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Carmen Rupe was a whakawahine (trans woman) who was very influential in Pōneke Wellington in the 1970s and 1980s. She was a drag queen, activist, trailblazer of the queer community, owner of cafes and brothels, and one-time mayoral candidate. She ran in 1977 on a platform of legalizing abortion, prostitution, homosexuality and gay marriage. She compared herself to the other candidates as so;

"I am better looking than Sir Francis [Kitts], I am more charming than Michael Fowler and I could beat [Tony] Brunt in a brawl any day."

She was mostly active around Cuba Street in central Pōneke. If you walk down there today, you will cross four sets of pedestrian lights which have been changed in her honour.

[Image: a pedestrian "green man" shaped like a silhouette of Carmen.]

"Māoritanga - Scenes from Māori Life, Carmen Rupe" by Ans Westra, Wellington, Aotearoa (1970s)

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[A video of the inside of Aotearoa Parliament. Rawiri Waititi, leader of Te Pati Māori, is speaking.

Raiwiri: I see I've got a little bit more time here. This house needs a bit of festive cheer. Okay Mr Speaker?

Speaker Brownlee: It's long been established on this debate that this is what we could expect. [background laughter] Better be good!

Rawiri (singing to the tune of Winter Wonderland):

Mokopuna [1], are you listening?

On your whenua [2], truth is glistening

A terrible fly, our tiriti [3] rights

Marching on stolen Māori land

This year ain't been pretty

Toitū te tiriti [4]

A three-headed goose [5]

But we know the truth

Marching on stolen Māori land

In the Beehive [6] they can build a front man

ACT like he's not a racist clown [7]

He'll say "Will you join me?"

I'll say "no, man!"

Our mokopuna will make a stand

Aotearoa, can you hear me?

The polls are up Te Pati Māori

Tīpuna [8] fed, tiriti led

Marching on stolen Māori land

Marching on stolen Māori land

Okay, finish it off with me!

Marching on stolen Māori land!

[Applause]

Rawiri (spoken): Merry Christmas!]

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[1] grandchildren. In this context it's being used more like "kids, are you listening?"

[2] land

[3] Treaty (referring to the Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi)

[4] Uphold the Treaty. This is a prominent slogan of the current Māori rights movement.

[5] the current government is a coalition of three political parties (National, ACT and NZ First).

[6] the Beehive is the nickname for the Parliament building.

[7] a dig at David Seymour, leader of the ACT party and primary author of the proposed bill to redefine the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

[8] ancestor(s)

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Palauan girls, Palau, by Pacific Arts Festival

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Signs from Hīkoi mō te Tiriti at Parliament - Pōneke/Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand (19 November 2024)

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I love my people and it's amazing to see so many of us turn up today, but it's like herding very friendly cats 😂

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I know most of tumblr is thinking about the USA right now. but fuck the nz government right now too. tomorrow, the treaty principles bill, the 'worst, most comprehensive breach of Te Tiriti in modern times' is being introduced to parliament early, because there were activations planned country wide and the cowards decided to pull it forwards. fuck this government. a friend of mine had to go home early, crying. I've been in shock all day since it came out.

check on your Māori friends, e hoa mā. see what they need. see how you can help. everyday, we see and experience racism. from people around us, up to our government. community care will save us.

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Today someone said to me"not everything is about colonisation" and all I could think about was the irony that they were wearing a bikini swimsuit.

Bikini is a colonial misspelling of the indigenous name for the Pikinni atoll. It was one of the many places in the Pacific where Western countries tested atomic bombs. In order to carry out the nuclear testing at Bikini, the USA relocated the islanders to an atoll with no shelter, inadequate fresh water, and so little food that some islanders starved to death. They were exposed to radioactive fallout anyway. Castle Bravo, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated by the USA, was tested at Bikini and sent radioactive particulate as far away as India, the USA and Europe. After detonating 24 atomic bombs on and around the atoll, the US told the islanders that it was safe to return despite knowing that radiation levels were (and still remain) dangerously high. Generations of islanders are still paying the price with their health and their lives.

The guy who created the bikini swimsuit named it after Bikini Atoll. He said that he wanted it to be "a bombshell" and "explosive" on the scale of a nuclear bomb. He said that "like the bomb, the bikini is small and devastating" and "atom bombs reduce everybody to primitive costume."

The point of this post isn't to suggest that we should stop saying bikini. It's a word in our language now, for better or for worse. My point is that colonialism and white supremacy are in everything. How do you heal, how do you move on, when the violence is embedded into our very vocabulary?

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A settler organized in a militia killed a Kanak protesting for liberation from French colonialism in Kanaky.

They are trying to minimize it by saying (without proper investigation) that the settler was defending himself and calling him a “civilian” as well as by calling the Kanak man a “rioter”. The high commissioner also announced that if “calm” doesn’t come back he will organize a military intervention to bring back “peace” and “calm”. For the record there’s already a lot of military checkpoints (edit: I used the expression military checkpoint but it’s not the right one I’m talking about the control by the gendarmerie who are like cops except they are in the military) that Kanak people have to go through daily in certain area and a heavy military presence so when he is talking about military intervention he is talking about killing people.

Article (in French)

This is all happening because France wants to accelerate the colonization of Kanaky by allowing every single white French adult the right to vote locally. The Kanak resistance managed to negotiate so only settlers who had been in Kanaky for a decade or more in 1998 could vote locally. New settlers cannot do it. And France and its settlers want to go back on that accord saying that the 2021 referendum shows that people don’t want liberation so it’s racist (against settlers) to not let them vote (and take over Kanaky completely)

If any piece of shit brings up the 2021 referendum as a justification of French colonialism in Kanaky, know that it has zero value. The Kanak people and the resistance called for a report of the vote because of COVID. Mentioning that not only there was a health risk but that Kanak people have a long grieving period which meant that they wouldn’t be able to vote. That vote ended up being only a settler vote. If you compare it to the two previous votes with higher participation rate it’s almost certain that the Yes to independence would have won.

For those who don’t know it international law recognize Kanaky as a colony. The UN has Kanaky on the list of territories where indigenous people have no right to self determination and they recognize France as the occupying power (thanks to Palestine we’ve seen that international law doesn’t apply to Western backed colonialism but that’s an other topic)

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Banaba

How the West Made an Island Unhabitable (and Consumed its People's Bones)

Banaba, aka Ocean Island, is a small island in Micronesia. It's legally part of Kiribati [kih-rih-bas] but geographically, culturally, and politically very distinct. At three hundred kilometres from its nearest neighbour, Banaba is one of the most isolated places on earth.

It is also among one of the most ecologically devastated.

In the 1900's, a UK / Aotearoa / Australian owned mining company dug up and shipped away huge amounts of Banaba's phosphate-rich soil for use as fertilizer. They grew rich and created Aotearoa's massive agricultural industry from literal stolen land.

More than just the physical earth was taken. Phosphate mining stripped the layers where Banabans had buried their dead for thousands of years. The dust of their bones fed the lands of the West, creating rich green fields that Banabans would never see the profits of.

When I say 'huge amounts' of earth; 90% of the island's surface was stripped away.

[Left image: an aerial view of Banaba showing a roughly oval island with no vegetation in the centre. The outside is ringed by a thin strip of forest. Right image: a photo of the edge of a mining area. In the background is a forest, but then the ground drops off sharply into irregular rocky terrain.]

The ancient sacred caves were destroyed. The island's only source of fresh water was irreversibly polluted and left it unusable to this day. The interior of Banaba became one great hollow of uneven rock, so full of dips and pillars that it is now almost completely impassable on foot. It was left a barren land.

Banaba is not the only Pacific island devastated by phosphate mining; most notably, its neighbour Nauru had 80% of its surface stripped away. But nowhere has been exploited to quite the same extent as Banaba.

There were further indignities and horrors inflicted on the Banaban people, including indescribable atrocities carried out by Japanese occupiers during WWII, and tbe Britain-led forceful relocation of Banabans to Rabi Island in Fiji. Many still live there today. Others have migrated away.

[Image: Banaban girls performing a traditional dance on Rabi Island.]

The traumatic experiences of Banabans, the mass murders and the separation from their ancestral land have all caused significant cultural loss. This includes the loss of the Banaban language.

Approximately three hundred Banabans have returned to their home island, surviving due to supplies shipped in every few months. The only freshwater source remains unusable and severe droughts strike Banaba every three to four years. Although a desalination plant exists there, the vulnerability of the island became all too clear in 2021 when the plant broke down in the middle of a drought. It took three months for repair equipment to arrive. During that time the residents had no fresh water. Their only food was fish because all of their crops had died. They survived by sucking the liquid from fish eyeballs.

And an Australian mining company wants to do it all again.

Part of the reason that people returned to Banaba, despite the difficulties of life there, was to protect it from further mining. But in August last year, the Australian mining company Centrex announced a plan to restart phosphate mining on Banaba. The plan has been paused due to protests from the Banaban people, but it could be restarted again at any time.

We cannot leave it here. If you want to do one small thing to help, you can sign this petition from Banaban community leaders to stop the proposed new phosphate mine. But more than that, Banabans have been campaigning for Australia and Aotearoa to fund ecological restoration projects, especially for the sacred caves that were once the island's source of fresh water. As Katerina Teiawa says:

"We need to move away from this same continuous narrative of ‘the poor Banaban people, who have no water, help them’ and move towards an approach that is actually finding a solution.

This whole thing is a series of crises. We can’t just keep telling the story of devastation and vulnerability over and over again. Where does the crisis end, if not with justice?"

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Fijian dancer, Fiji, by fijitourism

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The po'ouli was one of ten "American" bird species declared officially extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2023. Eight were from Hawai'i, one from Guåhan, and one from the mainland USA.

(A note: the drawing of the Maui 'ākepa is actually a Hawai'i 'ākepa, a separate and still living species. The Maui 'ākepa was green.)

Also declared extinct were the little Mariana fruit bat (of Guåhan), two species of mainland USA fish, and eight species of mussels.

From the Wikipedia article on the Kaua'i 'ō'ō:

It was the last surviving member of the Mohoidae, which had originated over 15-20 million years previously during the Miocene, with the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō's extinction marking the only extinction of an entire avian family in over 500 years.

The last po’ouli died in an unusual nest. Too weak to perch, the brownish-greyish songbird rested in a small towel twisted into a ring. He was the last of his species, the last in fact of an entire group of finches, and occurred nowhere on Earth outside his native Hawaii. For weeks, as scientists tried to find him a mate, he had been getting sicker. The only remaining po’ouli had just one eye. Alone in the towel, alone in all the world, he closed it.

Extinction Obituary for the quiet and beautiful Hawaiian po’ouli

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An addition

#EatThePolice

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Tuvaluan kids, Tuvalu, by GoldCoast2018

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Tēnā tātou katoa (greetings everyone) so I thought I'd give the tuāhine (sister) Lee's waiata (song) a bit of a crack. I know she sounds way better than me but hei aha (whatever)! Mai te awa ki te moana (from the river to the sea), free Palestine.

Ka hīkoi, ka hīkoi tātou

March, we will march

Mai i te whenua ki te moana

Across the land to the sea

Mō ake tonu, ka whawhai tonu mātou

Forever, we will fight on

Tūturu whakamaua kia tina

Prepare to be fastened together

Kia kaha, kia māia,

Be brave, be strong

Kia manawanui i tēnei wā

Be steadfast now

Kaua e pirau, he waka eke noa

Don't give up, we are in this boat together

Tūturu whakamaua kia tina, tina

Prepare to be fastened together, fastened

Ka tō te rā, ka rere he rā

As the sun sets, another sun rises

Ka tō te rā, he rā ki tua (×2)

As the sun sets, better days are beyond

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#EatThePolice

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Saibaian Torres Strait Islander dancer, Australia, by Leitha Assan

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okay time for a rundown on the significance of pounamu/greenstone in māori culture, seeing as its less than a month until tourists can come back to aotearoa

pounamu is the name for jade, nephrite, or greenstone in te reo māori. its a stone which is mostly found in the arahura river, but also other places in te wai pounamu/the south island. this stone has an important significance to all māori, but especially ngāi tahu and other south island tribes. pounamu is the name given to all of this stone found in aotearoa, but any greenstone found outside of the country cannot be called pounamu. the stone is a connection to our land, our history, and our ancestors

pounamu is taonga, and is regularly carved into small shapes for necklaces. these necklaces can be bought throughout aotearoa, and make a huge profit annually. luckily, in 1997, all rights to pounamu were returned to ngāi tahu, meaning no one else can legally take the stone from rivers, carve it, or make a profit from it. many māori wear pounamu necklaces, but its not something that only māori can wear! many pākehā and tauiwi wear it as an acknowledgement to tangata whenua, to acknowledge the land

if youre visiting aotearoa, i absolutely encourage you to buy pounamu. there are, however a few key things to consider

1. you should never buy pounamu for yourself. you can buy it to gift to someone else, and you can wear it if you have been gifted it, but never buy taonga to wear yourself. this carries back to the traditional usages of pounamu taonga as a trading/gifting item. we would gift it to other hapū, or it was given to individuals within hapū or whānau.

2. make sure it is ngāi tahu pounamu. this is easy to check when purchasing it! ngāi tahu have put together a system in which every piece of pounamu that is carved or sold by ngāi tahu has a code which can be put into their website to trace the origins of the stone, and who carved it. if you are buying pounamu that doesnt have this code, it is either stolen, or more likely, it isnt pounamu at all and its jade that has been grown outside of aotearoa and imported to profit off our culture. the only time you will have authentic pounamu that does not have the traceable code is in the case of being gifted pounamu by a ngāi tahu iwi member who collected and carved the pounamu themselves

3. not all pounamu is nephrite! mine for example is bowenite, which we call tangiwai pounamu. our tūpuna didnt distinguish between these different types of rock, they are all considered pounamu and none is any less precious than any other

4. check the meaning of the shape your pounamu has been carved into. the last thing you want is to be purchasing something that means something you dont realise...

otherwise, if you have checked everything, please do buy pounamu for people! the profits go directly to tangata whenua, and its a beautiful and meaningful gift

when our borders open, come for a visit if you have the means, and do what you can to immerse yourself (respectfully) into our culture