When you inherit intergenerational wealth and power at the expense of others like she has, your life’s duty should be to right those wrongs, writes Te Matahiapo Safari Hynes in this opinion piece.
It’s important to note I’m not saying that Māori should behave in a uniform way in response to her death. There are differing whakaaro, experiences and relationships across different iwi and individuals - all of these different responses are valid and deserve airtime. After a couple days of thinking, this is where I’ve landed.
When I heard that Queen Elizabeth had died, I was shocked. Not because I loved her but because she was always ‘there’ and I felt a sort of emptiness with her now gone.
I was shocked because I didn’t know how to feel and what it meant for the future of our country.
I felt sorry for her children and her grandkids who have lost a mother and a grandmother, as I would anyone else. I even admired her devout service for seventy years and insistence on duty.
And then I saw the proclamation for King Charles III being read from Parliament and remembered she was not just an individual, but an institution too.
She was the ultimate symbol of British imperialism and colonisation
Her duty for the institution she so devoutly served was to continue the colonial legacy she inherited from her ancestors.
When her reign began in 1952, she became Queen of the British Empire and had power over one quarter of the world’s population and landmass.
She maintained the institutions established by her forebears that took the land, lives and power of countless Indigenous peoples across the globe. Māori were one of these peoples.
British representatives were sent to Aotearoa on her ancestor’s behalf to establish a government.
The following institutions set up by this illegitimate government aggressively usurped the tino rangatiratanga of the hapū and iwi of this land and continued with policies of warfare, dispossession and assimilation, with what feels like the aim of exterminating Māori.
Under the systems established by the Government on the monarch’s behalf, Māori had become constitutionally powerless, virtually landless and were relegated to a dying race by the turn of the twentieth century.
Our language and culture was being beaten out of us and our people were forced into urban settings in order to survive where successive governments tried to assimilate us into the dominant Pākehā culture. Our whānau were made impoverished, our children were taken by the state, our people were thrown into prisons and our foreshore and seabed was stolen.
Regardless of the British monarch’s apparent lack of proximity to our government, all of these actions were done in their name, on their behalf and by the institutions which they are the heads of.
In 1952, Queen Elizabeth opened a session of our parliament, thereby endorsing the actions of the institutions established by her forebears and playing a part in the continued subjugation of our people that ensued from those same institutions.
Queen Elizabeth undoubtedly knew what Britain had done to the world, especially the institutions it had established here
When she attended Waitangi Day celebrations in 1990, she famously acknowledged that Te Tiriti had been “imperfectly observed.”
While Queen Elizabeth was not personally responsible for our people’s suffering, she has played a part in our continued suffering.
When you inherit intergenerational wealth and power at the expense of others like she has, your life’s duty should be to right those wrongs.
I’m not sure we can confidently say that her life was devoted to correcting the wrongs of her ancestors.
I didn’t expect her to entirely dismantle the monarchy and the systems of oppression set up in the Crown’s name, because everything in her life had prepared her to maintain them.
However, it may be something we expect of future monarchs, including King Charles III.
Queen Elizabeth II has now passed but the oppressive institutions that were established by her ancestors and maintained by her remain.
They’ve been passed onto her son, King Charles III. He now gets to decide how to address the detrimental intergenerational impact of his ancestor’s decisions, across the world.
So yeah, I’m respectful of her death but I’m not mourning her. I’m just trying to think and reflect.
Te Matahiapo Safari Hynes is principally from Rangitāne and is a tauira at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington.
Top Image: Empty seats at cancelled Test match between England and South Africa at The Oval in the UK. (Source: Getty)
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