The colonial machine

When we talk about the challenges facing our whānau in Taitokerau, we often look at lost land or broken promises. But there is another side to colonisation that we rarely discuss, the deliberate attempt to standardise the way our minds work. We can call this heavy, corporate setup "Babylon." It’s an outdated operating system that treats our world like a cold machine made of separate parts. It insists that every single person must be squeezed into the same mold to be considered useful. For people with unique minds that thrive on varying rhythms and deep connections, this machine has been completely hostile for over a century.

Silencing our seers

The historical proof of this hostility is very clear. In 1907, the colonial government passed a specific law called the Tohunga Suppression Act. This was a targeted strike against the unique leadership and traditional knowledge systems of the Māori world. What our ancestors recognised as a beautiful spiritual gift guided by Wairua Tapu, the colonial state re-labelled as madness, bad practice, or insanity. By outlawing the practices of our traditional experts, specifically the matakite, or seers, and traditional healers, the Crown effectively criminalised a highly visionary way of thinking. They cut at the roots of our leadership to ensure the community lost its guidance.

Real talk about labels

Let us be completely honest about what is happening to our kids here in Taitokerau. Every single week, parents  across Taitokerau are completely exhausted and stressed out because their child has been sent home from school again or labeled as a major problem in the classroom. We are told by outside experts and official agencies that conditions like Takiwātanga, what people call Autism, or Aroreretini, known as ADHD, are behavioral disorders that need to be managed with medication or special clinics. But looking closely at our families, I see a much simpler truth. The problem is not with our children, it is with a rigid system that expects every single mind to work exactly the same way.

This post marks the start of a plain-spoken, ten-part series about our ancestral mind. Over the coming weeks, we are going to look at the hard realities of our community, from classrooms that feel like cages to the genuine need for practical skills on our land and in technology. I’m not interested in grand, wishy-washy academic theories. What we need is real, grassroots solutions that make sense to everyday people.

The industrial assembly line

The modern education and work system was built over a century ago to turn people into productive workers for factories. It relies entirely on standardisation, strict clock-time, and forcing children to sit perfectly still for hours on end. When a child with an active, fast-moving mind does not fit that narrow mold, the system protects itself by calling the child broken. It is a very lazy way of explaining human differences, and it is causing real harm to our whānau.