The thieving neighbours from hell
Go home, whitey. That, right there, is exactly the kind of inappropriate sentence to which some in New Zealand think they will wake up one morning and read in their newspaper.
Dabbing their pink brows, barking outrage, these people know that, given a chance, Ma¯ ori would ship them back to wherever they or their ancestors came from. And that’s if they’re lucky.
These people are fizzing with paranoia. And the truth is this: being a lousy person makes you paranoid. You throw out suspicion like space junk in perpetual orbit around your rotten little soul.
Paranoia won big last week. A swath of referendums around the country crushed the latest decent and reasonable efforts by councillors to create Ma¯ ori wards in places like Manawatu¯ , Palmerston North and Whakata¯ ne.
I have written about the wards before – that, unlike other council wards, they could be undone by referendums. I didn’t feel confident about their chances for survival.
Even so, there were a couple of things that struck me about the poll results. Firstly, the return rate was astonishingly high – nudging returns for actual council elections – and so was the antiMa¯ ori vote. Secondly, the phrase ‘‘we’re all in this together’’ never seemed so terrifying.
There is apparently a chunk of pa¯ keha in the middle of everything, bridging the Left and Right, operating from fear and its associates, spite and stupidity.
They live right over our fence. You see, Ma¯ ori are the people who had crummy neighbours move next door. First, things started going missing around the yard, then the house. The arches of the pergola were packed away, carried over the fence. The roof slates peeled off the rafters. The tick of the carriage clock gone, along with the clock. Now it’s too damn quiet in the front hall.
Yup, we ended up with thieving pa¯ keha¯ for neighbours. Actually, many peoples around the world ended up with thieving pa¯ keha¯ for neighbours.
They cleaned out everything and now their children are clopping the street draped in our grandparents’ valuables and our partner’s shoes. Everything that was ours is theirs, and somehow it’s worse that they aren’t even taking care of it.
Our beautiful home, naked, battered, cold, looks like the operating table moments after medical malpractice. It all used to be ours, and now it’s theirs.
And what’s worse is that nobody hates having their own stuff stolen more than thieves. They glare over the fence and complain to neighbours about how shifty we look. They are paranoid.
The preservation of history, which is really the attempt to capture moments of time itself, is a profound study. Preserving someone else’s memories makes us human. We catch the information buzzing through their neurons and hold it in our hands.
But history only works if you are honest. Paranoia doesn’t breed honesty.
I cannot even begin to understand how such a crime – the theft and alienation of an entire people’s home – could happen in plain sight for so long in front of pa¯ keha¯ . I guess it creaked along, glacially, over decades of confiscations and battles. People were busy with other things. I guess too that, during that time, many pa¯ keha¯ looked the other way while their kin picked our pockets.
Man, I would love some of that indifference right now with things like these creepy referendums. I would love the sweet, bracing blast of ‘‘Meh’’; pa¯ keha¯ throwing up their hands in unison and saying, ‘‘We don’t care either way if Ma¯ ori have a fraction of their mana returned through fairer treatment, so we won’t vote in your boring referendum’’.
The world won’t end if mana-enhancing changes happen. It will actually get better. But regardless, uninterested pa¯ keha¯ get to keep doing what they do best: being the pinky-white constant in the background of the Great Show that is our nation’s recent history.
Instead, it appears plenty of pa¯ keha¯ were invigorated by an opportunity to vote against the brown guy. He is, after all, just a despot in pauper’s clothing. Which, all said and done, makes the support, curiosity and love of other pa¯ keha¯ toward Ma¯ ori even more powerfully important. And frankly extraordinary. Strong character, decency, kindness shouldn’t be a surprise, but too often it is (especially in ourselves).
The lies of those who whine about special treatment would push Ma¯ ori to the background of our nation’s history, make them a footnote in their own story.
I don’t know much about history, and not enough yet about te ao Ma¯ ori, but I know in my gut that Ma¯ ori were in the centre of it all from the start, and we still are.
I promise pa¯ keha¯ who choose to take our hands that they are part of something bigger too.
First, things started going missing around the yard, then the house ... They cleaned out everything.