Thursday 26 May 2011

Dear Colonisation

Dear Colonisation,

Did I remember to thank you for the tobacco and alcohol you introduced to my ancestors with which we are now the leading ethnicity in this country's negative statistics? How about the judicial system you still use today to trap my relatives into a cycle of crime without any real rehabilitation? Did I remember to thank you for the 'spare the rod, spoil the child' policy you - through the church encouraged my people to adopt and implement with which we are also the leading statistic for family violence?  Or maybe the gang culture that evolved out of you displacing us & deviating us from cultural teachings? Did I thank you for the education system you introduced to make sure my grandparents would eventually teach me to reject my culture and identity through the trauma they suffered under your regimes? Did I thank you for the amount of sickness & disease you introduced to my people which decimated our communities?  How about the media you use to offset your political agendas to make the rest of New Zealand think we are the people to watch out for?  Did I mention the fraudulent activities you participated in to strip my people naked of their lands?  Maybe I forgot to thank you for the lies you tell in the history books about my people and yourself?  Let me please if you will, show my gratitude towards you for the fact that the head of my ancestor is locked away in a dark cabinet or displayed for exhibition in some English museum – a result of your impious trade & commerce practices. 

I can not thank you enough for the fact that a large amount of my people have abandoned our cultural ways and are now locked into your poor attitudes toward the world and all its inhabitants with only a small possibility of any real escape.  That instead of gaining respect through love and contribution to the majority, they have followed the example of your drive for material wealth, with which they are now prepared to embrace selfishness and step over other people to get ahead in life in the ultimate pursuit for what you say is right.  Your skilfulness in the crushing of the morale of my people is impressive indeed.  I'd like to especially thank you for making sure my grandfather was unable to learn our language.  So thanks, thank you for taking from me that relationship I could have shared with my grandfather as grandfathers and grandsons had enjoyed in generations previous.  Thanks for convincing generations before me to resent our way of life and to abdicate to colonial ways.  Thanks for making it a difficult job to encourage others my age to care a little about the decline of our people.  Thanks for making me wanting to live as a Maaori in my own homelands a daily struggle.  So thanks for showing your obvious hate for who and what I am and even convincing me to subconsciously become my own instrument of oppression insofar as you need not finish the work you have started... because I hold those convictions you place on me against myself.

But most of all, most of all I'd like to thank you for the fact that I wake up every day fearing that tomorrow I could be the only Maaori left on the planet & centuries of practices, skills and knowledge lost.  That through all you have done which I'm sure you meant with good intentions has resulted in the slow and excruciating genocide of my people.  I thank you for the fact that I'm dead scared that my culture and its treasures could one day die out.  Who said interacting with you was a bad thing?  I'm sure you’re very proud of what you have caused and are a prime example of a thinking-type and an act that all human beings should follow.  You are a truly a good example of general goodness which history should remember you as, 'the pathway to humanitarianism'.  I die inside to the clear reality that a noose had been placed around the necks of my ancestors and with each passing generation that noose tightens... My people are slowly wasting away, soon to become lost.  So helpless I sometimes feel that although I work tirelessly to eliminate the perpetuation of these negative circumstances we face – I seem unable to really do enough.  Instead, I am left to watch.  To witness the dwindling of what so many have worked hard for.  I stand in the centre of a world which appears to be crumbling around me, but still I dare not cower – I have chosen to keep going.  Nevertheless, I  thank you for the fact that I'm growing tired of the tragedies that plague my people, that I am still so very young but suffer the exhaustion of fighting you.  You do not wish to understand me or you give little reverence for the credibility of my ways.  You will never know the pain I suffer for simply wanting to live as I am.  Freedom for me in Aotearoa is a dream and not a reality, but dreams are worth sacrifice... and so I say to you;  FREEDOM OR DEATH AND NO OTHER.

Yours,

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