You know that feeling that the rug’s been pulled out from under you? I felt it last year when my friends redacted Te Papa’s English version of the Treaty of Waitangi and it dawned on me: I’ve been lied to about our history. So this year I went to Waitangi myself for the first time. Before Waitangi, I want to tell you about two other parts of my life. They fit together. Gaza, and Arohata Women’s Prison.
Free, free Gaza
Since October 2023, I’ve marched almost weekly against the genocide in Gaza with hundreds, thousands, millions around the world, spurred on by the immorality of the Israeli Zionist apartheid apparatus.
Those images of dead kids won’t leave me alone. For me they expose the truth about Western governments’ complicity selling arms and enabling genocide. Our own government’s complicity includes troops assisting United States military in the Red Sea.
In Gaza, and now frequently in the occupied West Bank, we are witnessing the extreme version of a brutality that litters world history.
I am not an anti-Semite. I am anti-genocide. Israeli Zionist leaders, the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) and their funders and suppliers expose a settler-colonial trail of blood and murder of indigenous people that stretches all the way to Aotearoa New Zealand.
Arohata Women’s Prison
I’m a supporter of Climate Liberation Aotearoa, formerly the Restore Passenger Rail campaign.
I am on remand for cementing my hand to State Highway 1 between Wellington Airport and the city on August 29 last year. I did it because I wanted to bring attention to the urgency of the climate crisis. Peacefully blocking traffic is neither pleasant nor popular but it gets attention.
After more than a decade of climate protesting, writing letters, signing petitions and speaking at select committees, local body meetings and hearings against oil and coal industry applications, almost always stacked against the natural world, I was ready to get more uncomfortable for the sake of my grandkids.
Climate activism over the past couple of decades has felt to me like a few dedicated souls dampening down the flares of a huge spreading fire. But we’re being engulfed. There’s no time left for putting out little fires. The corporations are winning.
I already have a criminal record on behalf of the climate. In 2020, I was convicted and discharged along with three others for wilful trespass for occupying an oil support vessel in Timaru Harbour.
In 2023, I was sentenced to 125 hours’ community service for writing a satirical email pretending to be New Zealand’s oil and gas industry leaders and shakers, postponing the 2019 Petroleum Conference due to the climate crisis. I was convicted of forgery.
For community service, I made cups of tea and played Scrabble and Skip-Bo with old people in respite care every Monday. It was such a joy that I’ve kept doing it.
It took the police and the fire brigade more than an hour to get my hand off State Highway 1. I spent two weeks in Arohata Women’s Prison surrounded by young, energetic brown-skinned women who called me aunty, taught me the rules and treated me with kindness.
There it was before me, our society’s shameful racist system, usually invisible to middle-class white women like me. A lovely Samoan nurse cracked the cement on my hand and I chipped it off through my first two days of getting used to no phone, no way to contact loved ones, baffling regulations and too large canvas loafer shoes that flapped around the 5m by 9m caged exercise yard that I shared with other prisoners for two-four hours a day.
For the next nine months, an electronic bracelet strapped to my right ankle 24/7 restricted me to my Dunedin house during Wellington rush hour traffic, Monday to Friday.
I am now a criminal according to the New Zealand justice system. In the eyes of the agency which spied on me between 2013 and 2020 when I was part of Oil Free Otago helping to kick the oil giants out of the Great South and Canterbury Basins, I’m an "issues-based activist".
As if the destruction of our future is an unwanted issue. As if I warrant police time and taxpayer money spent being watched, arrested and convicted when really, I’m a grandmother trying to conserve a future for my two grandchildren and all the kids of the world.
Those kids’ world no longer resembles the one I grew up in. Their world promises increasing floods like the Auckland Anniversary floods of January 2023, cyclones like Gabrielle a month later, droughts and heatwaves and dead fish, like the bream washed up on Dunedin beaches in their hundreds in August 2022.
It promises growing food shortages, more pandemics, more refugees whose homes become unlivable due to heat and conflict.
Last November, New Zealanders voted in the most right-wing government we’ve had for ages. They wasted no time ramping up the divisive rhetoric and regressive scrapping of policies that had begun to show baby steps towards better health and equality for all, like Labour’s Te Aka Whai Ora.
Now we are facing a threat to our very foundations, our own founding document, in the Treaty Principles Bill.
If we let it, our kids’ world threatens to slip towards a version of the worst kind of governance we’ve seen throughout history. We don’t have to let it.
Waitangi
My friend Bob, a retired physics professor, said we have two choices in this time of climate breakdown: change the laws of physics or change the entire economic system. His punchline is that he thinks it would be easier to change the laws of physics.
I agree with Bob, but not his punchline. The growth-at-all-cost neoliberal capitalist system was last century’s experiment that made a few greedy people very wealthy and the rest of us tread water or lose the battle against poverty. It has accelerated the climate crisis, skyrocketed inequality and pushed us past six of the nine tipping points towards runaway climate catastrophe.
We are teetering on the edge, or maybe are already over a cliff that will take us to an unlivable future. I’m not going to sit around waiting for this unimaginative right-wing coalition government to tip us over.
This is where Waitangi comes in. The Crown made a pact 184 years ago, its meaning is clear and decided, and no minor party politician with 8% of the country’s vote has the right to use it to divide us.
I was in Waitangi to listen, to learn, to drink it in. I felt a stirring of something that wasn’t just the trembling of the Treaty grounds as the biggest, meanest powhiri welcomed government officials on to the Waitangi Wharenui — something I haven’t felt for a while. I don’t have a word for it.
In 1984, after almost three years of backpacking around the world, I flew home. I was 24.
As the plane circled in to Auckland Airport, I glimpsed shimmering ocean and green forest. Tears welled up.
Four generations before, my ancestors came here from Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but there below me was home.
My three days at Waitangi reminded me of power. I watched a little boy as tall as the thighs of the men surrounding him, slapping his own with perfect rhythm and tiny might. He reminded me of power not built on size, wealth or military might but on a decision of his people to teach him his own belonging; he epitomised the very essence of Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act, now being repealed by this government.
That power is ours if we choose it. It’s a power built on a collective decision to think, work and contribute in whatever way we can to secure our survival — and that of the little haka expert who faces a warmer, harsher world as he and my grandchildren grow to adulthood.
I’ve signed up to te reo classes and can’t wait. We older Pakeha have a lot to catch up on, like taking a crash course in our true history, as former New Plymouth mayor Andrew Judd did. Then we’ll be able to (finally) stand beside the promises made in te Tiriti o Waitangi and He Whakaputanga before it.
To organise and plan together for a survivable world is an act of defiance when those in power divide us and treat our precious Earth as a thing to poke and steal from instead of to nurture and love. It’s an act of creativity. An act of survival.
We have smart and brave people in this land. We have a history of defiance to back us up, from withdrawing labour to climbing on top of nuclear submarines. We gave women the vote before anyone else in the world. We helped end apartheid in 1981.
We have Parihaka and thousands of stories of indigenous struggle to help guide us. We even have a unique constitution to work from. We can start from Matike Mai and, as true partners, build a system of governance based on love and mutual respect not corporate profit.
What are we waiting for?
■Rosemary Penwarden is a retired medical laboratory scientist and grandmother.
