The classrooms
Each lesson had a classroom. Most of them had a law behind them.
School. The Native Schools Act 1867 made English the language of the classroom. Within a generation or two, kids were being strapped for speaking te reo in the playground. That’s where compliance was taught.
The healing ways. The Tohunga Suppression Act 1907 made practising as a tohunga a crime. It stayed law until 1962. That’s why my nan practised in secret. It wasn’t shyness. It was the law.
The land. The New Zealand Settlements Act 1863 took land outright. The Native Lands Acts and the Native Land Court broke shared land into individual shares that could be bought one by one. That’s where poverty’s classroom was built.
The town. After the war, whānau were moved into the cities for work. They were placed in state houses spread through Pākehā streets, “pepper-potting,” so we would blend in. That’s where we were taught.
What did colonisation teach you to do?
To comply. To speak English. To sit still, do as you’re told, keep your head down.
To be measured, and to believe the measure. To keep busy, because a busy Māori was a good Māori.
What did you do to be seen as a “good Māori”? Who was watching?
What did colonisation teach you to hide?
The reo. I wasn’t given it. The adults around me had learned it was safer not to pass it on.
The healing ways. My nan carried gifts from our line, and she practised them in secret. The law had made them something to hide.
Whakamā. When nobody names what was done to you, it feels like something wrong with you. So you hide that too.
What did your whānau stop passing on? Do you know why?
What did colonisation teach you to carry?
Things that feel older than me. A tightness that wasn’t mine to begin with.
What my tūpuna carried came down the line without a name. What should have been passed on wasn’t. What was passed on included the fear. You pass on what you know.
What do you feel in your body that doesn’t seem to start with you?
What did colonisation teach you to become?
The Brown Pākehā. Forty-one years in corporate rooms, fluent enough to succeed, never fully received.
Not Pākehā enough in one world. Not Māori enough in the other. And sometimes turned away by my own, because the line back to the marae had been cut before I was born.
Who did you have to become to be accepted?
What did colonisation teach you to want?
Their measure of a good life. The career, the house, the respectability. A faith that arrived through the coloniser’s door, not as an invitation.
I wanted to belong so much that I forgot to ask: belong to what? Whose measure was I using?
What did you want before you were taught what to want?
What could colonisation not take, no matter how hard it tried?
Whakapapa. It’s still in me.
The maramataka, still turning. The healing line that went underground with my nan, and came back up. The reo, coming back into my mouth, and my children’s.
This is the question I wouldn’t ask the same way as the poverty one. I won’t ask what I’d not give back to colonisation. It isn’t owed, thanks. I’ll ask what it couldn’t take.
What survived in you? And who will you pass it to?
Name the teacher
None of this was failing. It was learning. Colonisation was the teacher, and it taught well. When we can see that, the shame stops being ours to carry.
If you read the poverty questions, these sit around them. Poverty was one lesson. This is the whole curriculum.
The second lesson
Some of what colonisation taught, it taught out loud. At school, at church, in the law.
The rest it taught through silence.
When I was a kid in Kaiti, we’d go into town past the freezing works, down toward the wharf. On the other side of the road was an urupā. I remember thinking, what a weird place for a graveyard.
Years later, in my Mahi Wairua training, I found out why. The freezing works site used to be a marae. The council took the land, moved the people off, put a road through and turned one side into industry. The urupā was all that was left. I suppose nobody was comfortable putting a road over the dead.
The answer was right there beside the road. Nobody told me the story.
That’s how colonisation works. Like poison ivy, it creeps in unseen. By the time you notice it, it’s in the structure: the road, the freezing works, the belief that this is just how Māori are.
That silence taught me something too. We were poor, and I believed that’s just how Māori were supposed to be. Pākehā were the model of success. Nobody taught me about the Acts that took the land, one law after another, in just a few years. No school taught it until 2026.
So I learned it late. And it didn’t only bring grief. It showed me a belief I’d carried my whole life as if it were true. What was hidden, and what I believed because of it, was never mine to carry.
The first lesson was taught out loud. The second was taught through silence. If these questions stir that second one up for you, go gently. Don’t open it on your own. That one is better done with someone beside you.
What was taught can be loosened. That’s the work. These six questions sit in the Te Ara Iwa Teaching Tool, and the second lesson, the silence, is held in Te Ngāhau Kiri, walked with a kaiārahi. You don’t have to unlearn it alone.
Take one question at a time. Don’t rush the hard ones. And always finish with the last one.
What did colonisation teach you? To hide? To carry? To become? To want?
And what could it not take, no matter how hard it tried?
And who will you pass it to?