way that has completely devastated it. Thousands and thousands of years of highly successful Indigenous regulation and collaborative management has been erased by Eurocentric mis-management.

Of course, the military plays a huge role in this. It assumes rights of conservation of those spaces as well as military domination. The military have utilised their extensive budgets to outbid others for conservation responsibilities in remote regions of Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa, thereby eliminating all other conservation watchdogs. The same military agencies then promote their conservation work at international fora like the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) even though these conservation activities pale in comparison to the damage done by testing, training and dumping. It is an astounding act of greenwashing. The amount of ecological damage caused by the military in the region is incalculable. The noise pollution, seismic testing, weapons testing and war games all contributed to the absolute ecological devastation inflicted on our tūpuna. That’s before we even get to nuclear dumping and nuclear testing.

The Doctrine was never rescinded, only extended

None of these Papal Bulls have ever been rescinded. They continue to be the foundation of systems of extraction that were set up through the Doctrine of Discovery. Early Papal Bulls, Inter Caetera in particular, became the basis for many international laws governing how nations interact with each other. The resources still flow outward today because the systems of dispossession are still

in place. For example, in West Africa, Europeans acting under Church auspicies laid claim to those lands. Those resources, including the people themselves, were redistributed and mineral and other resources were sent to Europe and the Americas. Africa is a resource rich continent with some of the poorest nations in the world; this is a result of the violent invasion and the extraction of their mineral wealth facilitated through the Doctrine of Discovery.

Even where European powers have politically withdrawn from their colonial occupations, they have done so only after completely economically gutting and politically destabilising those countries; those countries are now debtor nations and continue to languish today. The systems of debt are facilitated and administered through international institutions that were established under the Doctrine of Discovery including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which have exercised devastating control over the lives of ordinary people to extract debt payments.

The governance of the World Bank is determined by the nations that contribute the most money. In many cases, that money has been extracted from the resources on stolen Indigenous lands. Subsequently, the World Bank then loans the funds to poor, high-risk countries and creates instruments such as structural adjustment policies which force the borrowing countries to relax environmental controls and eliminate established local trade preferences. In the past, the colonisers had swivel guns and cannons; today, the Doctrine of Discovery requires pens and free-trade agreements for its maintenance.

Moana people have always resisted

From the outset, our people have opposed these imperialist invasions, and resisters were often killed. The only reason Europe managed to establish domination was due to the sheer levels of arbitrary violence they were prepared to use. Cook repeatedly referred to the people as “savages” in his journals and even named Niue the “Savage Islands;” however, the early European seafarers were the savage invaders who unleashed the brutal imperial violence that has never stopped.

Often what was termed “native savagery” were early acts of resistance to invaders who arrived uninvited and unwanted. The killing of James Cook was itself an act of resistance against his 10-year-long campaign of infection, murder and abduction across the Moana. People understood what he was doing. They had had enough.

In Aotearoa, Māori have always resisted. The land wars that began in the 1860s pitted native resistors against the imperial invaders. The pulling out of land survey pegs at Parihaka was an act of resistance. The Wairau Affray was an act of resistance. The refusal by Princess Te Puia Herengi to allow the conscription of Waikato Māori in World War 1 was an act of resistance. When one considers the genocidal underpinnings of colonisation, then the Māori experience of it, right down to our very existence, is a continuing act of resistence.

One of the inspirational resistance leaders who profoundly shaped contemporary perceptions of the colonising state, Haunani-Kay Trask, reminded the people of Moana that we are children of the Moana, mokopuna of the Moana and not children of the state or of the crown. We are descendants of the Moana who have rights.

Haunani reminded us to constantly position ourselves in our own precise, sovereign space, and to reject the overarching narrative around identity as equal citizens of liberal, democratic states. She embraced and promoted respect for Tangata Whenua as the Indigenous people of this land, these waters, these mountains and this space. She recognised that identity functions as a key tool of colonising-government oppression through the Doctrine of Discovery.

The connection and development of the regional Pacific decolonisation and human rights movements over the 60s, 70s and 80s drew inspiration from the US civil rights movement and African liberation movements. These movements were often galvanised in response to ecological issues like weapons testing. Moana peoples came together to oppose what the imperialists were doing in Pacific spaces, for example, nuclear weapons testing in Mururoa and nuclear ships in Aotearoa. As part of that resistance, we peoples of the Moana practiced collective and collaborative responsibilities of care that have been negotiated for thousands of years. This is the proper trajectory to achieve justice in that shared space as Indigenous nations.

For those of us who identify as Indigenous, this means more than the formal political definition; it goes beyond the relational sense of the Indigenous person and the coloniser. It is a relationship between people and place: a way of knowing and being and doing that organically grows out of our soils and waters and is, therefore, contextually relevant. That can manifest itself as laws, as food systems, as religion—it can manifest in ways of knowing, being, doing, thinking and relating that grow out of the soils and out of the water. Therefore, re-indiginising is much more than a political status. Re-indiginising is similar to what the tribal Lenape scholar Steve Newcomb discusses as the rematriation, which is the restoration of a peoples’ spiritual, ecological, political and cultural relationship with territories and waters without external interference.

The application of the Doctrine of Discovery in Te Moana-Nui-A- Kiwa continues to have global consequences. These Eurocentric laws have failed. Land policy applied to the Moana was simply never going to work. Fish don’t know that there are borders; they just go where they need to go and do what they need to do. Plastic doesn’t know that it has to stop polluting in this exclusive economic zone. Climate change doesn’t recognise national borders. The broader ecological system of Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa requires transnational attention. The application of these laws to the ocean has imposed an existential crisis for the planet.

The challenges that the planet faces now require integrated, collaborative, collective and socially just models of governance. That is the opposite of the imposition of the Doctrine of Discovery in this region and internationally. The best hope of restoring the collective, collaborative model of governance rests with re-installing the Indigenous models that were in place before the imperialist invasion.

The Times to Come

We do our future generations a life-threatening injustice when we glaze over the seriousness of the present situation; in our future planning, honest conversations with our youth are essential to our survival. Too often, we evade acknowledging our own complicity in the injustice of leaving them a spoiled environment. They recognise that it isn’t fair or right that this is what they will inherit. Our responsibility is to do everything that we can to reduce the impacts of our past, poor decision making, and to start doing what we can to equip them to deal with what is left. This isn’t a just situation, but it’s even less just to leave them unequipped and unprepared.

My visions of peace and decolonisation are to go to my grave knowing that my mokopuna are safe. That means knowing that my children can access the bounty of their coastline, which has not been impeded by overfishing, contaminated with nuclear waste or choked with plastics. I want my children to have access to the intellectual and cultural abundance of their tūpuna, as well as the ecological abundance and the food systems that are part of who we are.

The role of the military in this vision is the ultimate colonial backstop: when all is said and done, if I were to live my Indigenous vision today, and reclaim the rights denied to me through the ongoing crime of humanity that is the Doctrine of Discovery, then it is the military and the police who would be mobilised against me—they are, and always have been, the end-game enforcers of colonial white-might. From the days of Cook through to now, the military have been the vanguard and strongarm of the global imperial project.

I want to know that my community is safe, and I mean that in terms of my future communities throughout time.

We in Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa have traditionally come together and made decisions collectively around our genealogies. We’ve strengthened those lines throughout the Pacific since time immemorial. The solidarity that we seek, that we pursue and that we capitalise upon today has its own whakapapa and its own roots. In the UN and across colonial governments, the overriding presumption is that Indigenous people need others to manage the shared territory between us; this is but a convenient lie. We have a long, well understood history of working across that shared space. We don’t need a patron or paternalistic entity or body to help us govern the shared space. The idea that an intermediary is required comes from the presumption of a hierarchical mindset; it argues that if people get together, there will inevitably be conflict. That presumption is the product of a violent mindset, that has been projected onto us despite a history of working collectively through space and time.

The wider political vision that I have for Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa, is that the shackles are removed. Those shackles come in the form of UN conventions and colonial government laws. When those shackles are removed, I think we will see again the resurgence of that Indigenous way of knowing and being and doing that govern how we relate to each other and how we relate to Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa.