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.