More Than Just a Warrior

Growing up in Te Tai Tokerau, you hear the names of the great rangatira passed down like heirlooms. But history has a funny way of flattening a man. For my 4-greats grandfather, Pomare I of Ngāti Manu, the history books often get stuck on the image of the "formidable warrior"—all muskets, mana, and battlefield prowess.

But if you sit on the porch long enough and look past the colonial ink, you see a different story. Pomare I wasn't just a fighter; he was a master of Strategic Entanglement. He was the original disrupter who transformed the Bay of Islands into a global trade powerhouse. He was an architect of reality who understood that to keep his people's Rangatiratanga, he had to master the new world's tools without letting them overwrite his internal "source code".

Growing up with a Pākehā mum who held onto a very specific, strongly colonised religious view, my scientific mind was always at war. I want to be clear—I love my mum deeply. She did the absolute best with what she’d been given, and she always did it with a pure heart. 

To me, spirituality looked like fairy tales—nice stories for Sunday mornings, but nothing that stood up to the rigour of 'real' data or the 'hard' world of business and physics. I experienced a strain of neoliberalism and imperial theology that had weaponised the spirit, turning it into a tool for control or relegating it to a building you visit once a week.