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.

We are currently drowning in data but starving for wisdom. If you walk into any boardroom in Whangarei or sit in a council meeting in Kaikohe, the air is thick with spreadsheets, GDP forecasts, and ROI percentages. We’ve become experts at measuring the "price" of everything while remaining completely blind to the "value" of anything.

The old Babylonian operating system has convinced us that if the line on the graph goes up, we are winning. But look out the window. If that profit comes at the cost of a silt-choked awa, if it’s built on the backs of whānau who can’t afford to live in the towns they were born in, then that "growth" is just a polite word for entropy. In the physics of the Woven Universe, we are exporting order and importing chaos. We are measuring the speed of the car while the engine is melting.

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.