Flaxmere College hosted three members of the Polynesian Panthers on Wednesday as part of the revolutionary social justice group’s Educate to Liberate programme.
Tigilau Ness, Melani Anae and Alec Toleafoa spoke to students at the school in Hastings to acknowledge the movement’s legacy of activism and its ongoing battle for the fair and equal treatment of indigenous minorities.
The young urban Pacific and Māori activists formed in South Auckland after the Dawn Raids of the mid-1970s in response to racism and oppression experienced by Pacific peoples. The group took their distinctive name from the Black Panthers, an African-American rights movement.
Today the Polynesian Panther Legacy Trust visits hundreds of schools around the country.
As high school students at the time, they became interested in the three foundation points of the Panthers movement: civic empowerment, education to liberate, and passive resistance against racism.