SOVEREIGN ASSUMPTIONS

There’s an insurance ad currently running on TV that shows a bunch of salesmen sitting around making assumptions about a client and passing judgments based on their frame of reference.  The problem for the salesmen is that their assumptions, judgments and frame of reference are all wrong. 

E whānau ma, the scenario portrayed in the ad has a familiar ring.  One that has echoed throughout the history of New Zealand, is still resonating in the present, and will likely segue into the future.  

I am talking about the judgments of people whose forebears assumed sovereignty over us based on a European frame of reference that was laid out in the 15^th century Papal Bull of Pope Alexander VI – aka the Doctrine of Discovery.

In past columns I’ve already covered the historical and present realities of those people and their wrong assumptions.  If you want or need to know more on the subject, my blog on http://hikoidiary.blogspot.co.nz/ is a starting point. For the present I address te kaupapa tuatahi. 

When it comes to other people’s assumptions and judgments about us, unless we caused or controlled them, we should only either watch them play out, or ignore them.  Any other response is a symptom of that psychological dis-ease called collective guilt. 

Next Tuesday is the 179th anniversary of the signing of He Hakaputanga o Te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni.  So it's timely to remember that we should either stay away from other people’s kutukutu ahi, or risk catching their dis-ease. 

We are better than that and have better things to do, like teaching and preparing our tamariki mokopuna to be Rangatira in all things, times and places. 

So, unless we are an affected party, or have kaitiakitanga over an affected party, Rangatira ought not magnify someone else’s faults. But if a fault or failing happens in our whānau or hapū, then we have a responsibility to reveal it rather than conceal it. 

Ultimately, because everything we do is based on intimate links with te ao wairua, our Rangatiratanga is a spritual endowment to us from the Gods in whom we believe. Tino hohonu.

Contrast that with those whose sovereign assumptions are based on a Western religious doctrine wrongly attributed to an Eastern God who most of them don’t even believe exists. Somewhat shallow.

Which brings us back to that insurance ad.  It ends when the client doesn’t fight or feed other people’s wrong assumptions about him, and doesn’t let their problem become his.  

Instead he simply exercises his Rangatiratanga within his own frame of reference and takes his business elsewhere.  

Ko tātou tēnā.