OUR GREATNESS

In 2013 I took part in an exercise in which a group of us were given around 400 laminated cards and told not to read anything on them except the date at the top of each.  Instead we were directed to simply lay them out in chronologically ordered lines.  About 30cm long and 5cm deep, each one represented a specific event that had occurred in or affected Aotearoa between the late 1690s and this decade.  

Although they didn’t cover everything that had happened in that 300 year period,  those lines of cards still looked like a nest of centipedes when we’d finished laying them out, and I thought somewhat wryly to myself, “That’s the Crown for you; just when you think you’ve found its heart, it turns out to be another leg.”  

Anyway we were invited to walk through the centipede lines, find a date closest to the year in which one of our tūpuna lived, and to then read and consider some of the events that had occurred during their lifetime.

My great-great grandfather was born in 1816 and died in the 1890s.  In that span of around 80 years, the Crown passed and enforced legislation that dictated almost every conceivable aspect of his life and that of his descendants. E.g. how we got married, died and were buried; what we were taught, where we were taught it, and the language in which it was delivered and received. As a result, our tikanga, matauranga, reo, hauora and ritenga (laws, sciences, language, health and religious practices) were effectively outlawed and almost annihilated. 

Henare Tuauru PUKEROA

Additionally the land held by Mana Whenua Māori was reduced during those years from 66,400,000 acres in 1816 to less than 10,000,000 by 1910.  I note that that has since reduced even more, and in 2006 Mana Whenua held no more than an estimated 3,700,000 acres of the original land mass.

When I consider these events and their impact, I better understand why different ones of us do the things we do.  I also see anew how amazing we are as a people to still be here, bowed but unbroken, fighting back and forging our recovery.  We are truly great. 

Nelson Mandela has said of human beings in general that, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? ... As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Our tūpuna had already said a similar thing much earlier in the whakataukī “Ka warea te ware.  Ka area te Rangatira.  Hongihongi te whewheia.  Hongihongi te manehurangi.  Kei au te Rangatiratanga.    Ignorance is the oppressor.  Vigilance is the liberator.  Know the enemy.  Know the destiny.  Determine our own Destiny.” [Translation by Tamati Kruger] 

As part of realising that destiny, the movie ‘Māori Boy Genius’ was released a week after ANZAC Day 2013, a very auspicious timing. Because, even more than it did during the years in which the ANZAC tradition was being formed, the rest of the world needs our greatness now.

Ka area te Rangatira.

SHE'S MY SISTER

There's a song running through my head today. It's a song composed and arranged by a woman of faith and the chorus goes, “She’s my sister, far across the sea, or right next door to me, she’s my sister. And we’ll walk hand in hand with God, holding to the iron rod, with faith enduring to the end, we will be eternal friends.”  [Written by Janice Kapp Perry]

I write thinking of a friend. There’s no particular reason why we are friends. I once knew heaps about her – facts – some good, many bad, others indifferent. Yes, I once knew a lot about her, but I didn’t know her. Now, as much as one human being can know another, I know her.

She’s the lady who once came looking for me almost every day for weeks on end while I wallowed in the lowest despond. She’s the lady who reintroduced me to the Wairua Tapu and helped me see my own inner beauty at a time when it was not at all apparent. She’s the lady who now lets me give back to her what she once so abundantly gave to me.

We have sorrowed and joyed together. We have hit rock bottom and found our best friend and big brother was right there – loving and lifting us back up. We share a faith in Him and all He has done, continues to do and will yet do for us. We have changed and been changed by knowing each other.

Maybe if we hadn’t shared the bitter and the sweet times we wouldn’t be so close. Maybe if we didn’t share a foundational faith in Jesus Christ we would not be friends. Who knows? Who cares? When life ends, and only the distilled essence remains, the truth re-emerges and only love matters. 

As another woman of faith once wrote, “Na te aroha i piri ai te rongo māu ki tēnei whenua.  Ka tipu te pono; ka tipu te pono, me te tika.  The spirit of love has been firmly fixed by what I have heard from you in this place where I was born. May the fact of that grow; may the truth of that grow, and become a guiding reality.” (Written by Ngōi Pewhairangi)

Yes there’s a song running through my head today, and I’m glad to know that she’s my sister.  She’s my friend.

THE TRUE ECONOMY

“False Economy: the high cost of a low wage economy,” is the banner under which Jan Logie and Denise Roche, Green Party MPs, are touring nationwide to discuss the impact of the Government's policy reforms and funding cuts on community organisations and communities. They started in Invercargill on March 6^th and were in Kaitāia last Tuesday.  The meetings are based on a series of fast-paced 5-minute presentations from those representing workers, beneficiaries, women, people with disabilities, people affected by mental health issues, the Pasifika community and Māori. 

In Kaitāia I was one of the presenters and my message was that the economy isn’t false at all.  Rather it is a true reflection of the fascist states and global corporates that are running it.

A fascist state is one that steals the wealth generated off the industry and resources of its people, then redistributes that wealth to an idle, unproductive class of parasites; i.e. the global corporates that move at will across borders seeking tame governments who will change labour laws, offer tax breaks, and do whatever the corporates require to do business in their countries.

To illustrate, I went to the meeting in clothes and shoes designed by New Zealanders, Americans and Europeans.  But every item had been made in China by garment workers paid an average of fifty cents an hour.  Although that is hardly a living wage, global corporates require it to be so.

In order to run their true economy the corporates also require formal collusion between key private sectors and various arms of the state to dumb-down, distract, tempt, frighten and silence people into becoming compliant work units who happily consume while employed, and contentedly retrain or relocate when they become surplus to corporate requirements.

My whānau and hapū have long maintained our mana motuhake and manaaki for all those who came to our lands to find a home.  But the apparatuses by which we do that have steadily been eroded or removed by the greed of global corporates and the faithlessness of a fascist state.  Iwi corporates who have ceded their sovereignty to that state in deeds of settlement are now steadily replacing us.

Our interests, when properly organized and channeled, are not those of the corporates or the state.  The key to undoing any power they try to assert or maintain over us lies in educating ourselves and our children to think critically, to use the media more for information than entertainment, to resist debt and all other addictive substances, to fear nothing and no-one, and to speak the truth about the state of things as they really are. 

Can we do it?  Yes, if we want to enough.  Will we do it?  I don’t know.  I do know that if whānau and hapū don’t do it, then the outlook for the rest of the citizenry is poor.  However I retain hope, and I look forward to a time when the true economy is not one run by corporates or states.