30 Maranga Mai! Chapter I: Kaikiritanga Colonisation, doctrine, racism and white supremacy This chapter analyses the impact of colonisation, racism and white supremacy and the role of the Doctrine of Discovery. It also discusses the undermining of self-determination, and the denial of racism, strategic amnesia and downplaying of racism upon tangata whenua Māori society. Colonisation and racism Western colonialism subjugated Indigenous societies, by establishing permanent settler colonies, and taking Indigenous lands and resources for colonial exploitation (Aikman, 2019; Mills, 2011; Wolfe, 2016, 2011, 2006) (Wolfe, 2006). Western racism emerged alongside European colonisation 700 years ago in post-Middle Ages Christian Europe (Kuper and Kuper, 1996, p. 715). After the Crusaders were ejected from the Middle East, European powers sought riches and resources in other lands. Their first middle-to-late fifteenth century forays traversed the western coast of Africa then crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The ‘discoveries’ on these voyages would lead to the mass exploitation of colonised natural resources in the form of 20 million African slaves, in addition to colonial settlement which killed 20 million or so Indigenous Americans (BBC, 2007). Colonisation was a race-based process (Jackson, 2017, p. 7): Colonisation was constructed on the racist belief that so-called white, civilised people in Europe were innately superior and therefore had the right to dispossess non-white ‘uncivilised’ peoples who were inferior (Jackson 2017, p. 7, 2019). Societies have debased and dehumanised one another throughout history through the disapproving interpretation of markers such as skin colour, physical stature, facial configuration, hair texture, eye shape, culture, dress, lifestyles, and customs and colour. The unprecedented scale and impact of Western colonisation in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific triggered a new and more violent form of race hatred, we now term colonial racism (Taonui, 2021). This racism was given shape and impetus in the edicts of Papal Bulls delivered by Catholic Popes from the mid-1400s onwards (Greenberg, 2016, p. 236). The Dum Diversas (1452) encouraged the conversion of new peoples to Christianity, while also justifying, if necessary, their enslavement, subjugation, or destruction as ‘enemies of Christ’. This doctrine birthed virulent colonial racism which, combined with white supremacy, matured into the colonists’ manifest duty (Taonui, 2021). The Doctrine of Discovery The Romanus Pontifex (1455) legalised the taking of lands from Indigenous peoples in new worlds without their knowledge or consent. Alongside other Papal Bulls, this emerged as the Doctrine of Discovery that articulated a violent European Christian entitlement to seize ‘discovered lands’. This led to the destruction of Indigenous economies (Taonui, 2021) and “the genocide and deaths of millions of men, women and children” (Jackson, 2019). Aotearoa New Zealand was first colonised by the British Crown under an international legal principle known as the Doctrine of Discovery. This fifteenth century Papal Bull asserted that non-Christian, Indigenous peoples inhabiting ‘discovered lands’ were enemies of God, less human than Europeans and therefore their land could be taken from them. This was key to the authority by which the British Crown first gained its sovereign and property rights in Aotearoa.