TP+ Explore the dark history of the Dawn Raids in 1970s Aotearoa

[0:06]One of the reasons Pauline um decided to do this and to write a book, um which this exhibition is based on was because she was talking a lot with um Pacific Island students. And they had no idea what she was talking about when she was talking about the Dawn Rades. And she realized that this is a really important part of our history. The exhibition is not just about the dawn raids, it's also about the resistance to racism with the best of the Polynesian Panthers. And all the fantastic work that they started doing, you know, things like accountability for police. I mean, it's called Dawn Raids educate to liberate and that was one of the um central kind of philosophies is that, you know, to to liberate the people they needed to be educated on their rights. You know, before that people didn't realize that actually you can say no to the police. You don't have to let them into your house. Pauline who developed this exhibition um in conjunction with Museum, um she wanted people to feel like they were going back in time. You know, you're sitting here in the lounge and then you look over there at the massive protest picture. And it's like, you know, you're safe in your home, but there's danger outside, there's the policeman literally just outside the door. I mean, hopefully people come and just reflect on that for a minute, you know, reflect on it might not have personally affected you, but it affected people around you and it affected families. One of the things that Tay was talking about and when they were protesting, they knew who the enemy was, they could see it. Nowadays it's a lot harder to define. Racism isn't as obvious as it used to be, um but we still need to fight, we still need to call those things out. One of the other central tenants of the Polynesians was to annihilate racism. I think we've still got a long way to go, and we've got to own up to that and we've got to look at our history and these events that have happened in the past and say, no, we're not going to let that happen again.