First of all, a bow to my irawhiti/trans-whānau – you who have called us together, you who have braved so much, and continue to brave so much, to you and to all who showed up in Tamaki today, to send another fascist packing from our shores – he mihi. The voices of gender diversity who hold the line today, like Shaneel Lal:
And the legacy of those who have held this line before, like the inimitable Georgina Beyer:
And of course, going back even further to the strength and leadership of trans-activist Carmen Rupe:
Although I’ve long held the trans-rights movement in complete awe – I have never had to struggle with not-feeling-right in my body, I have never had to deal with the incessant messaging that I don’t belong anywhere, that I am inherently wrong, broken, or deviant. I can’t even pretend what it’s like for irawhiti whānau who face multiple layers of oppression. For that same reason, though, it’s important that I do stand in support of my irawhiti, trans-gender, and broader rainbow whānau in whatever ways I can, and even though today was a victory for trans-rights, it was also plain to see why solidarity with the trans-rights movement will still be important tomorrow, and every day until trans-rights are fully recognised:
This tweet illustrates why it’s so important to show up when you can.
The stand made today was powerful, first and foremost for the rights of trans-whānau on our whenua, and secondly, to call down the thinly veiled white-supremacy of these events. and while we have sent this particular fascista home – trans-oppression continues here in her absence, in various guises – and continues to require our attention. She may be gone, but the folks she attracted, and those who are referred to in the tweet above, they remain.
I’ve seen some people try to insist that trans-rights are an import, and an affront to our rights as New Zealanders, and even as Māori – so let’s start there. Obviously, looking back at the likes of Georgina Beyer, the world’s first transgender Minister of Parliament, and Carmen Rupe, who, in 1966 (three years before the Stonewall Riots), was standing for trans-rights in a courthouse in Wellington, it’s clear that Aotearoa has our own, proud history of trans-rights leadership that holds weight even on the world stage.
And in their day too, they were treated as if they did not belong, and were un-natural. As I’ve mentioned numerous times now, our own whakapapa, and the whakapapa of this whenua, and the moana around us, includes non-gendered ancestors and relations. The most senior levels of our ancestry are non-gendered.
The Māori world is one of whakapapa. Whakapapa, as a genealogy, connects us to sky, to the seas, to the land and all creature and natural phenomena within these spaces, including our many intersex, non-gendered and trans-gendered relations. The repository of whakapapa are our wharenui – and if you look to them, around the motu, they are replete with references to plant and creature species in an acknowledgement that they are our relations within the broad expanse of whakapapa. The vast majority of our plant species are hermaphrodite. Numerous creatures like the mata (pink maomao) change gender as they age. Native species such as our pūpūrangi (native kauri snail) don’t even need binary genders to reproduce. They all have a place in our wharenui, because they all have a place in our whakapapa. Gender diversity, gender fluidity are a part of the māori (natural) world.
So to say that gender diversity is un-natural, and to suggest that nature exists within a gender-binary is factually wrong from a western and Indigenous scientific perspective.
Now we have dismissed the suggestion that nature occurs in gender binaries, let us look to Te Ao Tangata – the human context. The suggestion that it is unnatural for humans to shift gender is also flawed, colonial and patently false. Within Te Ao Māori there are numerous cases around our motu of ancestors who shifted form, and shifted gender. Anyone who suggests that gender binaries are innate and universal, is further ignoring generations of social science findings that culture shapes gender. The very idea of what it is to be “masculine” or “feminine” is a cultural construct. Around the world, Indigenous cultures express being male, or female, differently. The behaviour ascribed to being male in one culture is how people might expect females to behave in another. We also know that right across Te Moananui a Kiwa, multiple gender expressions existed as a part of pre-colonial culture and were not only accepted and normal, but in many cases also revered.
The fires of colonization robbed us of so much. Thirty years ago, our understanding of Atua Wahine was minimal, it had been robbed through a process of cultural genocide, written by old white misogynist anthropologists who refused to see, or accept, the sanctity of wahine and their role in the Māori pantheon. A process which convinced us that Rangi and Papa only had seven male children. Through decades of work by the likes of Aroha Yates-Smith, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Leonie Pihama, Jessica Hutchings, and Ngahuia Murphy we have slowly but surely reclaimed the gems that have been held close and safe by hapu, and retained in carvings, in waiata, in karakia, to restore our understanding of the tapu of wāhine. This journey alone teaches us that decolonization is an ongoing cycle of revelation, and revolution.
In another form of ethnic-cleansing, colonialism also erased our histories of gender-diversity, replacing it with the Christian cis-hetero norms that are toxic in so many ways. In the recently released “Ki te Whaiao, ki te Ao Marama” Report by the Human Rights Commission, it was noted how both Māori and Pasifika experience bigotry as a from of colonial oppression, and voiced their vision for a future Aotearoa:
”Some participants noted the importance of education being intersectional. They spoke about living in a future society which embraced different cultural understandings of gender, and male and female roles, without the fear of being judged or discriminated against, which led to people being “double marginalised in society”.
One participant commented:
“The Western understanding of gender is only one way of understanding what gender can be. But if you look to the Pacific, and of course in te ao Māori as well where historically gender has been a very differently understood concept, much more fluid. There is a lot of mana in that, learning about those kinds of histories. Fa’afafine is one example of many in the Pacific that we can draw from to say there are so many other ways of expressing gender. This idea of “either or”, you know either male or female, as introduced through colonisation is very unhelpful. I’d like to see where histories like that are taught to see we have this bigger whakapapa with the rest of the Pacific. Our ideas of gender and our ideas of sexuality are not confined to just within Te Ao Māori, but we have cousins within the Pacific region.”
Some participants believed the concept of colonial masculine and feminine roles were often enforced in conservative New Zealand:
“If I think back to primary school, because I grew up partly in the South Island, there was lots of heavy conservatism there. From a young age those ideals of masculinity, particularly colonial masculinity in terms of what a man should do, and what a man should be, and equally so what a woman should be.”
As much as TERFs might try to deny it, their racist dimensions are evident in the support they receive from neo-nazi groups, white supremacist media organisations and other far-right conspiracist groups. Their conspiracy theories operate upon the same themes of manufactured threats to women and children, scaremongering around a “takeover” and a general idea of a degrading society. They use the same tactics, spread through the same channels and networks, because it is the same phenomena. If you attend the “Stop Co-governance” roadshow events, or listen to a Destiny Church sermon. you’ll hear many of the same themes.
It’s not by chance that the rise of the far-right is coinciding with the rise of TERFs. It’s not by chance that nazi groups feel comfortable enough to brazenly display themselves at TERF rallies. Nor is it by chance that a Christian evangelist is attempting a national Anti-Māori roadshow at the same time as a colonielle attempted her own 2-stop tour. Fundamentally, these are manifestations of the same issue – white, colonial opposition to human rights progress.
Whereas diverse genders have a home and a history here, on and from this whenua and in this region of the globe – transphobia does not. It was brought here on a boat, along with white supremacy, and is rallying now, alongside its sibling of white supremacy, for its survival.
Today, those who showed up to oppose these forces demonstrated that transphobia and white supremacy are losing, and for as long as we continue to stand in solidarity against transphobia and colonial hate – it will have no place in our future. Because Trans rights are human rights, Indigenous rights are human rights, and transphobic settler colonialism is dying.
Welcome to part 3 of my Waitangi 2023 series which considers the current risks to our Mana Motuhake movement. In Part one, I reflected upon the uptick in performative gestures and part-measures by the Crown, and our own permissiveness that allows it. Part two reflected upon the shift in white supremacy, how it co-opts the language of struggle, and how its reach is now super-charged by the internet.
For part 3, I will be focussing on our solutions – because all of these issues can, at times, seem insurmountable, but we are not without tools, strengths and strategies.
WĀNANGA – we need to learn about white supremacy – it’s full history from the Doctrine of Discovery’s inception right through to today, and in particular the shifts that the white supremacist movement have undertaken through the various generations. The conventional means of fighting white supremacy aren’t enough anymore – we need to learn about online tactics, and how to counter them. This report is a very informative analysis on online white supremacy. Once you learn about how the Doctrine of Discovery embedded white supremacy within our political and economic systems in order to protect privilege it will become much clearer why the current political system is not equipped to deal with white extremism.
Recommended viewing: Web of Chaos, Fire and Fury Recommended reading: Maranga Mai report on the impact of colonisation, racism and white supremacy on tangata whenua in Aotearoa New Zealand.
OBSERVE – Keep a close eye on what is happening in the USA/Canada far right movements – as I mentioned in part 2 the far right movement has globalised in a much more effective way than social justice movements have, and the far right in New Zealand is bankrolled by and influenced by the US/Canada. Counterspin is financed by Steve Bannon. The Freedom Convoy was directly drawn from the Canadian Freedom Convoy. The Wellington protests drew from the US Washington Riots. The NZ Proud Boys are connected to the USA Proud Boys. The National Rifle Association sends their representatives all around the world to influence gun laws. As we saw in Fire and Fury, the far right likes to use Aotearoa-New Zealand as a kind of social-experiment site, but its also true that observing the far right in the US/Canada can provide us with early warning signs of what might be attempted here. Recommended viewing: Fire and Fury, How to Sell a Massacre
LOCALISE – Centralised approaches leave massive gaps at the community level, and these gaps are capitalised upon by online movements who are extremely sophisticated at providing an illusion of belonging. The only thing they can’t compete with is when your sense of belonging relates to a group that can knock on the door and have real-life interactions with you. We have grassroots work to do to embed the mana motuhake movement at the community level through resources, workshops, and a community of support.
Recommended reading: Matike Mai Aotearoa sets out a vision for a JUST Aotearoa that secures Mana Motuhake.
STRATEGISE – Social media is still being largely treated as a casual pastime, digital noticeboard or annoying distraction rather than the most powerful current means of social control. In addition to wananga on the Doctrine of Discovery, we need to upskill ourselves in social media and the warning signs of incoming misinformation trends. If you have community Facebook pages (for your marae, for your township, for your hapū or rugby team or kapa haka roopu), engage the page administrators in a kōrero about keeping it a safe space, and what good moderation looks like. You might not agree about how to approach it at first but be open to the conversation growing over time, and be patient. If you can have open communication channels with the admins of your local online communities, then it’s far easier to minimise harm and reduce the chance of that group being infiltrated by external forces/ideas. Offer workshops or open discussions with parents about social media management for them and their kids. A lot of parents are interested in online safety for their kids but are not sure how to go about it. This is also particularly pertinent learning for the mental health workforce and for whanau supporting someone with mental health challenges, as mental health challenges can correlate to social isolation, which makes for attractive radicalisation targets. We also need to strategise, at a local level, how to support each other in the event of online bullying, we need to develop online tikanga at a community and whanau level, and share these tikanga within our whanau.
SOCIALISE – This is in my opinion our strongest tool – *ACTUAL* community. The people you go to work with, the people you cook alongside with in the wharekai, the people you play rugby with or go to the RSA with. Every day we validate truth offline – it might be around the staff table during our breaks as we discuss what we saw online or on the news last night, or it might be on the marae atea as a topical whai kōrero, or in the changing rooms after a game, or it might be from your community radio station. But it’s from people you know, and with whom you share a sense of identity and community. If we utilise these spaces to intentionally build our sense of community, and utilise these relationships to engage in discussions about our health, or our taiao, or other issues, we close the information vacuums that misinformation needs in order to operate, and we take the air out of the online misinformation sails which are necessary for the Endeavour of far right recruitment. What we have found with this approach, is that the new information needs to be made relevant to the local context. It’s a hard sell to make one of us in Rangitukia care about the plight of polar bears and melting polar caps…. But we know very well what the Waiapu looks like in flood, and that is the climate change conversation we need to have. Similarly we need to ground discussions about vaccines, about masks, about water rights and co-governance in contexts that are LOCALLY relevant in order to get local engagement, and to take a collective local position that is based upon real relationships and real factors, not misinformation and online manipulation.
I hope this all helps – if you look at these solutions, the approaches are the antithesis of imperialism – as power networks, they are devolutionary, redistributive, and decentralised, and that is exactly what is needed to support social cohesion, because it’s a colonial fiction that cohesion comes from rigidly centralised power structures –social cohesion grows from the grassroots up, not from the top down.
This is part two of a three part Waitangi series of reflections on risks to our mana motuhake movement. In part one, I looked at the risk posed by the uptick in performative gestures by this government without any real commitment to transformative change. In this part, I’ll be reflecting upon the risks posed by white supremacists, and the far right.
Possibly one of the most jarring aspects of the far right movement in Aotearoa in the past few years is the co-option of Maori into the movement. I’ve written about the rise of “Māori MAGA” before and since then a number of us have watched with great concern while more of our whānau became aligned with what is ultimately very dangerous mindsets.
What should be very clear now is that the groundwork for co-option of Māori into the far right movement has been set by the institutions of government, media and science themselves – for each of those institutions have their own history rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery, all of those institutions have visited significant harm upon Maori throughout the process of colonization and all of them have yet to really reckon with that history. The drivers for the dissolution of society are different – For Indigenous and the disenfranchised, the driver to dissolve government stems from the longstanding failure to secure real justice and the clear lack of regard for our human rights.
For the far right, the drive to dissolve government stems from the fact that governments have become too progressive. The far right seek to undo the progress made on civil and Indigenous rights, and wind the clock back to when white supremacy was well entrenched and normalised. Of course, it would be unhelpful for them to frame it as such – it’s much more helpful for the far right to focus on the shared interest of dissolving government.
Importantly, white supremacist movements understand that the dissolution of government must play out on their terms, to enable their vision of installing their own power structures. Of course, the work on constitutional transformation and the Matike Mai report – which considers how a government that is centered upon Te Tiriti and He Whakaputanga o Nu Tireni might look – has been underway for over a decade now, and presents a clear threat to the far right promise of political reform. For these reasons, constitutional transformation (particularly through the He Puapua Report) is consistently attacked by the far-right conspiracy front. For those who have been aware of these discussions over the past decade, it’s farcical that conspiracy movements think they have uncovered some great secret – when John Key’s National government funded a nationwide conversation on constitutional reform, Matike Mai Aotearoa is freely downloadable online and has been for many years, and the 252 hui around the country that led to the report were anything but secret. Still – the pretence that they have access to secret information is one of their favourite recruitment devices so they will continue to larp as spies and detectives.
One of the narrative tools used to recruit Māori into the far right draws from Western storytelling methods which construct one-dimensional binaries of good and evil. Within these binaries, those who are constructed as villains are denied any form of humanity, and a happy ending can only come with the downfall of the villain. The dehumanising of our perceived opposition is a dangerous premise for violence and denial of human rights. When the far right position themselves as the victims, and suggest that they are “under siege”, it can trigger, at a very deep level, our own intergenerational trauma as a people whose way of life has actually been under siege for 254 years, and we can think we have something to identify with.
The “great replacement” conspiracy theory can also interact with our own internalised racism, a legacy left in our hearts and minds by the Doctrine of Discovery, and trigger our own xenophobia towards other racially marginalised groups. When pākehā speak of great replacement – they do that with the privilege of not being seen as immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, themselves. When pākeha speak of great replacement, they have a media and education machine behind them which reiterates that they are the default, never the “other”. Raising the great replacement theory is much more likely to stoke Māori trauma about being replaced on our own land, than lead to us considering the root of that trauma itself.
The involvement of the new age and capitalist wellness industries further confuse our communities, because they present themselves as being progressive (when in fact they are often also capitalist extractors). We can also layer upon this confusion the practice of “pointing to the mirror” – seen way in which white supremacist and neonazi movements utilise nazi and Nuremberg imagery in their attacks, casting their opponents as nazis and threatening them with hanging… all while either wearing swastika or standing alongside others who do. It is not an approach built on logic (and in fact confusion and disarray is also a goal in itself) but rather a deliberate strategy of emotionally manipulating the masses in order to build your movement.
While antiracism as a concept and movement is over 2 generations deep – there are now new elements to the far right political scape that have super-charged it, and chief amongst those is the advent of the internet. Through the internet and in particular social media, the far right have been able to rapidly recruit in an unprecedented fashion, utilising the reach of the internet to warp the minds of the disenfranchised. Internet security analysts have noted:
Indeed it has already been evidenced that right wing extremist groups have become global in nature, and New Zealand’s right wing community is bankrolled from the USA/Canada, and there is a mimicry and trial relationship between our nations where what happens over in the USA/Canada will be mimicked here, and the USA/Canada far right groups also utilise New Zealand as a kind of social experimentation site.
They have successfully infiltrated non-extreme sites and online communities for recruitment and radicalisation purposes, and court people across to their conversations using universally condemned notions such as child sexual abuse but then gradually link that to their broader conspiracies – and in this way the far right are building the critical mass necessary to mainstream white supremacist ideas.
So the mana motuhake movement needs to understand internet and social media dynamics and how to combat them (I will be talking about our solutions in the next essay). In addition to this, of course, is the direct harassment and the threats received by online racists towards Māori leaders, Māori technicians, Māori activists, Māori academics and Wāhine Māori , the brutality of which is completely uncalled for and reminds us of the depraved extent to which white supremacy will extend itself, where neither women, nor children, nor families are safe.
Collectively, the co-option of our own struggles; the triggering of our trauma and recruitment of our own people into their movement; the super-charging effect of the internet; the reach of social media; and the brutality and degradedness of the white supremacist online bullies have all delivered a chilling effect upon the mana motuhake movement. The very notion of hikoi has been sullied by the 2022 Wellington protests, and people who would have previously engaged in perfectly legitimate discussions on our rights or constitutional transformation now veer away from it for fear of being misaligned with violent conspiracy theorists. Others simply will not take the risk of their families being targeted, and who can blame them?
The clear articulation of our rights struggle is what is necessary here – the story of the Doctrine of Discovery and its connections to the far right as well as its connection to our current government. From that shared understanding of how a global injustice was brought to our shores and remains here, can we then clearly articulate our own whakapapa within this story – from He Whakaputanga o Nu Tireni, through to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and onwards throughout time to our mana motuhake movement of today. Kia kaha tātou katoa
This Waitangi week I wrote three pieces that reflected upon the areas I believe we most need to focus on for our pursuit of Tiriti justice in Aotearoa. They are three short form pieces, and are all based upon recent developments of our political landscape which threaten to derail our progress towards mana motuhake. The first of these is the uptick in liberal performative gestures, and the permissiveness of Te Ao Māori which allows it.
If the New Zealand government really punches above its weight at anything, it’s performativity. Over recent decades the Crown has refined, to a fine art, the practice of performative gestures that don’t really amount to anything transformative. This includes siloed reforms which are under-resourced and regularly drop terminology like “mana motuhake” whilst still leaving ultimate power in the hands of the Crown. The fact that they are siloed means that even the most progressive of the reforms will inevitably butt up against other sectors who are far from ready to take that step – for instance, the health sector reforms will struggle to achieve wellbeing for Māori whilst Māori are still being disproportionately incarcerated and dispossessed of our own children through institutionalised racism within the Ministry of Justice and Oranga Tamariki. Even when the intention is bold, and benevolent, rarely is it met with the systemic force or resourcing to support that intention reaching its fullest potential.
Performativity also includes giving buildings and public agencies Māori names, yet still not equitably sharing power or even securing pay parity within those same agencies and buildings, and further includes the targeted resourcing of Māori cultural optics (eg extravagant launches with roopu kapa haka or waka hourua presence) for spaces or entities that offer no material benefits or systemic transformation for Māori people. We see this where the government tries to “solve” racism by investing in cultural promotion and education, but refuse to embed education about racialised privilege, white supremacy or the harms of colonialism (as found in critical race theory).
As much as we may wish to point the finger at the Crown and call this yet another example of colonial mal-intent – all of these empty or part-gestures depend upon Māori endorsement in order to be effective. Our own permissiveness as ceremony holders, as performance or visual artists and as leaders, is critical for the government’s ability to continue with performative acts which at best offer scant progression, and at worst take us off course entirely. Perhaps it is conscious mal-intent, but we cannot overlook the fact that the governmental system we live with – the system which provides the policies that shape our lived experiences – was borne out of an intent to dispossess Māori, and that fact has never really been reckoned with by this government.
A vital component in combatting this phenomena is an understanding of the economics of colonialism, democratic capitalism, and how global market forces, crafted out of a history of colonial empires, seduce us into thinking that representation and financial success within colonial structures equals liberation and advancement. Mengzhu Fu and Dr Mahdis Azarmandi write eloquently here from a Tangata Tiriti perspective about the way in which cultural platitudes can be a distraction from where energy needs to be directed.
This is particularly pertinent for the issue of constitutional transformation. This government understands what it is, understands the discussion, understands how it relates to Tiriti justice – but it has repeatedly evaded doing anything about it. Ex-Prime Minister Ardern predicted it would happen in her lifetime, but not in her government. The current Prime Minister has yet to comment on constitutional transformation, but given he is clearly focussed upon clawing back the centre right drift to National and ACT, it’s doubtful he will be effusive.
So we are clear: this government’s constitutional framework is an unavoidable source of institutional racism with deadly consequences for Māori. If you need the connections drawn for you – I would recommend you read the recommendations of the Maranga Mai Report on The impact of colonisation, racism and white supremacy on tangata whenua in Aotearoa New Zealand – and in particular the chapter on health. We now know and have the scientific data to support that racism is an *independent* predictor of early, avoidable death for racialised minorities including Māori. When we delay constitutional transformation, we are condemning Te Ao Māori to higher death rates – and a raft of other horrid social and economic outcomes that would never be acceptable for white populations. We have to be unrelenting, and uncompromising, in our pursuit of constitutional transformation and no longer accept and enable performative gestures that distract us from this goal.
Tangata Tiriti must underpin their support of Tiriti justice by centering the importance of constitutional transformation – for you cannot pretend to be an ally whilst also tolerating a system that disproportionately kills those you purport to be an ally to.
When I first caught the news that Prime Minister Ardern had resigned, it was on a messenger thread… I’d missed the earlier message and just caught the notification on my screen of the response by a cousin – it read: “No way… Ardern is gone??”
For a brief moment I didn’t want to click on it. My gut had dropped, and my mind raced ahead as time seemed to slow down.
I thought, for a brief horrifying moment, she had been killed.
Time caught up with itself as I clicked and scrolled up to see she had resigned – but I was left with the chill of how natural my assumption was, and the simple reflection of what must mean for her.
For the record, I do agree that Jacinda Ardern has been the best Prime Minister we have had. I don’t like the role of NZ Prime Minister, because I don’t like colonial governments – and so praising her as a good Prime Minister rings somewhat hollow. I’m extremely grateful that, in the current system, we had her in charge during the early stages of the pandemic – her counterpart would have overseen much more death. I’ve critiqued her as I would any other colonial leader, and all leaders should be open to critique. However what she has been subjected to over the past few years is not critique but violent, dehumanising, depraved attacks that, when boiled down, have little to do with her decisions so much as the fact that she is a woman who is not far-right.
Today, I’ve watched the speculation around her decision (most agree it’s at least in part due to the extreme misogyny) and the natural assessment of her performance. I’ve also watched Māori social media call up various Māori MPs to step into her role. I’ve read people question “is it time?”, “is New Zealand ready for a Māori Prime Minister?”. I guess given the strength of the Labour Maori Caucus there is some logic to even considering that question.
I’m at a loss, however, to understand why on Earth anyone would assume New Zealand is ready for a Māori Prime Minister in the current climate, given how we have allowed a white woman Prime Minister to be treated.
So we are on the same page – here is what I am referring to (please watch the clip and remember this is the toned-down version):
Now imagine that, every day of your life, for years. Not getting better, only getting worse. In all of the speculation about PM Ardern’s performance, we are missing what this is saying about US. We have allowed a Prime Minister to be subjected to an unprecedented level of violent, sexist attacks. As a nation, we have collectively failed to insist upon change. Racism plays a huge role in this too – a significant number of the more violent and worrisome attackers also subscribe to the “great replacement” theory, accusing Ardern’s government of allowing for a “Maori takeover”.
The truth of the matter is, for those of us who are committed to Mana Motuhake and Tiriti justice, Ardern presented a conundrum. She is progressive enough to avert radical decolonial change (she repeatedly dismissed the value and possibility of constitutional transformation) whilst still being politically wedded to a system that is overarchingly patriarchal, capitalist and colonial in nature. In no way did she deserve the treatment she was subjected to – and that treatment is also the natural distillation of the political system she has defended for a long time. A system that prioritises protection of patriarchal colonial privilege above all else. A system that would not provide protection for women (even its own leader) against extreme misogyny –- because it is inherently misogynist itself.
So when I hear my relations calling Māori MPs up to the role of Prime Minister, I recoil. If this is how a white woman is treated in the current political climate, what do you think a Māori Prime Minister will be subjected to – even moreso, a Wāhine Māori Prime Minister? If you need further explanation – check out the recent findings from the Disinformation Project which has tracked Wāhine Māori as the most targeted group for online hatred within New Zealand social media. The risk of a violent act would increase exponentially (and it is already quite high).
Even though there are Māori MPs in parliament right now that undoubtedly have the goods to lead – there is no way I would ask any Māori politician to step into that role right now, in the current climate. It’s physically perilous, mentally dangerous, and politically unwise. The center-right that drifted across to Labour for the past 2 elections is being courted back by the far right, and their own ingrained, normalised misogyny is their weakspot. The current polarization of NZ politics calls for a center-right male who doesn’t (by just existing) stoke toxic white male anxiety. If I were to make a call – I’d say it’s Andrew Little’s time to shine. Two elections ago, New Zealand wanted real change (and didn’t see that in Little – although I think he has become more seasoned through his more recent portfolios). One election ago, New Zealand wanted continued protection. This election, neither of those drivers are relevant. People have had more than enough change in recent years – hence why so many are willing to take risks with their own health as a pandemic still continues around them. Voters are looking for comfort, familiarity, and a sense of “returning to normal”. For all of the tumultuous times Ardern has led New Zealand through (and arguably because of them), she cannot be synonymised with normal. Normal and familiar, within the scope of the past 500 years, is a white, Christian, thin, abled, CIShet male. For Labour, Andrew Little is the safest option for holding on to the center right voterbase, and he will be attacked for many things, but not for merely existing.
But this cannot be our aspiration. What I have described above is a consequence of a deeply sick and harmful system that needs fundamental change. Regardless of how well Little would perform, it is supremely unjust that his gender, race, ability and sexual orientation – and what that means for his safety – should be the grounds upon which we appoint a leader. Tiriti justice does not look like a Māori Prime Minister within a Westminster parliamentary system designed to strip us of our rights and undo any progress every four years. Euro-parliamentary systems (and democratic capitalism) are deeply and inherently racist and misogynist and cannot help but beget further racism and misogyny.
A Tiriti centered political system, anchored with tikanga like manaakitanga, tauritetanga, and kaitiekitanga, would look after its leaders better, as well as looking after Aotearoa better. That is where we must set our sights. That is what Tiriti justice calls us to focus upon.
Introductions mean a LOT for us in Te Ao Māori – we have ritualised first encounters, and getting to know each other, in sophisticated and deliberate ways which help us to honour both our difference and similarities as a grounds to moving forward. There are small jokes commonly heard in these encounters, one of which is “I’m from [small rural town] – center of the universe” and we all laugh at the irony, but also appreciate that to each person, that small town, in land and blood, is their umbilical tie to the world around which all else has grown.
My home is just one such of these places. Matakāoa is perched on the tip of the eastern fin of Te Ika a Māui, the great fish of Māui. Traditionally it refers to a peninsula in our region but it has come to encapsulate the collection of communities from Pōtikirua to Ōtiki, and south to Whakaangiangi. We have 16 hapū in our rohenga. Our area currently holds about 1800 people, but this swells about 4 x that size over the summer as descendants return from around the country return to connect with their umbilical center for the holidays, and regional, inter-regional, and international visitors descend upon us to enjoy our famed beaches and “wild, remote” environment. I’ve written a number of times how this becomes a problem for us in the context of a pandemic, because we have limited health infrastructure, and long after people have packed up and gone home where they have access to pharmacies, emergency services like paramedics, GPs and hospitals – we remain here dealing with the fallout of their visit, but without the health safety net to assist us.
If there is a trauma incident, we have no paramedics. Ambulance transfers can take up to 5-6 hours or more. If you need medicine, you need to wait for the next courier (ie you need to order it before 1pm or wait for the next day/Monday). Access to a GP is not a given, nor is access to a vaccine or PCR test. Secondary services (dialysis, physiotherapy, chemotherapy) are the same 3-4 hour drive away. It’s difficult to convey exactly what it’s like to have this as the norm. Most who visit here don’t really understand what its like until they have a very sick child at 10pm, or a severe accident, and there is nobody to come and help them.
When I listen the discourse on remote, isolated, rural communities, there are some common assumptions in the subtext – one being that our difficulties are borne out of our geographic location. What I don’t see much appreciation of is the fact that the very notion of being “isolated” is imperialist in nature. One must ask: isolated from whom? From where? An isolated community on the fringe of somewhere depends entirely upon someone defining where an infrastructural center is, so who gets to make that decision, and in whose interests is that decision made?
If you turn the years back to pre-colonization – the various communities of Matakāoa were anything but neglected, because they were anything but remote or isolated, and this is because Aotearoa had not arranged itself according to an imperialist paradigm that centralises power and decisionmaking. Decision-making was localised, the management of resources was centered around that resource, and the intergenerational strengthening of the relationship between person and place ensured that the management enhanced with every generation. As one generation passed on all they knew about their river to the next generation, and taught them all of the science and skills in how to care about it, the next generation, living on the river, would grow that science and those skills, continue the observation and care (upon which their own existence and comfort depended), and through these means, the science remained relevant, contextual, and robust. Science, within this context, supports abundance. While people marvel at the strength of Indigenous science in caring for biodiversity and abundance, what they often miss is that it is a very predictable and natural result of an extended relationship and interdependence upon their traditional territories. What they also often neglect to discuss, is the fundamental political reality that the theft of Indigenous lands and waters, and the refusal to return stolen Indigenous lands and waters is not just a crime against the people, but also against the environment.
Before colonization arrived, we were not dependent upon a regional center to provide us with medicine, or skilled medical staff, or transport to care. We cared for each other, and our environment and it in turn provided for us. We were the center of our own universe. We were not dependent upon Wellington to provide us with funding or to include us in decisionmaking about our river or coastline. Power was distributed much more broadly, much more efficiently, and in a more localised fashion.
So what has this process of centralising power meant for communities like mine? In an imperial paradigm, the remote regions are treated as extraction zones. A Doctrine of Discovery mentality legitimises exploitation of the remote regions, for the benefit of the center. Each center in turn, contributes to the next-greater center until you reach the power-hubs of Empire (hint, these aren’t in the southern hemisphere). Think I’m being dramatic? Not too long ago I sat in an environmental commission hearing and listened to the council describe the characteristic of a small area nearby as being one of “extraction”. When I asked what they meant by that, they stared blankly at me like I should know and then explained that all rural sites are considered an extraction zone because we are not in the city or suburbs. I found this assumption (and it’s apparent normality to everyone in the hearing) deeply disturbing. Rural communities have been subjugated without consent as sites of exploitation for the benefit of selected centers. Geo-positioned into subservient roles because someone, at some point, determined that Tūranganui-a-Kiwa (Gisborne) would be the regional center upon which we depend. Our classification as an extraction zone functions within the resource management system to justify the continued exploitation of our waterways, soils, and coastline for the benefit of empire.
It’s not just environmental exploitation that shapes our reality, but social exploitation as well. Power and decisionmaking is accompanied by infrastructure, it comes with other supportive jobs and industries. It comes with training and education – so when power and decisionmaking is centralised all of the infrastructure that surrounds power and decisionmaking also becomes centralised. Not only do places like Matakaoa then become powerless extraction zones, but the dominant income is medium to low, often involves further exploitation, and is manual in nature (which means higher risk of injury). When the average income is below the poverty line, and utility services like plumbing or electricians are more expensive (because they too are centralised and charge for travel), housing is going to be poor. When the dominant jobs in a region are manual and high-risk, and housing is poor, people are more often injured or sick, so the demand for health services is greater and more complex, but guess what – health services are centralised, too. So not only is the need greater, but the access to care is significantly lesser. It’s hardly surprising that young families who want better health care or employment prospects opt to move to the cities. When funding and infrastructure is determined by population base, it so often discounts the role colonialism has in the re-distribution of populations, and so on it rolls with roading, energy and communications infrastructure being centered around urban locations, and these same vital systems being severely neglected for rural isolated regions.
State highway 35 has been in this state for over 40 years now, often flooded, and not the kind of road you want to drive in the dark for hours during an emergency.
Is this experience of rurality the same all over the country? No – in fact some of the wealthiest communities in Aotearoa are rural farming communities. Farming stolen land, taken from Indigenous hands many generations ago, and exploited for material gain. Unsurprisingly, these are the families who often have intergenerational access to regional power through seats at council. Councils around the country started off as roading authorities, existing to enable access for landgrabbers to farm Maori land from the late 1800s, and since then they have been largely dominated by these interests. Consequently the bylaws, processes, decisions and plans coming out of these councils have benefited that same demographic. Rurality is very much racialised, and the economic realities faced by a young Māori family trying to stay on their family land in Te Araroa is incomparable to that of a wealthy pakeha farming family in Te Awamutu – yet somehow I often find myself at the same table with them when it comes to discussing rural health.
The redesign of our health system in Aotearoa has recognised the need for a rural health care strategy – and we have yet to hear anything about what that strategy entails, but if it hopes to account for our own nation’s history of injustice, it must take into account that rurality is deeply racialised, that we are not inherently remote but made that way by colonization, and it must deliberately aim to return power back into the hands of those who have been treated as second-class sites of exploitation, for too long.
“Have your day in the sun to deny us our right, because the Doctrine of Discovery is long over. Long gone.”
These words by Dame Naida Glavish pulled the issue of religious racism into the spotlight this month as she called out the mayor of Kaipara for refusing to allow karakia in the council chambers to start their meeting. While some have been working for years to grow awareness about the Doctrine of Discovery and its role in shaping Aotearoa, the response to this matter, and to these words in particular, betrayed just how far we have to go as a nation in understanding this concept.
For those that need a quick run-down on exactly what the Doctrine of Discovery is: here, here and here are a few links. In a nutshell, the Doctrine of Discovery is a set of religious laws that granted entitlement to European monarchs to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and enslave them for their own profit and privilege. Over centuries, those legal entitlements had whole economies and political systems built around them – until it eventually became a global economic and political meta-system that we all live under. It manifests in different ways around the world, but there are some core tenets which are consistent everywhere: Indigenous land is the rightful property of colonizers; Colonization is God’s work (ergo is good and just); Indigenous people can and should be contained and controlled; People who are non-Christian and non-European are lesser than European Christians; Profit is more important than human rights – are just a few of these tenets that have come to influence and shape our world.
Over the years I’ve learnt and shared about the Doctrine of Discovery, the issue of religion has always been one of the most sensitive aspects. Many, if not most of our people have been Christianized to varying degrees, and it’s difficult for people to reconcile the role of the church in colonization with their love and commitment to Christianity. While I don’t consider it my job to take that reconciliation journey for them, what I can say is this: it seems to me, that the bare minimum a good Christian can do, is sit with the truth of this story and contemplate what the Christian role should be in bringing justice to it. So with that said – let’s delve a little deeper into the role of Christianity and the Doctrine of Discovery. After all – it’s the best time of year for Christianised society to be talking about sacredness, hope, and doing the right thing.
The full name of the Doctrine of Discovery is the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, and that’s probably a good place to start for illustrating how central Christianity is to this matter. Its abridgement speaks to the fact that while it started off as a Christian project (borne out of the Crusades and the longstanding war waged upon Islam by Christianity), the truth was largely because at the time of its inception, religion was the dominant vessel for transacting power. Over the following centuries, however, it has evolved to take on numerous other faces and forms – science, politics, social philosophy, International law, economy and business have all grown around the concepts codified within the Doctrine of Discovery – so reducing it to a Christian concept ignored these centuries of evolution. That said – Christian supremacy certainly still sits at the heart of the Doctrine, and still remains an injustice unresolved between the church and those who have been impacted – hence why Indigenous nations are still today calling for the Vatican to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery.
If you look to the text of the papal laws that constitute the Doctrine of Discovery, it is very clear that Non-Christians are framed as enemies of Christ, and that their conversion to the Euro-Christian empire, their dispossession for the benefit of the Euro-Christian empire, and their enslavement for the profit of the Euro-Christian empire was not just permitted, but was deemed a righteous Christian duty. The entire premise of the Debates of Valladolid, a series of arguments called for by King Charles of Spain (also the Holy Roman Empire) wrestled with the righteousness of waging war upon Indigenous peoples who refused conversion to Christianity. The parameters of that debate were that:
a) Indigenous peoples were inhuman and it is the Euro-Christian duty to smite them in the name of Christ or b) Indigenous peoples are human, but lesser humans (like women or children) and should be given every opportunity to convert to Christ.
But Euro-Christianity did not just feature as a driver of the Doctrine of Discovery – it was also a powerful tool for establishing domination over Indigenous peoples. In the debates of Valladolid we can see that what is, literally, undebatable, is the assumed supremacy of Christianity. This is again referred to through El Requieremiento, the document read out by conquistadors as they arrived to invade Indigenous lands:
Of all these nations God our Lord gave charge to one man, called St. Peter, that he should be Lord and Superior of all the men in the world, that all should obey him, and that he should be the head of the whole Human Race, wherever men should live, and under whatever law, sect, or belief they should be; and he gave him the world for his kingdom and jurisdiction.
And he commanded him to place his seat in Rome, as the spot most fitting to rule the world from; but also he permitted him to have his seat in any other part of the world, and to judge and govern all Christians, Moors, Jews, Gentiles, and all other Sects.
El Requieremiento
Euro-Christian supremacy was utilised to both justify violence upon resistant Indigenous nations as well as to coerce Indigenous peoples into believing that the ultimate power rested with the Euro-Christian God, and the universal order determined by their God which fell first to the Pope, and his Church, and the various monarchs who administered his laws.
This was not just about the uplifting of Christianity, though. The project was deliberate and forceful in its debasement of Indigenous faith systems. In the seminal text “From a Native Daughter”, Haunani Kay-Trask laid a powerful foundation for our understanding of the inter-dependency of cultural debasement and colonial domination over lands and people: in order to exploit land and people, one must first assert a right of domination over them, and there is no more profound a way to do this than to diminish them spiritually. If you can assert that their god means nothing, then their universal order means nothing – spiritually they become terra nullius and as we know – any “blank space” is then able to be claimed, occupied and “righteously” colonized. If you are no longer sacred, and nothing you hold is sacred, then there is no consequence for abusing your rights. There is nothing that cannot be done to you, or taken from you, by those who ultimately sit above you in the universal order.
The de-sanctifying of Indigenous culture is a core feature of the Doctrine of Discovery and is a well-known military strategy. Importantly, this has held dire consequences for Indigenous women and children, as they are considered in many Indigenous cultures to carry spiritual roles pertaining to the creation of future generations and the continuation of culture. The direct attacks upon women and children by colonizing forces communicated that in the colonial mindset, nothing of the Indigenous world was held sacred, and there was no line that would not be crossed in the assertion of Euro-Christian dominance.
This belief is the underpinning value upon which the devaluing of Indigenous women’s lives, and theft and abuse of Indigenous children was built, which still manifests today as disproportionate and unacceptable numbers of missing, beaten, raped, and murdered Indigenous women; and State-stolen and State-abused Indigenous children. Indeed, the targeting of women and children by European colonizers in acts of violent debasement are some of the most disturbing and upsetting records to read by early missionaries such as Bartolome De Las Casas who accompanied conquistadors as they set about applying the Doctrine of Discovery in the Caribbean and Mexico.
Importantly – many of these conquistadors were actually just poor soldiers, who then went on to establish themselves as encomenderos – essentially, settler farmers who held political power over the Indigenous lands that they stole, and farmed. This pattern is mirrored in Aotearoa where poor English, Scottish and Irish colonial soldiers, also guilty for directly attacking Maori women and children in their pursuit of Maori land, illegitimately claimed the right to establish political systems at national and regional levels that further enabled the colonial project.
For these reasons, it was singularly powerful that a wāhine Māori councillor Pera Paniora took her stand against an older pakeha Mayor – the quintessential colonial “settler” archetype who has always dominated regional government (and in this case who predictably opposes co-governance and water-reforms). For these reasons, it was profoundly powerful that respected champion of Te Reo Maori Dame Naida Glavish continued her championship by calling out the Mayor’s racism, and supporting Pera, and by framing this as an application of the Doctrine of Discovery.
My heart broke a little this morning – I received a DM from a rangatahi I’ve known for some time now, and they were feeling very down. The usual burden of climate anxiety, layered with the emotional legacy of covid, and now the rise in racist hatred is taking its toll on so many, and we are about to enter into an electoral year – which we all know comes with its own levels of brutality – with depleted reserves. For you, my friend, and for all of our rangatahi, I wanted to say:
I know things are hard right now. I know it all seems insurmountable at times.
The world you are being handed is one in turmoil, with an uncertain future.
Truth be told – this trajectory of peril has been set for some time now, but never before were we able to access proof of that peril, expose it, and speak out to it, as we have been now, and it is taking a lot of work – much of which you too will have to bear. I wish it wasn’t so, I wish we could have taken care of so much more, but nevertheless I take heart that we have progressed enough to make the extreme right very, very anxious – and it’s important to understand that the global rise of the right, with all their hate and violence, is a direct reaction to social rights progress over many generations now – resulting in you, and the powerhouse you are.
Whenever you hear them speak nostalgically about the “good old days” – they are always referring to the wind back of social justice – the days before the marginalised had a voice, the days before we had diverse representation in media, parliament and other sites of power, the days before we valued equity and human rights for all. All of the social justice progress of the past seven decades: Civil rights, Indigenous rights, Migrant Rights, environmental rights, Disabled rights, Queer rights, Fat rights are exactly what stoke extreme right anxiety. Violence and hate are simply their most base instincts in their fight to survive.
The white supremacist structure is broad (it has, after all, been built over 500 years). At one end of the spectrum you have centrist power-mongers who passively protect and maintain colonial privilege whilst presenting as benign allies. At the other, you have white identity extremists who hold less structural power but are often the loudest, most offensive, hateful and violent. Don’t let the latter distract you from the former – focus on the sites of accountable power, and continue to articulate, with all your beautiful, passionate, eloquent, powerful voices, what true justice looks, sounds, and feels like. Remind those sites of accountable power that it is their responsibility to deal with the violent and hateful extremities of their own colonial political ideologies.
A dear frontline sister once said to me: The most dangerous time in an abusive relationship is when your abuser knows you are going to leave. Never before have we made it more clear to our abuser that we don’t need them, don’t want them, and are well equipped to do without them. This is exactly why the right is raging in its ugliest form yet.
As many great leaders have said – the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. That is not to say it will cosmically take us there without work, but rather that the the human spirit is indomitable – it can never rest in oppression, nor the truth rest in darkness – both will find, or fight their way inevitably to the light.
The work put in by previous generations to fight for Tiriti justice and education, for reo, tikanga, matauranga, and taiao, has provided us with the cultural, intellectual and political confidence to stand our ground, and has made YOU the scariest damn nightmare the right has ever had to behold.
We now have a new resistance generation, culturally grounded, with the tools of eloquence, political awareness, and righteous determination – ready to pick up this struggle, and take it to new heights. Use the gifts they secured for you to balance your decolonization with reindigenisation – don’t forget to bathe the wounds of your battles with the colonizer, in the soothing waters of our taonga, our karakia, our wananga, our taiao, our waiata, puoro, reo and matauranga. It will renew you to continue the journey, until it’s time for you, too, to pass on the torch.
I know when that happens you will have achieved wonderful things. When I think of what previous resistance generations had at their disposal, and what they have been able to achieve – and I look before me at the quality and strength of our rangatahi movement – I’m filled with hope.
So please, never lose heart. It’s ok to rest, it’s ok to take a breather, in fact you must – because the struggle is intergenerational. But never lose heart – it is precisely the success of our movement that drives colonial anxiety. We have come a long way, and whatever others may say – we are winning.
Composed for all of my Indigenous relations. We got this.
I have a stone in my shoe and I can’t walk straight and I’m sick to my gut perhaps it’s something I never ate perhaps it was the taro held in leathery hands, that guided me here through old seas to new lands held in her belly, a gift from Hawaiiki the taste upon my ancestral tongue, that would have been a reminder of their continuity in me
I have a stone in my shoe And I can’t go on I hear you say you want to fix me with a solution never meant for me formaldehyde fixed versions of me forlorn, pickled, measured sitting on shelves objectified, observed, preserved in your solution crafted by Kant, Locke and Descartes but did you stop to think that maybe you’re in this belljar with me
And sure, looking out through this crystalline colonial curvature these self described bearers of enlightenment may have all the answers like breeding us out of existence with theories of blood quantum that reduce me to a walking pie chart like the question of whether I’m even human coming down to the colour of my skin The Enlightenment Period was made to lighten you, period.
Darwin 1872:
“when civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short… new vices are highly destructive… those who are most susceptible to its destructive influence are gradually weeded out , and so it may be with the evil effects from spiritous liquors as well as with the unconquerably strong taste for them shown by so many savages.”
So hear me out, it’s wild, savage even, I know but maybe the problem isn’t me Maybe I’m a native, grown perfectly poor in a garden of weeds maybe my toxicity is the fruit of the same seeds planted by colonial universities and we keep getting told: “We’ll deal with that later…” “Don’t play the race card” “Don’t look back” “Just walk on” “Just walk on” But my brother just walked off the edge And I ain’t takin another step Cause I got a damn stone in my shoe
Stop looking at me like I’m the problem waiting to be solved Like my land was waiting to be sold Like my ancestors were waiting to be vanquished Like their children were waiting for colonial mischief Like we ain’t already had 250 years of being told we are the problem some kind of dark manifest destiny existing for you to come save me awaiting enlightenment by European philosophies rooted in a Doctrine of Discovery created to legitimise slavery a tool to erase our native divinity
De Zurara 1450:
“And so the native African lot was now quite the contrary of what had once been… in that at home they lived like beasts, without any custom of reasonable being – for they had no knowledge of bread or wine, or shoe or cloth and only knew how to live in bestial sloth. But as soon as they came to this land, and men gave them prepared food, their bellies began to swell, and for a time they were ill, until they were accustomed to the nature of the country, but some of them were so made that they were not able to endure it and died, but as Christians… they were very loyal and obedient servants, without malice.”
Yeah, maybe it was something I ate Or maybe it was the lies that they fed to retain me as a loyal and obedient servant to the colonial economy to contain me in a box shaped like a reserve a land block a prison cell a hospital ward a movie screen
Preserved, in your formaldehyde solution at that exact moment of invasion forever exotic, forever subdued, forever subjected to a colonial gaze Not your dusky southsea maiden Not your lovely hula hands Not your savage haka peepshow Did you know that cultural appropriation of our Moana was initiated in the brothels of London and we’ve existed within Euro-maginations from then, til now as sexually available commodities there to be taken as they please our ancestress deities stripped from our collective memory But I hear her calling me Calling me to sing her back To say her name To chant her words again It’s time.
I got a stone in my shoe and maybe that stone is you and maybe we need to heal together you, me, and our mother She who has carried all ancestral truth through time Let us share that truth Like taro upon our tongues Weeding out the colonially cultivated self-blame Take what has been dismembered and Re-member ourselves with the cadence of karakia let the tonal salve of Hineraukatauri seek out the pain of generations and draw it from your marrow back into the belly of she who holds us all let’s resculpt let’s renew let’s radically rejoice in who we are and who we have always been destined to be seeds of chiefs sown in the belly of gods the sum total of the interwoven love of thousands Ara mai anō Hineteiwaiwa! Ara mai anō Hinerauwhārangi! Ara mai anō Kēkerewai!
It’s time to re-imagine our full rematriation to our waters our lands our plans for joyous, thriving futures defy colonial timelines and expectations and surrender now to the pull of Hina mother moon aligning our cycles to rhythmic tides and familial migrations and listen, feel, see, sense the present with our whole beings to make sense of the universe again. and reset our trajectory, here, now on our own terms in our own time and re-emerge proud, whole, marked, healed and healing stepping into our roles as good ancestors continuing their stories and starting ours afresh for nothing is ever lost in this neverending series of new beginnings
Let us offer ceremony back To what has been taken for granted With each breath honour the inhalation of Ranginui, Again, becoming one, with Papatuanuku In a constant cycle of life, within you Each breath a gift of their reunion Remelding the negative and positive Within your whare wananga As oxygen, blood, and flesh Ranginui, Wainui, Papa-tu-a-nuku
Offer thanks to sacred water who carries Sky Father aloft to his love A cooling nourishment for your inner eco-system clearing the way for your righteous voice to reach the sun Salving joints that have borne the weight of injustice for too long Presaturating your fully weeded garden for the replanting of native medicine cleansing our bodies our minds our spirits beckoning us internally to the external water cycles that connect sky sea and land Tuia i runga Tuia i raro Tuia i roto Tuia i waho Tuia te here tangata Ka rongo te pō Ka rongo te ao Above, below, within, without Becoming one Becoming whole Becoming present Tihei Mauri Ora.
(aku mihi ki a: Karlo Mila, Rachael Rakena, Moana Jackson, Haunani K Trask, Diana and Mark Kopua)
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.
