Why hasn’t Ngāpuhi settled?

This weekend my whanau travelled down to Tauranga Moana for the interment of our great aunty who passed away at the age of 101 ½, after living a peaceful and frugal life and giving most of her money away to the needy overseas. I carpooled with my sister and niece. On the way home as we were coming over the Brynderwyns, enjoying that majestic view that welcomes us home, the conversation turned to the Ngapuhi settlement. I did my best to explain, from my perspective, why Ngapuhi hasn’t settled.

One of the things with explaining something to a 9 year-old (even a very smart one) is that simplicity has a way of rising to the surface. In the simplest terms, even though the $500-800 million potentially on offer would be handy for our whanau, what the government wants in return isn’t ours to give away. It belongs to our mokopuna and their mokopuna and their mokopuna.

The Problem With the Old Maths

Kia ora. In offices and boardrooms across Whangārei and Kaikohe, success is often measured using spreadsheets and bank balances. This old system, which can be thought of as "Babylonian maths," focuses purely on profit. But if that profit comes at the cost of a polluted river or families who can no longer afford to live in their own hometowns, is it actually success? In the "Woven Universe," we see that everything is connected; we cannot separate the money from the health of the land and the people.

The Hidden Debt

When a business makes money but ignores the damage it does to the environment or the stress it puts on workers, it is creating what is called a "Mauri Debt." The old system treats the land as a dead object to be used, rather than a living ancestor. We might call this profit, but the universe sees it as Mauri Mate, a state of decay and loss.

Sitting on the porch

Tēnā koutou, e te iwi. Pull up a chair here on the porch with me. Lately, I have been sitting with a couple of books that might seem like they come from different worlds. One is about the deep secrets of quantum physics, and the other is an old Māori translation of the Gospels.

At first, you might think a scientist and a preacher have nothing to say to each other. But when I look at them through our Ngāpuhi lens, they are telling the same story. They both say that nothing in this world lives by itself. Everything is connected, from the stars in the sky to the mangroves in the Hokianga.

The tickle effect

In the world of science, there is something called entanglement. It sounds fancy, but the idea is simple. It means that when two things are connected at a deep level, they share one life. You could put one part on the moon and keep the other here in Taitokerau.