Earth Tuna
I feel like a kid who has outgrown their shoes.
Scuffed round the edges, rubber breaking at the seams.
Toes that hurt from trying to protrude the front.
I feel like a tree so tall and far from the other plants below them. Reaching with its branches to connect with another, someone like him.
I feel like a cloud constantly chasing the sun. Even though it feels closer every time I cover his light, his presence is so far.
I feel like a tuna brought on land. Expected to survive in an atmosphere that is against every part of its being. Wriggling around, feeling the pressure to try flow like water in a place only existing on dirt.
I feel like someone that no matter how hard I try to connect I’m so far from everyone around me.
I feel like someone who has untameable passion, ideas, creativity and burning that no one else around me can appreciate.
I feel like the trees, the clouds, the shoes, and the tuna. A being undergoing such growth in an environment that doesn’t support such things.
Put your tuna back in its awa, watch it go, watch it flow, watch it thrive and hopefully survive because it’s finally in an environment where it can own who it wants to be.
Enough
You hear that. It is the uproar of nations screaming enough is Enough.
You hear that it is the cry’s of our tupuna telling us to continue, they see us, and they feel us. They are here with us.
Enough is enough.
Our people have died for this. Our languages have been lost because of this. Our tears have been shed for this.
Our people have been arrested for this. Our people have had enough of this. But yet we are still here fighting and showing what indigenous excellence is. That is the power of our people and the power that will continue until the cultures, the languages, and the wellbeing of our lands is returned.
I hope one day our ancestors can rest easy. Knowing that we are okay. That we are living by their teachings.
In my time on earth I want to build a hopeful future for these lands and culture for the next generation. The question is do you?
Te Ara Whānui a Tāne
Sometimes I dance with the thought of death walking hand in hand down Te Ara Whānui with Koro.
As we approach the sunset I’d pause
I’d ask Koro;
Why did you make the decisions you made?
Why did you hurt my Papa?
Why did you hit my Kuia?
Why did you break a whānau and leave us to pick up the pieces?
Did you realise the Whakapapa you altered.
Intergenerational trauma is a silent but violent mamae.
You’ve grown for so long tolerating it or unaware.
When I was year 12, I wrote a story about you Koro. It was so believable I nearly won a national award. Even Māori thought I knew you.
I imagined you teaching me a purakau from our iwi which I knew so little about.
Koro, I wrote about you like I knew you and had passed on such wisdom.
Koro, everything I should’ve learnt from you, my whānau, my marae - I sought to find myself. I’ve taught myself reclamation because of the decisions you made decades ago.
The only thing in this world we get to hold as timeless is our Whakapapa and the inherent effect we all have on it. With it. Through it.
Koro, I know I’ve never met you but looking out this airplane window after returning to my marae. Your grave. I saw Te Ara Whānui and I thought of you.
I left my pounamu for you. Koro, I graduated from te Reo Māori and Māori indigenous studies. I did that for us. For our Whakapapa. I just hope in return one day you’ll guide me home. On the path you never got to choose. Is that too much to ask?
