As the world remembers Queen Elizabeth II, it is clear that for many, her 70-year-long reign symbolised great strength and familiarity. However, with the #RoyalFamily TikTok hashtag skyrocketing to 17.7 billion views, and Parliament’s recent declaration of September 26th as an official day of mourning, several Indigenous and minority groups have taken to social media to share their sentiments for the late Queen.
It’s nothing new to ask that POC remain silent in times when the Western world is struggling. But the monarchist arguments and tributes work to actively gaslight minority groups into silence, to feel empathy for a family who has rarely shown empathy to them. Where was the “have some respect” for the Māori ancestors whose remains were stolen to be displayed in museums? Or the Indigenous children who were abused and quietly disposed of?
For many Māori, the Queen’s passing overshadowed the incredible time that is Māori Language Week. This year, in particular, celebrated 50 years since the signing of the Māori Language Petition: the legal acknowledgement of te reo Māori as an official language. However, that isn’t to say there have not been troubles in normalising the Māori language and culture amid an abusive colonial empire, in the name of the Queen and the Crown.
The legacy of the British Royal Family is riddled with controversies, particularly their long-lasting, detrimental impact on Indigenous and minority groups. While Queen Elizabeth II was not at fault for the decisions made before her time, it is also she who upheld and benefitted from those very decisions. To pretend she was unaware of the damages the British Royal Family have caused is an insult to all Indigenous and minority groups who have suffered under British rule. On the other hand, plastering the British Royals across social media platforms acts as a painful reminder for many BIPOCs; recent graduate Madison Chambers-Coll (Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāi Tūhoe) shared that she has since removed herself from platforms such as TikTok, due to her ‘For You’ page being “absolutely plagued with royal shit”. For Madison, the Royal Family are a symbol of colonialism, and a group of insignificant people with a platform. “She [Queen Elizabeth] didn’t mean anything to me. A dead person is a dead person. People deal with grief in different ways, and her death resurfaced a ton of generational grief for us as Māori.” Madison shared that the negative response to remembrance posts and gatherings has been a result of the terrible relationship the British Royals have created with POC, through an oppressive system built on institutional racism and white supremacy.
But it isn’t just Māori who have felt the sharpness of the Royal Family’s knife - Kenyans are suing the British Government for up to $200B in reparations for land theft and violent colonial abuses. For nearly seventy years, Talai and Kipsigis people were forced from their land to establish tea farms for white settlers, subject to several human rights violations as their land was stolen from beneath them. However, their claims are ignored by the British, “an act of gross, gross inhumanity and injustice”, according to former Chief Justice of Kenya Willy Mutunga. Continuously dismissive, the lack of acknowledgement from both the Crown and Queen Elizabeth has fed into the nonchalant, unbothered nature that defines the British Royal Family. Queen Elizabeth never acknowledged the unearthing of thousands of Indigenous children on Canadian residential school sites - schools that were established in the name of the British Crown, and still existed throughout her reign. Many anti-monarch tributes are littered with the comments, ‘Have some respect for the dead’ or ‘This isn’t the time’. But when IS the time?
The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, but Aotearoa did not observe a Māori Language Day until 1975 - 135 years after signing as ‘equal subjects’ of the Queen. Furthermore, the Matariki bill was proposed in 2009, yet was not passed until 2022. Facebook forums and media outlets were used as breeding grounds for disagreements over Matariki as a national holiday. However, within a week of the Queen’s passing, Parliament had announced a national public holiday. “People lost their rag over Matariki, then there were crickets over the Queen’s Memorial Day - where was the anger for the random holiday?” Madison said, furthering the idea that a public holiday loses its meaning, especially culturally, when Māori are made to wait incredibly long periods to even be acknowledged. “It’s just another meaningless day, I didn’t know her, nor care for her. We’ve never been equal to them [British Royals]; maybe for all of five seconds – when they let us use the same pens to sign the damn Treaty.”