A Response To This Paru Government And Their Colonial Way

Words By Rosa Hibbert-Schooner (she/her) | Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Awa 

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Ka whakanohoia ngā atua ki taua ahi  (The gods were located in that fire)

That fire burns deeply in my core. It enrages me with the environments we settle in and normalize. We aren’t all free until we are all free, my fire breathes this. My fire is a formation of generations of whakapapa, waiting to light our spark in the movement toward liberation.

The start to the flame 

Kaunoti for me was the teenage boys who spoke ‘ban the haka, fuck the haka’ at my school

Kaunoti for me was the spit that flew across every whakataukī poster we tried to put on the lockers, social media allowed them the power of support. I thought this was the common view

Kaunoti was not having a teacher who spoke my mother tongue until my last tau. We found her in a hopeless place, Tamara, bring us back to the ground

Kaunoti was words on paper, spoken aloud. Preaching to whatever crowd would listen. Desperately searching for them, the likeminded people

I did not know this before, the kaunoti to the ahi may not always come from the memories we are most fond of, but the sustainability of the flame needs us to fuel our reconnection, our mātauranga,

 our own decolonisation.