Why Toitū Te Tiriti must be at the heart of transformational change in Aotearoa

Kia ora koutou!

He Kōrero Tapatahi is a space where organisations and individuals working for radical change in Aotearoa are invited to share ideas about how we can build a strong united progressive movement together.

This first post is an opinion piece by Torfrida Orme of Pathway to Survival.  Comments welcome! 

13 February 2024

We are coming together!

Tapatahi: Coalition for a Peoples Aotearoa launched last June to showcase the diverse campaigns for progressive change in a single platform of demands, covering Tiriti justice, tax reform, fair pay, housing security, 4 day week, an end to coal mining, oil exploration and industrial farming, protection of whenua, awa and Te Taiao, and more. 

Since October the new government has moved rapidly to roll back Te Tiriti o Waitangi, te reo, fair pay agreements, bans on coal, oil, gas exploration and mining, fresh water regulations, smoking prevention, and more, and has provided support for US military action in Yemen. 

This has led to a massive outpouring of resistance all around the motu this summer.  People came together in repeated and well-attended rallies and hui, culminating in massive gatherings at Tūrangawaewae, Rātana and Waitangi. 

He Kōrero Tapatahi is about breaking down campaign silos and encouraging dialogue among different groups - Tiriti activists with climate and eco-warriors, unionists with degrowthers etc - to build understanding and unity.

This dialogue is well and truly on right now!    So many people are making the connections between Tiriti justice and the struggles for climate action, nature protection, income and housing security, peace and real democracy.  

It is now clear to many people that we are all up against the same extractive, exploitative, capitalist and colonialist power structures.  As Paul Maunder says – we are shaking off the mystification that neoliberalism shrouds us in.

Why Toitū Te Tiriti is central to our resistance

Energy!   The driving, positive energy and leadership of Te Ao Māori in this surge of resistance is infectious.  New young “Tiriti-generation” MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke epitomises this in her powerful maiden speech to Parliament, which was met with thunderous singing from the public gallery.

It’s in the singing and the kids and young people filling the streets in the Toitu Te Tiriti rallies.  It’s in the surge of open dialogue between tāngata whenua and tauiwi, and among tauiwi, in the groups that have sprung up on Facebook, like HE TANGATA and We Stand With Māori.

Fightback!   Because Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the legal mahi that generations of Māori have put into it is now one of Aotearoa’s main lines of defence against global (and local) corporates coming in to extract the last possible profits from mining, sea-bed trawling, industrial agriculture, infrastructure and land development and more, as the NACTNZF government opens the doors of deregulation and sells or gives away public assets once more.“Trick or Treaty? Indigenous rights, referendums and the Treaty of Waitangi”, a 1News doco by journalist Mihingarangi Forbes and others shows how fossil fuel and mining money swung the Australian referendum against a Voice for Aboriginal peoples, and how this almost certainly will be tried with a Tiriti referendum here.   

Recently the Supreme Court ruled that National Iwi Chairs Forum climate leader Mike Smith has the right to sue Fonterra and 6 other high emitting corporates (Z, Genesis Energy, BT Mining, NZ Steel, Dairy Holdings and Channel Infrastructure.)  This is one of the strongest challenges to their high emission operation that these corporates have had to face in Aotearoa, and is gathering international interest.   

A common fight for fairness – many Māori are fighting for the basic rights of a secure home and living, health and justice.  Many tauiwi these days have very similar basic struggles.  It’s crucial that we see our common interest here and don’t get sucked into racist memes of competition.   The openness of Toitū Te Tiriti and Te Pāti Māori leaders in welcoming tauiwi allies is an opportunity that tauiwi must not miss.    

Carsie Blanton’s “Rich People” tells it like it is -

  

A pathway to doing democracy better – all our campaigns for social / eco-climate / Tiriti justice slam up against the vested interests of the big corporates, with their well-funded lobbyists.  More people now see the need to replace this broken decision-making system with some form of direct democracy.  

Māori have been discussing this for decades.  The Matike Mai project, with Moana Jackson and Margaret Mutu, held debates on constitutional reform on hundreds of marae throughout the motu.  The project’s 2016 report was offered to the government in 2017 so tauiwi could join and continue this conversation.  The subsequent He Puapua report on co-governance was stalled by Labour and attacked by NACTNZF.  But Matike Mai remains an inspiring pathway for our country to find a way for indigenous and tauiwi to live together in peace and security.    

Common values – the Matike Mai process is about exploring and sharing our values and visions for te iwi, whenua, awa, moana, taiao.   Doing so, we may well discover our common love of the land we live in, our common longing for a decent, fair society where we all support one another, and our common determination to make this happen.

To my fellow tauiwi

This is written by he wahine tauiwi, mostly for other tauiwi, since I'm guessing we make up most of Tapatahi’s readership right now.   I'm an English child migrant from the 1960s, who learnt almost nothing about te ao Māori till recently.  The attack on te reo has lit a fire under many of us to learn and use it.  As I struggled with my pepeha and a dismal awareness of the impoverished nature of my kinship lines, it occurred to me – hey there's an upside to this.  I've learnt, from my mum especially, ways of creating whanau.  

When my mum left home at 15 to get away from a violent mother, she landed her first job at The Cooperative Society in Leicester. This was a welcoming supportive gateway to the working-class left-wing community in the ferment of 1930s England – mass strikes, early Labour Party, WEA summer schools, Fabian’s, communists, Irish and Indian independence fighters, Spanish Civil war against fascist Franco.  And the same grim sense of war looming nearer that many of us feel now.    

What I got from her was a deep sense of being embedded in a strong warm whakapapa of people stretching down the long ages who had fought and resisted oppression.   So many of us Europeans have such a long history of being rootless and landless, swept around after jobs and a living, depending only on ourselves.   But we’ve also resisted, worked together despite differences, reached for our common visions, made intentional community over and over,

So we may have taonga of our own to bring to Aotearoa and tangata whenua.   Those of us who are tauiwi need to pick up the wero laid down by tangata whenua to know and own our history, our whakapapa, whatever it is, if we are to make an Aotearoa Hou together.   What an opportunity! 

Name note: I’ve started using my mum’s surname Orme in her honour.  Yes I know it’s her father's father’s father’s… but she never married our dad and was a strong independent woman.  Orme means snake/dragon in Nordic so feels auspicious in this Year of the Dragon where we will all need to be as brave, strong and wise as we can be against the 3-headed creature in the beehive.  And a hat tip to that dear anarchist feminist Ursula le Guin.