REFLECTIVE INSIGHT #061 - HEALING THE TEARS IN OUR CLOAK: RACISM, COLONISATION, AND THE PATH TO UNITY IN THE NORTH
The Wound in Our Community
If we are completely honest with ourselves, we know there is tension in our beautiful home of Te Tai Tokerau. We see it in the suspicious looks in the supermarket aisles, the harsh comments on local community social media pages, and the unseen walls that keep our neighbourhoods divided. This tension is racism. For generations, people have treated racism like it is a problem that only affects one group of people. But if we want to truly heal the soil of the North, we have to look deeper. We have to realise that racism is a terrible sickness that damages everyone it touches, and that the people carrying this hatred are actually victims of the exact same history that hurt our whānau.
The Root Cause: A Shared Loss
To understand why people hate, we have to look at the history of the "machine mindset." Colonisation didn't start when the tall ships arrived in Aotearoa. Colonisation actually started centuries earlier back in Europe, where a cold, mechanical way of thinking crushed the ordinary people first. It forced families off their ancestral common lands, broke their ancient tribal connections, and taught them a brutal lie: that life is nothing more than a lonely competition where you must dominate others just to survive.
When the early settlers arrived in the North, they didn't just bring their blankets and tools; they brought this deep internal trauma. They were spiritually homesick, disconnected from their own roots, and terrified of anything they couldn't control. Racism is the direct result of this fear. It is a defense mechanism used by people who have been completely hollowed out by a machine system that treats humans like separate, isolated objects. Racists are victims of colonisation too, they are trapped in the cold, unfeeling code of an empire that taught them to value property deeds over real human relationship.
The Impact: Broken Threads
When people operate out of this broken mindset, the damage to Te Tai Tokerau is massive. It creates a state of "Mauri Mate", a severe blockage of our collective life force.
It stops us from working together to fix our local housing shortages and clean up our harbours.
It splits our community up into separate pieces, making us weak and easy to manage from the outside.
It keeps us stuck fighting over crumbs in a rigged game, while our regional wealth and resources keep leaking out to big corporate interests in the major cities.
You cannot have a healthy society when one part of the body is constantly attacking the other. The pain felt on our marae is directly linked to the spiritual blindness living in the homes of those who look down on us.
The Healing Process: Reconnecting to the Whole
How do we heal a wound this deep? We cannot do it by using the same angry tools that the machine system gave us. Punishment and shouting alone will never fix a broken heart. True healing requires Whanaungatanga, the deep, unbreakable truth that we are all permanently woven together in a single universe.
We have to help the people who carry racism realise that their own ancestors once lived in harmony with the land, too. We need to invite them out of the cold, lonely box of isolation and back into the warmth of the human family. When we heal the relationship between our peoples, we plug the leaks in our community and build Te Ōhanga Mauri, our own healthy economy of life force where everyone is safe, valued, and fed.
A Higher Commandment
Ihu (Yeshua's name in the Paipera Tapu) gave us the ultimate operating code for breaking down these walls of hatred and restoring the fabric of our world:
"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another." - Ethiopian Orthodox Bible (John 13:34)
Original Ge'ez Text: ትእዛዘ፡ ሐዲሰ፡ እሁበክሙ፡ ከመ፡ ትፋቀሩ፡ በበይናትክሙ፤ በከመ፡ አነ፡ አፍቀርኩክሙ፡ ከማሁ፡ አንትሙኒ፡ ተፋቀሩ፡ በበይናትክሙ።
Te Reo Māori Paipera Tapu 1868 Translation: "He ture hou tāku ka hoatu nei ki a koutou, kia aroha koutou tētahi ki tētahi; kia rite ki tōku aroha ki a koutou, waihoki kia aroha koutou tētahi ki tētahi.”
Walking Forward Together
Healing racism in Te Tai Tokerau isn't about ignoring the pain of the past or pretending that history didn't happen. It is about having the immense courage to look at a person filled with prejudice and see a broken relative who has forgotten how to be human. By grounding ourselves in our own identity and offering the healing medicine of true relationship, we tear down the fences in the mind. Let’s lead the way in the North, showing the rest of the world that when we fix the soil of connection, fear dies, and true abundance can finally grow for all our children.
