No guns, no chainsaws, time to talk
Jaiden Patel had been up since before dawn, but he was bright-eyed atop Maungakiekie yesterday. ‘‘Mum saw the tree come down,’’ the 10-year old said. ‘‘I’ve seen new ones come up, so one day I can tell my kids.’’
Jaiden was one of 13 members from three generations of his Mt Albert family who made the early morning climb up the volcanic cone known worldwide as One Tree Hill.
He watched as dignitaries and regular folk, young and old, planted totara and pohutukawa that some hope will symbolise the dawning of a new partnership among the diverse peoples of Auckland and New Zealand.
I was there too, with my family. My eldest son goes to a school on the maunga’s lower slopes; his uniform bears the image of the long-lost windswept pine.
That tree was assaulted by activist Mike Smith, protesting Government plans to cap Treaty of Waitangi settlements – his was the first of two blunt attacks that eventually killed the pine.
Some saw Smith’s actions as an important statement against colonialist intrusion; others saw them as an attack on national unity. I’m a journalist, a storyteller, so I see his actions as a useful part of our compelling national story; this weekend was the start of a new chapter.
I used to know Mike; I remember, one year at Waitangi, inviting him across the road from Te Tii Marae to my grandmother’s home for dinner. She was not impressed: ‘‘If he’d cut it down with a tomahawk, I might have had some sympathy,’’ she grumped. ‘‘But he cut it down with a chainsaw!’’
Mike had the good grace to laugh as I recounted this to him. ‘‘She has a point,’’ he chuckled.
If there is a point to this weekend’s tree-planting, it is surely that we are now smart enough and sensible enough to create a new relationship between the peoples who grace these shores, a relationship founded not on the guns and chainsaws of yesteryear, but on talking to each other. A common language for our kids.
Smith wasn’t at yesterday’s planting. He thinks we still have a long way to come. ‘‘What has changed on the ground?’’ he asks me. ‘‘Homelessness, degradation of the environment, incoming climate change . . . A realistic look at ourselves is a step in the right direction, but for the most marginalised in society, things are going backwards.’’
As we made our way back down the hill in the warming sun, the voice of a Ngati Paoa speaker echoed down from the peak, bouncing back and forth off the slopes and craters until it seemed as if he was speaking quietly at one’s shoulder. ‘‘Maungauika, Pukekawa, Maungawhau, Maungakiekie . . . ’’
That common language isn’t English. Nor is it te reo Maori. Least of all is it the angry rasp of a chainsaw.
It’s talking face to face.