ABSTRACT
In a stirring address on the subject of human rights, Robert Sullivan said:
Words are a powerful weapon. In many places people are imprisoned for saying, or writing, words.
When Aotearoa/New Zealand was first colonized it was the Word that was used to colonize Maori. Missionaries used the tools of literacy and the Bible to capture the hearts and minds of Maori. Indeed, the Word softened the way for the words of the Treaty of Waitangi, and their duplicity: the biblical word kawana (governor) makes a special adjectival appearance in the text of the Treaty to disguise its true intent, the surrender of mana or absolute sovereignty by the Maori to Great Britain.
Once British sovereignty was established, eventually by force, it was again the task of words to smooth the process. This time in the law courts. “The Treaty is a legal nullity” was a resounding phrase by a judge which was repeated and emphasized by many others for nearly the next one hundred years. The Native Land Court also used the word of law to strip our land from us, to commodify the very thing that defined us as tangata whenua, as “people of the land.” Not as people on the land, or who own land.
As in other European colonies, our names for places were replaced with European names. The name for the place I live in, Taamaki Makaurau, ‘the land of a hundred lovers’, a place desired by many, was renamed to Auckland (pronounced Awk-land). The names of our mountains were changed. Aoraki, ‘sky world’, became Mount Cook. The ancestral mountain Taranaki was renamed Mount Egmont.
One colonizes minds with words. With the words for one’s world, for instance …
In terms of human rights and literature … writing can help us to reclaim our humanity … Just as our people have reclaimed the names for our mountains Aoraki and Taranaki through the Treaty of Waitangi reparations process …
To me literature will never define in a prescriptive sense what it is to be a human being. But literature reminds us that we are human beings. And that is so powerful.
(Sullivan 2004: 225–26) 1