Crown without Consent

Te iwi e e karanga  

E te iwi e  

Kua eke mai nei  

Ki runga te marae e  

Mauria mai rā e ngā mate  

O te motu e

Our tribe is calling  

To the people  

Who have just arrived  

On our meeting ground  

Bring with you memories of the dead  

Of this land

Crown Without Consent

A generational reckoning from beneath the velvet glove

Inherited Reverence

My nana bowed to a flag she never chose.  

My mum was caned for questioning it.  

And me? I watched televised weddings like rituals, 

Not in awe, but because there was no other channel.

Loyalty as Indoctrination

They called it heritage, we called it survival.  

Loyalty wasn’t chosen... it was demanded.  

Beaten into brown backs, cloaked in English hymns,  

Passed down like a script we couldn’t rewrite.

The Benevolence Illusion

*They said it was for our good.  

Education.  

Legislation.  

Civilization.*

But what they gave was  

Erasure hidden in good grammar,  

Control dressed in legalese.

Succession Acts. Settlement Charters.  

A tangle of clauses  

Where every “right” was a leash  

And every “benefit” had a price.

We didn’t sign these documents.  

We didn’t consent to the Crown’s rules,  

Yet generation after generation  

Was bound by their ink  

As though it came from our blood.

The Quiet Revolution

It didn’t end with protest.  

It ended with disinterest.

My kids don’t know their names... 

The kings or the castles.  

They weren’t raised to bow.  

They just shrugged.  

And in that shrug,  

I heard the empire begin to dissolve.

We were trained to kneel.  

They were born standing.

The Myth of Grace

They called it grace.  

They called it class.  

They called it duty wrapped in diamonds.  

But it was never ours.

They praised composure 

Not knowing it was silence  

We’d been beaten into for generations.  

They dressed their dominance in etiquette,  

Their distance in dignity.

And when we didn’t clap,  

They called us angry.  

It wasn’t anger.  

It was memory.  

It was truth  

Trying to speak in a language they outlawed.

Royalty as Ritual

They made a religion out of restraint.  

Called silence “grace.”  

Distance “dignity.”  

Submission “tradition.”

We were told royalty was chosen.  

Sacred.  

Divine.

But I’ve seen more divinity  

In a kuia’s laugh  

Than in all their gilded ceremonies combined.

From Silence, Strategy

From the silence, we did learn.  

We studied the oppressor.  

Sketched their maps in our margins.  

Learned to predict, not worship.

We read between the laws  

And spoke in the gaps they couldn’t legislate.  

We fought—  

Not with crowns, but with stories.  

Not with fear, but with refusal.

Reclamation

Our language, our land, our whakapapa

Stolen, but not forever. Just for the moment.

Now we remember.  

Now we rebuild.

We’ve gathered the scattered names,  

The broken reo, the buried tikanga.  

And with every word we teach our children,  

Every step we take with healed knowing,  

We fortify what they tried to erase.

This is not revival.  

This is return.  

We are not fragments.  

We are the forge.

*And this mark?  

The ururoa wrapped along my arm?  

It is not art.  

It is a vow.*

Kaua e mate wheke, mate ururoa.  

Do not die like an octopus—die like a hammerhead shark.  

I won’t fade. I’ll charge.