A values base for radical left and Te Tiriti justice

In my activist life, I often want to say to young people, come with me. Come with me to the courtroom. Come with me to the protest, to the hīkoi. Come with me, and let’s see what happens.
My wish to bring young people along mirrors my own journey of learning outside classrooms. In dynamic situations where truth speaks to power, being in the company of inspirational people has taught me how to think critically and how to practise a values base for the radical left and Te Tiriti justice.
One relationship that lasted many years was formed on the front lines of protest. I was living an alternative lifestyle in the village at Umangawha Colville in Hauraki during the 1980s, when multinational gold miners showed up. They were planning to dig up the mountain, Te Moehau. Betty Williams (Ngāti Pukenga, Ngāti Maru) came to our anti-mining meetings as an activist and as a teacher. She taught me, and anyone else around me who would listen, what Te Tiriti o Waitangi meant in Hauraki. I learned the power of stories the day she told me why she fought so hard for the land. Betty’s mother had died when she was barely eight years old, and as a child, she used to worry about her lying in the cold ground on rainy nights. When the court moved to take away her mother’s land block in the forced consolidation of multiply owned land, she felt it like a blow to the heart. Betty began to fight for justice and never stopped. Her anger and loss, her fire and tenacity touched me, but even more, her analysis of colonisation and multinational capitalism, and her sharp deconstruction of systemic oppression.
She would get up at our Coromandel Watchdog of Hauraki meetings and challenge us hard with the depth of her kōrero. She would explain the mauri of gold, and the whakapapa-based, site-specific, non-transferable responsibilities of tangata whenua kaitiaki. With us, she worked in direct action to stop the mining, and with me, she shared stories about her past. She became a friend and a mentor. With Betty, I started to understand what being a Pākehā in Aotearoa might mean, as well as a new framework for thinking: structural analysis. Following her example, I learned to examine the unjust architectures of power that control our society, how they work and how they must be understood in our lives so we can challenge them.
Much of our time in the 1980s and ’90s was spent in the Environment Court fighting mining consents. Betty would march into the room and rearrange the seating to get the people to the front row and the lawyers further to the back. I learned something every time she changed the room, and she changed the room every time she spoke. I recorded her life story because it is extraordinary, and because she gave me benchmarks for future work: test against Te Tiriti articles, and test against seven generations’ wellbeing before you act. She inspired the young wāhine from her community and she took on the world.
One day at a public meeting against gold mining in the Tapu Hall on the Thames Coast, a white environmental group arrived to tell locals that the Hauraki should be designated as a forest park. Some of their assumptions were so arrogant that the tangata whenua rose as one and walked out. I wanted to walk out with them in solidarity, but Betty said to me, “Go back in there and sort out your people.” In that moment, solidarity was redefined for my practice.
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Come with me, I want to say to young people, and let’s see what happens. Come with me to the hui, the streets, the river, the garden, the burial ground. It starts with turning up at the meeting, or the protest, or the hearing, in solidarity and self-doubt, time after time.
But many cannot drop their commitments to qualification paths. They have student loans to pay, and education outside market considerations is an uncertain road. Those who do manage to create their own pathways and walk with elders. Through cross-cultural relationships in particular, we discover who we are, who we are not, where we come from and the cultural oppression we have either experienced or benefited from. Working with my outrageously creative colleague Kay Robin from Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, we travelled together on a tutoring path where neither was leading except in our fields of knowledge, and both could be spontaneous in workshops because of an elevated level of trust and respect.
Kay taught tangata whenua social science students and rangatahi in youth programmes that their everyday cultural practices were powerful. But her world, based on wairua, was not my world. As a Pākehā, I was raised in a materialist atheism, and a long tradition of individualism and suppressed feeling. I learned to trust and follow tangata whenua when things felt weird in the classroom. Instead of freezing all emotions and clinging to a curriculum, we could stop and reflect. I learned that karakia could create safety and open hearts in any form or language, and that programmes and structures existed to be challenged and changed.
Kay had her moko kauae at a young age, way before it was common. She was kicked out of a pub one lunchtime in her hometown for having a ‘tattoo’. She fought the bar owner via the Human Rights Commission and won, but it took years, and it was a bruising process. She is unstoppable: small of stature, feet on the whenua, a kaikaranga and a fountain of laughter, eloquent curses and love.
Once, when learning to speak out in support of a Treaty settlement bill in Parliament, I overstepped the boundaries by going beyond my own knowledge and into the space of tangata whenua. I was firmly told by the iwi to stay in my lane, and I had to apologise in front of the whole Parliament to people I deeply respect. When I left the chamber, however, I found them waiting for me with kindness at the bottom of the stairs.
That day, I learned that it’s very painful to get into trouble, but it’s essential to own it when you do. That conflict need not be the end of a relationship, as we Pākehā so often presume. If you are willing to own your mistakes, that can open the possibility of learning valuable things and be the beginning point from which to build a relationship. All of these ‘mistakes’ are an education that no amount of money could pay for, and no course could deliver.
A mildly abbreviated chapter taken from the inspiring new anthology Past the Tower, Under the Tree: Twelve Stories of Community by Balamohan Shingade and Erena Shingade (Gloria Books, $45), which sold out its first print run but the second run is now available in selected bookstores. It won the best non-illustrated book at the 2024 PANZ Book Design Awards last month, and has been folded into required reading for two University of Auckland courses in Fine Arts and Indigenous Philosophy. The editors state, “For many, education is synonymous with uniforms and tote trays, assemblies and sports days. But another form of education has always existed, and continues in Aotearoa today: teaching that is grounded in relationships, and learning in beloved company. Past the Tower, Under the Tree offers a portrait of 12 artists and activists crafting a life in community.”