181 Rounds.
The game Monopoly is a well-known and popular choice of entertainment during my whānau’s Games Night.
In recent times, this game has been used as a depiction for inequity caused by colonial systems. Personally, I can see it. I can visualise Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti as the players, the Crown as the Bank, and Parliament as the biassed wordsmith. As this new board game was being placed down, I can visualise it flattening Aotearoa’s indigenous landscape, and shortly after man-made roads and property sections are etched into Te Ika-a-Māui. I can see cities emerging from the ground, its smoke and shadow inked into the grooves. I can see wins and losses playing out. The board game has begun.
A board game which has been continuing on for 181 years. A board game that has stripped one player of all they have whilst embellishing the other with the properties, chance cards, and wealth. When you visualise the turmoil that 181 rounds has had on the ill favoured group, I hope you see the alienation of their land, the poverty rates, the health inequalities, the education disparities, the high incarceration rates, the totality of their deprivation, the frustration, the exhaustion, and the sadness.
Justice Joe Williams once said “the Law is a tool of colonisation, and it most certainly was and is, then it is also the tool of decolonisation. And that really is the phase we are in, not just as Māori but as a whole country.” So if Rule Books are the place to begin to pull at, to begin to tug at, to untie us from this oppressive knot, then I encourage all tauira to begin. You don’t need a Law Degree to know the Law. There are a plethora of books and resources that can assist as footholds. Learn how this game is being played, so that we can all be advantageous. So that we can all be dismantlers. Be our own Bank. Be our own wordsmiths. We have the Māori Land Court as our sherpa. We have the Waitangi Tribunal as our Champion. We have ourselves, descendants of the greatest voyagers this world has ever seen, as the navigators.
My words of encouragement to you are, if the place of tikanga in the Law was unimaginable a decade ago, but is now recognised by the Supreme Court of New Zealand, then the unimaginable now has every possibility of being the new reality. For us all, I hope it is a whole new board game. Hear the words of Princess Te Puea, Mahia te mahi hei painga mō te iwi.
Nō reira,
tēnā koutou,
tēnā koutou,
tēnā tātou katoa.
