Maranga Mai! The combined conquests of all former empires paled into insignificance compared with the worldwide reach of white colonisation. The devastation and harm were unprecedented and the extensive religious and philosophical justifications unparalleled in world history. These included religious doctrine and theorising Social Darwinism, race hierarchy, cultural evolution, colour, craniology, so-called scientific racism, planned breeding and eugenics. Based on self-serving myopic assumptions, the white Western world classified and ranked ‘others’ according to degrees of civilisation or primitiveness, advancement or backwardness, and cultural superiority or inferiority or in-betweenness. Whiteness presumed fair-skinned ‘races’ represented a civilised peak – intelligent, morally pure, brave, advanced and superior; and darker races primitive, backward, cowardly, untrustworthy, less intelligent, childlike, and inferior (Smith, 2021): This false ideology justified racism while forgiving the racist. The coloniser assumed we were inferior, this justified taking our lands which reduced our ancestors to poverty. That impoverishment and its cumulative intergenerational impact confirmed to the racist that we are inferior, while forgiving the racist from any act of racism. The assumption of our inferiority and their superiority informed the racist that whatever they did was for the benefit of all (Taonui, 2021). Colonial settlement The arrival in Aotearoa of the explorers Abel Tasman in 1642 and James Cook in 1769, marked the transplantation of colonial imperial dominion, racism and white supremacy into Aotearoa (Moewaka Barnes and McCreanor, 2019, p. 20; Aikman and Fu, 2021). The rapacious mercantile appetite of the expanding British Empire to exploit new lands and resources was a key driver of the arrival of Pākehā in Aotearoa (Moewaka Barnes and McCreanor, 2019, p. 20). Aotearoa was an ‘economic project’ (Ngata, 2021) built upon the aggressive extraction and exploitation of land and resources from Māori (Mills, 2011, p. 32; Sullivan, 2006, p. 4; Hall, 2002, p. 42). 32 The new British colonial settler society established permanent settlements, took control over land and resources, and ignored the prior settlement and rights of Māori inhabitants (Reid et al, 2017, p. 21).