I visit Te Aro Pā, or what remains of it anyway. I sit there on the concrete floor and think about what is, and what was, and what will be, listening to the screeching high-pitched whining of construction machinery. I sit there on the concrete floor and watch the sliding door open, and close.
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Ask the posts of your whare tūpuna
about fibres intertwined
Before your birth you were
whakapapa, etched on our faces
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Cuz, where are we from again?
Te Aro Pā
I thought Te Aro Pā doesn’t exist anymore.
Ew, you don’t exist.
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You know what kind of park I would have built there? I wouldn’t build a national war memorial park, I would build a national Parihaka memorial park. I would build a park to remember the Parihaka prisoners, with bricks to make, ploughs to push and fences to rebuild.
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Associate Maori Affairs Minister Tariana Turia is to be given a stern warning by the Prime Minister to keep her opinions about "the Maori holocaust" and colonisation to herself.
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When I was at primary school everyone got the vacuum cleaner hose or the wooden spoon at home. At school it was the strap. Or a ruler. Sometimes the whole class lined up one after the other like a twisted conga line. Violent nuns.
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I couldn’t work for that firm
because they represented another iwi.
I got told if I wanted to work for them
I would have to keep my whakapapa quiet.
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Our whānau were pushed out of Te Aro Pā. Our homes became their city.
So? Let it go. It’s not like you even go to Te Aro much. What do you even do there to show you’re from there?
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Sharing our stories
can be like being lowered
into a hāngi pit,
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Location: Northwest from Te Aro park almost to Wakefield Street, (the old shoreline), and east to just beyond Taranaki Street. And north across the harbour to Matiu/Somes Island, then Petone, Avalon and Stokes Valley. Heading over the Haywards to Parihaka and other parts of Taranaki. And south. Really really south. To the island of Ripapa. BYO steamship and shackles.
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