Aro-Mind

I heard Hēkia Parata speak recently and she uttered this memorable phrase, "Dont preach about tino rangatiratanga as you exhale!" Yea, I like that. Her theme was tino rangatiratanga at a personal level. You can't preach about independence, sovereignty etc as you yourself remain dependent upon something unnecessary. We need not think about tino rangatiratanga in grand ways, on grand scales. We can just as easily and meaningfully think about it at a personal level. Yes, indeed that's a great place to be thinking about tino rangatiratanga, to be thinking about the ways which we become fragmented inside of ourselves rather than unified, and then how we project this fragmentation outwards and onto the world. Rangatiratanga is about binding, uniftying weaving things together. How are we bringing about wholeness inside of ourselves and expressing that binding wholeness in the day to day detail of our lives?

I feel that our thinking about tino rangatiratanga has been too dominated by our history of colonisation. (Understandable tho'.) Meaning, we have been dominated by a need to 'talk back', to react and to respond to kāwanatanga, we have found it necessary, and for understandable reasons, to talk about 'survivability' and 'struggle' and so on. But I am absolutely sure that our ancestors did not have this in mind when they signed the Treaty. Why would you sign something that you knew would commit you and your people to hardship, struggle and impoverishment? Rather I think they had in mind the idea of the whole continuum of their history and its momentum and saw that momentum moving forward dynamically into the future. Furthermore, I believe they had views regarding the organisation of the whole country not just one part. I mean just as kāwanatanga now pertains to and affects all who live in Aotearoa, so tino rangatiratanga ought to too. The trick is that tino ra...

I think we need to revolutionise the way we think about tino rangatiratanga. I've come across a lot of people who when they explain what they mean by tino rangatiratanga,  it sounds to me like a kāwanatanga run by Māori. I think that if tino rangatiratanga just turns out to mean to another westminster style parliament, a western style legal system, generally a western style top-down, power from above type system but run by Māori, that seems to me to be a waste of time. Rather, I think tino rangatiratanga ought to be something very different representing an opportunity for our nation, not a burden. Fundamentally, tino rangatiratanga, in my view, is a vehicle for a tangata whenua way of doing things, an indigenous worldview. This means a regional based system with power 'rising upward' from the earth, upward through a people rather than power from upon high.