Sick of all the royal coronation news flooding your news feeds right now? Pīkari Mai, a new web browser tool, is replacing royal news with Indigenous content instead.
The Pīkari Mai plug-in works by using a data scrape to automatically search for keywords like ‘royal family’ and switches it out for articles about te ao Māori from different media outlets.
Pīkari Mai was created to challenge the coronation by bringing Māori voices and stories to the front pages of the internet, co-creator Hāmiora Bailey (Ngāti Huarere, Ngāti Porou ki Harataunga) says.
“Our hapori (community) is fatigued by royal gossip and I feel like we deserve the option to opt-out,” Hāmiora says.
“I'd rather pay attention to my own people than be reminded of the institution that doesn't honour or never honoured Te Tiriti.”
Hāmiora says a lot of the kōrero that comes from the coronation or the royals is often about how much a diamond costs or what people are wearing.
Hāmiora says he doesn't think our whānau Māori really care about that and by creating Pīkari May, they hope whānau whānui (wider family) feel “a sense of joy, to be able to enjoy defining ourselves from a cultural context”.
Pīkari mai is accessible on Firefox and Chrome and is in the process of being available to Safari.
To get in touch with the author of this article, email Teahi@renews.co.nz
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