“Nobody around me knew about Te Tiriti, and some of them didn’t even know who Māori were as people. I learned how to translate our experience into global discussions of politics,” writes Rhieve Grey about his time at Oxford. (Photo supplied)

Rhodes scholar Rhieve Grey recently completed a master’s degree in public policy at Oxford University. He spent a lot of time over there thinking about how Māori and other Indigenous peoples interact with global systems of trade and capital.

Rhieve is back in Aotearoa now, and sharing his ideas with rangatahi Maōri. This is an edited version of a kōrero he gave at Waikato University.

In 1840, Iwikau Te Heuheu of Ngāti Tūwharetoa travelled to the Bay of Islands to meet with missionaries from afar. While there, he found himself involved in deliberations on Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Three days after the main signing, Iwikau signed the document before returning to his home in Tūwharetoa.

However, he had signed without the permission of his older brother Mananui Te Heuheu, the then paramount chief of Ngāti Tūwharetoa. Mananui had vehemently refused to sign, rejecting any notion that a white woman from England could wield mana over his whenua. At a later signing in Te Arawa, Mananui repeated his rejection of the document, compelling other rangatira to do the same.

Today, Mananui’s actions remain relevant. To me, his stance can be viewed as a rejection of foreign mana, a rejection of hegemonic global norms of diplomacy, and a decision to set different terms of engagement.

There are many similar examples from kōrero tuku iho of different hapū and iwi. I want to whakamana these examples and what they can teach us about how we might engage with the global systems that we, as Māori, find ourselves embedded in today.

We are travellers, we go to other countries, many of us have represented ourselves as Māori on the world stage. And even if you haven’t done these things, the overriding economic system of capitalism means you’re inescapably connected to international trade regimes and global supply chains. So my question is not whether or not we should engage with the world, but how we should go about doing so.

Just posing this question is relatively novel as far as my whānau is concerned. My nanny grew up in a place called Taurewa, under the protection of Tongariro maunga. To this day, she lives in Tūwharetoa with my koro, and she has never left this whenua. She’s barely left the heartlands of Waikato, to be honest!

Only two generations later, not only have I ventured out of the heartlands, but I’ve had the immense privilege of regularly travelling overseas. It’s an intergenerational shift that must not be understated. I thank those in my nana’s generation for putting in the hard yards which means we’ve been able to venture internationally to take up different opportunities. Mei kore ake ko rātou, e kore rawa tēnei kaupapa e tū nei.

Among my travels, I’ve had the opportunity to study at the world’s oldest English-speaking university, the University of Oxford. I studied public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, as part of an annual programme which brings together 150 graduate students from across the globe, to learn philosophy, economics and politics. After completing the programme, the idea is that we’ll be equipped to help build a better world, or as the school puts it: “Contribute to a world better led, served and governed.”

Every day felt like being at the UN. Our classrooms were designed to mirror the UN General Assembly, and we would sit in a massive auditorium with little placards that had our name and country on them. The class was full of amazingly clever and powerful people. On my first day, I sat next to an older gentleman who had someone personally serving him tea and coffee. When the class started, he introduced himself as the recently exited president of Colombia, Ivan Duque. He’d only been out of the job for six weeks.

It was in this context that I quickly learned more about the world. I came to understand that nobody around me knew about Te Tiriti, and some of them didn’t even know who Māori were as people. So I soon learned how to translate our experience into global discussions of politics.

For example, in one of our politics classes we often discussed the major challenges faced by refugees who’ve had to flee conflict-zones across the globe. I obviously couldn’t lend a perspective based on personal experience, but I contributed to the kōrero by articulating what internal displacement from the whenua has been like for us as Māori.

I expressed the intergenerational mamae caused by being separated from our homelands, the land we consider ourselves to be descended from. My classmates took particular interest in our kinship connections to our maunga and awa. Being able to share these insights from an ao Māori perspective helped to enrich our conversations about the extreme violence caused by separating peoples from whenua, no matter who or where they might be.

Conversations like these helped hone my ability to participate more comfortably in the international community at Oxford. So much so, that I think my friends here would’ve started to find me unrecognisable. I remember one time when a bro from home came and visited me in Oxford. We went out to a pub, and that night our group included my friends from Ghana, Ethiopia, India, Germany and Singapore. We sat there and discussed our friends’ studies which focused on the failure of different development projects in Ghana while drinking at a pub which began serving beer to students while my ancestors were still chilling in Hawaiki!

As I became more familiar with the world, one thing that became clear to me was how our struggle for self-determination and identity here in Aotearoa is far from isolated. I learned more about the history of colonialism as a global project and how it continues to inform the systems of the global order today. I realised how hegemonic powers wield violence to structure global systems of trade and law to suit specific agendas. I bonded with the many different communities that find themselves on the oppressive end of these agendas. People from across the Pacific, Kashmir, Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar, Xinjiang, the Congo and many more are all struggling for autonomy and recognition, with an exploitative and violent system stacked against them.

That’s when I began to ask myself about the ways in which we, as Māori, might stand in solidarity with these struggles, and also how we make sure that we don’t become part of the problem.

In some ways, I saw how we had already become part of the problem. Having had our own economies and resources ripped away from us through the process of colonisation, we’ve been forced to participate in modern systems of trade to ensure we are looked after, even if these systems go against our core values. At an individual level, this might be as simple as not really considering where our products are sourced, by whom, and to whose benefit or detriment.

Additionally, I felt myself being pushed towards career pathways which could in some ways lead to the bolstering of these systems. After Oxford, many of the people in my class went on to work in global decision-making bodies, such as Capitol Hill in Washington, the Hague in the Netherlands, or the United Nations in Geneva. Although tempted by such potential opportunities for myself, I felt I needed to come home to reconnect with whānau and whenua, and continue to figure out how we engage with global systems in ways that are consistent with our values as Māori.

My feelings of angst were heightened last year when the state of Israel began its latest campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people, which continues at this very moment. The Palestinian students in Oxford told us how entire swathes of their whānau were being wiped out, and how this was only the latest in a long history of violent colonisation. The hypocrisy of the so-called “rules-based order” is on full show. It underscores the need for all of us to ask how we are implicated in this system. In what ways are we complicit, or even aiding a system that leads to widespread suffering, of the same kind that Palestine is suffering right now?

Over the last year, I’ve seen so many of us ask this question of ourselves. I’ve been warmed to see Māori rise up and connect our struggle with that of the Palestinians, West Papuans, and whānau from Kanaky. But our meditation on these issues needs to go beyond that. On one hand, we display support and solidarity for Indigenous peoples across the world, but at the same time we also look to take hold of the market-driven systems of international trade to further advance our Māori economy.

I’m so thankful that many of us understand the need to engage in these systems in a way that is uniquely our own, whether that’s taking more duty of care towards Papatuānuku or Tangaroa, or creating Indigenous-to-Indigenous opportunities for trade and exchange.

But during a time in history where our planet is screaming out for transformation and not just change, I keep asking myself if we really can have our cake and eat it too. I’m of the opinion that we cannot, and that our engagement with the world must take on completely different forms to what we’ve seen so far.

If we want to take up the opportunities of the digital revolution, for example, we need to ask some tough questions. What is the whakapapa of the technology that we’re engaging with? How is it tied to supply chains of exploitation and violence? What is our responsibility to those children in the Congo who’ve produced the cobalt necessary to run the tech that enables our launch into the digital economy? What part can we play in changing the terms of engagement?

By no means do I know the answers to these questions — heck, I wrote this kōrero on my cobalt-powered iPhone. But one thing I do know is that the building of a prosperous world where everyone thrives depends on our ability and willingness to ask these tough questions.

Māori, alongside the other Indigenous peoples of the world, are in a special position to respond to these questions in the right way. We bring to the table a different worldview, and if we hold steadfast to that worldview, we can contribute effectively to the transformation of the system itself.

For example, Māori and other Indigenous peoples have remained fiercely alert to the threats posed to our intellectual property and data. In May of this year, the 30th anniversary of the Mataatua Declaration on the Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples was celebrated in Whakatāne. I learned from attending the celebration that the declaration was well ahead of its time in predicting neoliberal threats to our data and knowledge.

Another example is the call to resist AUKUS, which encourages Indigenous peoples from across the Pacific to come together in favour of protecting Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa and to challenge nuclearisation and widespread militarisation.

These examples show that when our global engagement is fortified by other Indigenous peoples, we can move to change the status quo.

I urge us to hold steadfast to this idea of changing the status quo as we engage with the world. We as Māori are accustomed to seeing how domestic institutions and systems impinge on our rights as tangata whenua. We must take this same lens with us when we explore the world and consider international institutions and systems.

Resist the urge to engage in the ways presented before you. Interrogate the norms you participate in when going offshore or connecting afar. Be inspired by your tūpuna and their outlook, their mindset. Colonisation was a global project, and wherever you end up on your travels, the chances are that place will have been structured and organised in ways that produce inequality — and there are always ways that you can either be contributing to that system or actively trying to change it.

Going back to the example set by Mananui Te Heuheu. Our engagement with the world can be different. In fact, it must be different. We must say no to systems of genocide, exploitation and planetary destruction. We cannot be persuaded by the opportunities and advancements on offer, without questioning where they come from, and at what cost.

When we take inspiration from our ancestors, when we operate with our whakapapa and whenua at the forefront of our priorities, we can contribute to shaping the global system for the better.

Rhieve Grey (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Porou, and Ngāti Raukawa) is a Rhodes Scholar who completed his masters in public policy at the University of Oxford. He serves as Te Hiwa with Ngā Toki Whakarururanga. He is also a researcher for Te Kuaka, a New Zealand-based foreign policy think tank, and for Pūrangakura, a kaupapa Māori and community-based research centre in Tāmaki Makaurau. His current research focuses on Māori and Indigenous engagement in foreign policymaking.

E-Tangata, 2024