The Fire Inside

We are continuing our walk through the lives of our great ancestors. Today, we look at Hone Heke Pōkai, a man whose name is known all over the world. When people think of Heke, they often think of an angry warrior chopping down a flagpole. But his story is much deeper than that. He carried what I call a sovereign flame, a bright fire in his heart for true freedom, peace, and the right of our people to look after themselves under the guidance of God.

The Broken Promises

Hone Heke was the very first chief to sign Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840. He signed it because he believed it was a sacred covenant that would protect the land and the people. But it did not take long for him to see the truth. The new colonial government began to set up a system that took away local control, restricted trade, and taxed our people unfairly. This is what we call the "Babylonian" system, a heavy setup that wants to control everything from the top down and squeeze out local agency. Heke saw through the political BS and decided he could not sit quietly.

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 Choice is Ours

We often talk about "the system" as if it’s a faceless machine we can't control. But our ancestors and the prophets had a much sharper name for it: Babylon. As the song says, we need to free our minds from a way of thinking that keeps us as slaves to a broken system. In Taitokerau, we are at a crossroads. We have to choose: do we stay in the "Leaky Bucket" of Babylon, or do we finally build Te Ōhanga Mauri?

The Babylonian Way: A Leaky Bucket

Babylon is a system built on a big mistake, the idea that we are all separate and should just grab whatever we can for ourselves. In the North, we see this in the way we trade our logs. We send 61% of our raw timber away to the other side of the world. We are sending our "energy" away, and in return, we get paper money that we immediately spend on imported goods. This creates disorder. It leaves our roads broken and our families struggling, while the real wealth is built somewhere else. It is a system that takes our life force and leaves us with the waste.

The Hard Truth

We need to have a very honest kōrero about the numbers facing us in Te Tai Tokerau. For generations, our whānau have been waiting for the "Big Settlement" to arrive, hoping it will be the answer to our struggles. But the forensic reports are in, and the truth is sobering. The actual value of the land and resources stripped from our tūpuna exceeds $20 billion. That is the real debt. Yet, the Crown is offering a settlement likely between $500 million and $800 million. We have to be candid: this is not a rescue package, it is pennies on the dollar.

The Fiscal Envelope BS

The Crown uses fancy language like "Fiscal Envelopes" and "relativity clauses" to justify these small numbers. In reality, it is a political game designed to keep the status quo. If we think that $800 million, managed by a few centralised boards in the city, is going to fix the deep-rooted poverty in our region, we are falling for a "bad explanation." If we just pour that money into the same broken "Babylonian" system we live in now, it will leak out of the North faster than it arrives.

A shared signal

I was driving out to Mt Manaia with some whānau the other day, just soaking in the views of our beautiful hills. We were listening to a song by Unity Pacific, and it hit me just how much of our story here in Taitokerau is tied to a land thousands of miles away.

Most people see the red, gold, and green flags at Waitangi or during our festivals and think it is just about the music. But if you look deeper, those colours are not just a fashion choice. They are signals of a deep connection, what we might call an invisible thread, that links our struggle for sovereignty here to a global movement.

Prophets and promises

This connection did not start with reggae music in the 1970s. It goes back much further. In the 1800s, our own prophets like Te Kooti and Ratana were reading the Bible through their own eyes. They did not see a story about a foreign people needing "saving" by the British. They saw themselves.