Ko tōku reo tōku ohooho, ko tōku reo tōku māpihi maurea.
My language is my awakening, my language is the window to my soul.
Ko Dave McArthur taku ingoa. I whanau mai ahau i Kaiwaewae (Featherston lands). Tenei ra, kei te noho ahau i Haewai I nga whenua of Ngati Te Atiwai.
I am writing to express my profound opposition to the proposed Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill.
Our Psychology~physics
The human condition is such that no man (human being) can know with certainty the truth of our existence. At best we can develop compassionate principles of physics i.e. principles that inherently acknowledge our fallibility so we are better able to learn from our errors and harmonize our interactions with the universe. Principles involve profound ways of being.
By contrast, laws arise from principles and involve mere ways of thinking and words. The human condition is such that, without compassion, the ego in each of us can easily have us say one thing, do quite the contrary and remain oblivious to the dissonance.
Unsustainable principles generate bad law i.e. laws that expedite delusional behaviour and the destruction of any society.
Sustainable principles generate good law i.e. laws that expedite the creation of societies that live in harmony with the principles of physics.
A Reflection on Intentions
I will not attempt to debate the stated intentions of the architects of the proposed legislation. Whatever the real intention of its architects, the effect of the proposal has been to give extra vent to the racial hatred of te ao Maori that has long been endemic in Crown New Zealand, to generate crippling division and needless fear, to embed misinformation, intensify disinformation and, in general, to indicate the proposed legislation arises from very unsustainable principles.
We are Our Language
Information being physical, it is subject to the principles of energy and we are language.
Accordingly it is the duty of every citizen to care for and conserve the most transcendent meaning of their mother-tongue so as to know what they are saying because, without such compassionate practice, their culture becomes delusional and vulnerable to self-destruction.
Our Crown institutions and its corporate media inculcated me from birth in the Crown dialect of English, especially the BBC (RNZ), which has been my most intimate companion since my first memories. In retrospect, they inculcated me to be very much an English White Supremacist.
This said, my youth was profoundly informed by the Remutaka Forest, the Waiorongomai and Ratanui streams, lakes Wairarapa, Onoke and Pounui, rata and manuka honey, pukeko, tui and the “morepork” of the legendary ruru. These names evoked a haunting sense of wonderment and beauty in me such that some deep part of me always felt a aching lack that I could not speak te reo Maori.
In 1961 I graduated from the Featherston Convent school to Kuranui College in Greytown where we were taught French so “we could know English better”. Soon I knew more names of the rivers and towns in France than I knew in New Zealand. Eventually I and a like-minded student built up enough courage to ask the Head of Languages if we could learn te reo Maori. He stared at the roof for a long time and then said, “Well, if you want to learn a third language I can organize you Latin”. I thanked him and fled because I just endured seven years of seeming endless hours listening to Catholic liturgy and singing hymns, all in unintelligible Latin.
I knew the legendary Papawai Marae was one street away from Kuranui College but when I asked people about it they dismissed it as a “dump” and an “eyesore”. We did not visit it once in my 5 years at the college.
Half a century later I learned Te Wānanga o Aotearoa planned to hold evening classes that year at the school I have been the cleaner/caretaker of this past two decades. At last that life-long aching lack in me could be filled. I approached the principal and asked if we could organise a relief cleaner to do some of the cleaning once a week so I could attend the class.
The same response as in 1961. The blank look in the eyes, the long stare at the ceiling and this time no reply.
It was excruciating for me cleaning around the school that year knowing that people were learning te reo Maori in the brightly lit hall.
It was unbearable to imagine how much worse it must be for Maori people to be deprived of their mother-tongue!
The Te Wānanga o Aotearoa course was repeated at the school some years later in 2019. Different principal, difference response and it was made possible for me to attend. The 10 month introductory course proved challenging, inspiring, invigorating and enlightening in ways beyond my imagination
Te reo Maori opened up whole new world-views to me in a year I sensed I was rapidly dying. A doctor finally got me have a PSA test about October, which got lost in system until March 2020 when a hospital urologist rang to say I had what turned out to be very active, inoperable prostate cancer that had metastasized up my nerve lines so it now impacted my bowel.
This distraction plus Covid interrupted my formal lessons in of te reo Maori. However I had learned enough te reo Maori to now appreciate why I had long sensed great beauty and sanity in te reo. In particular I observed it enables the speaker to transcend paradox in vital ways impossible now in our Crown dialect of English – see a series of cartoons I assembled to show my tutors that year. https://truehope.info/wordpress/te-reo-maori/
Ka mua, ka muri
(The sustaining power of whakapapa)
My father, whose ancestors came to New Zealand in 1873, fought in WW11 in Europe, as did his father in WW1. My father was in the Squadron 75 under the RAF Bomber Command where he met and married my London-born mother, who was in the WAAF. After “VE Day” his squadron was detailed to fly to fight in Okinawa, an almost certain death sentence, but the departure was cancelled at the last moment after the atrocious Nuclear bombing of Japan.
Thus their marriage survived, I was born soon after in 1947 with the dark, menacing shadow of the European wars still enveloping our family though my parents remained silent about our history. However I sensed horrific, ugly events had happened in Britain leaving gaping wounds and learned early on not to ask about our family history.
Our omnipresent Crown media, especially the BBC (RNZ), reinforced my sense of living a dark, menacing self-deceit about my existence over the next several decades.
The te reo Maori course in 2019 transformed my world-view in a most compassionate way. It taught me to know and value the mountains, the rivers, lakes and oceans that informed me – not just the ones in my present life or the ones of my childhood but especially the ones of my ancestors in Scotland, Ireland and England i.e. the ones I had been taught ignore and forget. Thus te reo Maori anchored me in the Earth that empowers mankind and humbled me so I know more truly who I am by where I came from.
Searching for my whakapapa revealed the trauma of the English Crown’s confiscation of the Commons in Scotland and subsequent starvation, its confiscation of the food of Ireland and subsequent starvation and, above all, the true history and role of “The Crown” (i.e. The City of London Corporation) in my life.
I learned the Crown burned most of the records in Scotland’s church registries of births and death going back many centuries in order to destroy Scottish culture. Even now it erects paywalls limiting access to family records in Britain so I have not yet discovered my Irish ancestors beyond my grandparents in London. Such practices and laws are the work of psychopaths who can put a price on anything and know the value of nothing.
Te reo Maori taught me to neither fear or be dismissive of my whakapapa and it empowered me in compassion to know my ancestors, to understand them in the context of their time and to search for the wisdom that sustained their lives so I am better informed in my time.
Knowing the Whakapapa of our Mother-tongue
(My principal offering in this submission)
I have offered most of my life this century to exploring ways of improving the science of communicating the nature of energy and climate processes. My prime motivation was the terrifying realization in 1991 that our Anglo culture is founded in such extreme levels of waste and pollution that it is disrupting our vital climate systems, causing a mass extinction of species, despoiling the waters, soils and minerals of our planet and must generate global dystopia, if not the destruction of Mankind.
Since my boyhood we Anglo peoples have prided ourselves in the fact that English is the dominant language of global commercial transactions and our leaders have been very clear that this dominance is backed by global hegemony of the Anglo currencies – the petrodollar at present- which in turn are backed by the mightiest military-industrial-media complex ever created.
It is informative of our Crown culture that I majored in psychology and English at Canterbury University in the 1960s yet never learned of the subject of etymology until this century with the advent of the Internet and I encountered the amazing and freely available work of one passionate man: https://www.etymonline.com/
To summarize in a paragraph tens of thousands of hours of reflection and searching for correlations between our behaviour and our use of our mother-tongue, a clear pattern emerged.
My process involved tracking the meaning given to our key English words back to Proto-Indo-European times 2-5000 years ago.
I then rated their sustainability by evaluating whether they were in accord or in denial of the principles of physics – the Conservation of Energy Principle in particular.
Finally I set these results in the context of behavioural change over the centuries. Our behaviour and language are inextricably linked.
A picture can say what words never can – please see sample graphs at
https://truehope.science/word-history-at-a-glance/
A clear pattern emerges: a radical change occurs in both our use of the English language and our English culture/behavior with the advent of the English Combustion Revolution (aka the English Industrial Revolution). There is a fundamental loss of transcendent language (word-use enabling us to transcend paradox and the human condition in general) with a trend for words to be used in increasingly exclusive ways – typical of an absence of compassion and dominance of the ego.
English words, once used in ways that embrace reality of the principles of physics, are now used in ways that completely deny that reality.
This denial reflects delusional beliefs and generates delusional, addictive behaviour.
The ego in men (human beings) will have them condemn the above statements as Angophobic, as racist, as oikophobic.
The compassion in men (human beings) will remind them the principles of physics hold true and it is the duty of every citizen to identify any use of their language that is in denial of these great, wise principles and to rectify it so their use is in accord with them. Without such care, our language~behaviour will destroy us.
Treasuring te reo Maori
We are our language and the acquisitive spirit of the Crown dialect of English tends to suppress, disempower and destroy the indigenous voices where ever it does “business” on the planet. Indeed this psychopathy is having a devastating impact on the majority of languages, many of which retain ancient wisdom critical to sustaining local habitats at a time when our support ecosystems are collapsing.
It is now beyond the imagination of many of those inculcated in the Crown dialect of English to be able to rectify our language and restore its vital transcendent powers. The ego in them, as it did with me, has them assume it knows the meaning of words and they are simply ethereal constructs exempt the principles of physics. This self-deceit means it is all the more vital that we actively conserve all the languages of mankind, especially te reo Maori with its unique wisdom of the lands, waters and airs of Aotearoa.
I consider myself wonderfully fortunate to have been born in this land as a guest of the Maori people and have never had a passport. I have been employed for over 50 years as a labourer. I lived in the freezing works camps with them and listened to their sadness as they talked of life “before and after Maori died”. It was their compassion that sustained me amidst the often sterile, academic lecture rooms at university.
I worked in all weathers beside Maori loading rail wagons and came to put a high value on their sustaining sense of humour, which I now realize is an inherent treasure of te reo Maori.
I walked the streets for two decades as a meter reader visiting tens of thousands of households of every social strata on a regular basis. Thus I was privileged and humbled to meet the many unsung heroes who generously who are the actual glue holding our society together and who are our true philosophers i.e. people whose lives are acts of wisdom. Their words and deeds are true to each other and in harmony with the ways of the universe.
It was not my English teachers at college nor my English professors at university nor the clever wordsmiths in our corporate media who taught me to care for my mother tongue. Rather it was these many unsung heroes who taught me in their quiet ways that we are our language and the truth of our lives is always out in our words.
This why it can be said with certainty that the proposed Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill arises from such corrupt principles that it must generate division and warfare in Crown New Zealand. It is designed to bring out the worst in men.
Not grammar checked and I am diplopic i.e. struggle to write and to read what I write.
Dave McArthur
85 Houghton Bay Road
Wellington 6023
0220962488
Submission on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill.