Three of them do most of the strangling.

Each one lands on the same place: the triple exile.

“You’re still moaning about that? …That was in the past; why don’t you just let it go”

This is the first leaf of the ivy, and it’s aimed at the original wound — the colonisation exile itself. It sounds reasonable. What it does is nullify.

It takes the trauma your tūpuna carried under the Native Schools Act and the Tohunga Suppression Act — trauma that didn’t end when the legislation changed — and reclassifies it as ancient history with no bearing on now.

Your thoughts and feelings about it become, by definition, not valid. Not because anyone proved they were wrong, but because the sentence itself removed their right to exist in the present tense.

The thing is the wound doesn’t stay still because you stop looking at it. Trauma that isn’t metabolised compounds. The physiology of inherited stress doesn’t care whether the legislation has changed. It’s running on the instructions it received generations ago, because no one has ever been permitted to update them.

“Picking up te reo is easy — look at the pēpi, rangatahi and Pākehā.”

This is the second leaf, and it’s aimed at the double exile — the corporate Brown Pākehā position, caught between two worlds and at home in neither.

On the surface it’s encouragement. Underneath, it takes the fact that you were denied your own language and turns it into evidence against you: if children younger than you can do it, and non-Māori can do it, then your difficulty isn’t about what was taken — it’s about you.

There must be something wrong with you.

Maybe you’re just not clever enough.

And that thread runs in a straight line back sixty years, to when Māori were officially considered intellectually inferior. The sentence sounds like encouragement. What it delivers is the original insult, freshly repackaged as a comparative observation.

The double exile tightens: not white enough for the world you grew up in. Not Māori enough for the world you’re trying to return to. And now a private confirmation that the failure is yours.

“You should go back to your marae, ask your kaumātua.”

This is the third leaf, and it’s the most complex one, because it’s simultaneously correct and devastating.

Marae are the repositories of whakapapa knowledge. Kaumātua do hold the threads that were cut. The sentence names the right answer. Its injury lies not in what it says but in what it erases: the entire history of why that answer became unreachable.

Government policy moved your whānau into the cities. The people who held the knowledge have passed on. The whakapapa threads that would have guided a return are no longer held by anyone living who knows you. And in some cases, the return itself has been met with the gentle — or not so gentle — gatekeeping of those who remained.

The sentence closes the loop: you should have stayed, you should have kept the language, you should be able to find your way home. It points at the cure with one hand while holding the door shut with the other.

The closed loop with no exit

Three sentences. Three exiles. Wherever you’re standing, one of them is waiting.

Name the wound: you’re moaning about the past. Struggle with te reo: there’s something wrong with you. Look for the way home: you’re blamed for never having stayed.

That’s the poison ivy doing what poison ivy does: invisible until it’s everywhere, and everywhere it touches, it strangles.

The baggage nobody put down

To understand why these three sentences land as hard as they do, you need to understand the context they’re landing on.

Generation one carries the Tohunga Suppression Act on both sides — the severing of formal healing transmission. They’re also carrying the beginning of the Native Schools Act: te reo being removed from the mouths of tamariki as a matter of government policy.

These are not closed cases. They are open, handed on at the end of each life to the next generation — not because anyone chose to pass on the damage, but because nothing was ever fully resolved.

Generation two inherits both cases unopened and is handed two more of their own. By generation three — the urbanisation generation, the pepper-potting generation, raised in Pākehā suburbs with no language and a marae that was a rumour — the luggage has multiplied. The chairs themselves are made of luggage. The people sitting on them are being held up by what is crushing them.

Nobody in this picture chose their baggage. Each generation was simply handed what came before, plus whatever their own era added on top.

That’s the heart of it: you can only give what you were given. If what was given was loss, what gets passed on is loss — not because anyone wanted it that way, but because nothing was ever unpacked.

What “getting over it” grows

With a wound, that’s not what happens. A wound that isn’t tended festers. It can develop sepsis. “Getting over it” doesn’t close a wound. It just stops anyone from looking at it while it festers underneath.

With shame, that pressure grows something different: weeds.

Anxiety weeds. Disconnection weeds. And weeds don’t stay still — they grow bigger weeds. What they have never done, in any garden, anywhere, is grow a healthy tree.

You cannot “get over” your way to a healthy plant. You can only get more weeds, or you can clear the ground.

“Just get over it” asks generation three to put the bags down. But they’re not standing on the bags — they’re sitting on them, because that’s what’s left to sit on. The chair and the burden have become the same object. You can’t tell someone to set down what’s holding them up without also asking them to fall.

The clearing, the planting, the returning

This is what Dimensional Autophagy is for. Not getting over it — closing the wound properly, so it doesn’t fester. Pulling the weeds out by the root, so they stop crowding out everything else.

Then — and this part matters as much as the clearing — making room for healthy plantings. Asking what seeds are going in the garden once the ground is clear: the music, the books, the art, the creativity, the people and practices that grow something.

Finally handing back the baggage that was never theirs to carry. Putting those in the past — not forgetting but resolving their origin.

Clearing the garden means going through the cases first — naming what’s in them, generation by generation — not pretending they were never packed.

The poison ivy didn’t get into the garden by accident, and it won’t leave because we were told to get over it.

But a garden that’s been cleared and planted with intention doesn’t need the fence anymore.

That’s the work. That’s the difference between managing the poison ivy for the rest of your life and growing something else entirely.

About Dimensional Autophagy

Dimensional Autophagy is a kaupapa Māori nine-dimensional programme for whakapapa-level healing. It moves through five workbook cycles across Whakapapa, Wairua, Tuakiri, Hinengaro, and Tinana — not to manage the wound, but to metabolise it, return what was inherited, and plant what wants to grow in this life. Learn more at IAnTeMo.com.

Te Māra me te Pīkao – The Garden and the Ivy