"A Letter from The Māori Green Lantern: This Work Costs Something" - 5 July 2025
E te whānau,
I need to say this plainly.
This work costs something.
Not just money. Not just time. It costs concentration, sleep, emotional steadiness, and the ability to keep returning to material that is designed to exhaust you.
The work published on The Māori Green Lantern sits inside that reality every week: the government’s boot camp for Māori rangatahi, the pre-recorded sacking of 800 seafarers, and the attack on Section 4, Treaty settlements, and 5.2 million hectares of tribal territory are all current examples presented on the site’s homepage.
Power Counts On Fatigue.
Reader Poll
It counts on our people being too busy, too stretched, too under-resourced to follow the thread from headline to policy, from policy to profit, from profit to harm. It counts on us seeing each outrage as separate. It counts on us being demoralised before we can become dangerous to the story they are trying to tell.
That is why The Māori Green Lantern exists.
This platform is not here to decorate politics. It is here to expose it. My Koha Kiwi page describes the kaupapa
as forensic political analysis documenting how dispossession operates systematically through money flows, policy networks, and decades-long extraction strategies targeting tangata whenua.
The Deep Dive Podcast
Listen to a lively conversation between two hosts, unpacking and connecting topics in the sources of this essay.
I apologise in advance for the AI's very harsh pronounciation of reo. Please dont shoot me, :).
Youtube Video
Like video? Here is a short video suppporting the essay. Again, don't shoot the messenger please because of AI's pronounciation. 😄
That sentence matters because it names the job properly. This is not content production. This is pattern recognition under pressure.
And that labour has value.
When ministers hide violence inside soft language, I strip the language back. When media cycles flatten a story into a day’s outrage, I slow it down and trace the structure underneath. When policy is sold as reform but lands as dispossession, I try to show the mechanism, the beneficiaries, and the cost to our people.
My Koha page states that every essay includes 50+ sources, money trails, and analysis refusing colonial fragmentation. That is not casual work. That is disciplined work. It is work intended to arm readers with clarity.
And I give it away.
My Koha page is explicit: all analysis is free, with no subscription walls and no shareholders suppressing truth. That means the work is accessible to the people who need it most. It also means the usual commercial buffers are absent. There is no wealthy institution carrying the load. There is no corporate sponsor smoothing the path. There is just the kaupapa, the labour, and the people who decide whether it deserves to live.
So yes, sometimes this mahi is demoralising.
It is demoralising to keep company with evidence of harm while powerful people keep smiling for the cameras. It is demoralising to read the euphemisms, the evasions, the bureaucratic cowardice, and know that somewhere down the line a whānau will carry the real cost. It is demoralising because the machine does not sleep. It chews through people, language, whenua, and memory, then calls the damage pragmatic.
Some days I can feel that machine trying to do the same to me.
That Is Why This Questionnaire Matters More Than It May Seem.
I am not asking these five questions because I need empty affirmation. I am asking because I need to measure whether this work is landing where it matters. I need to know whether it is helping you see more clearly, speak more confidently, and resist more effectively. I need to know whether the value created here is felt in your life, your thinking, your whānau conversations, and your own fights against misinformation.
Because if it is, then this platform should continue.
And if it should continue, then it needs protection.
The Koha Kiwi page says the project has reached 42,000 across Substack, Facebook, Bluesky, and email, with no paid promotion and no corporate backing. It also says it reached position 79 globally in political influence within 24 hours of launch on 8 November 2025. Those are not vanity numbers. They are evidence that people are responding to a form of analysis they are not getting elsewhere, and that this kaupapa is already carrying weight beyond what a small independent operation should reasonably be able to carry alone.
So when I ask for support, I am not asking for applause.
I am asking for reinforcement.
I am asking readers who believe this work matters to help make it survivable. The Koha page says koha directly funds research, international networks, and the Green Lantern Corps multiplying this framework across Indigenous media. That means support is not abstract. It buys time to investigate. It buys capacity to verify. It buys room to keep going without the kaupapa being ground down by the same scarcity politics it critiques.
I appreciate every form of support I receive.
I appreciate the readers who stay with a difficult argument. I appreciate the people who send links into their whānau chats. I appreciate the people who challenge misinformation in public and private. I appreciate those who send messages saying an essay gave them language for something they could feel but had not yet named. And I deeply appreciate those who offer koha, because that support does not just reward the work. It protects it.
That is the heart of this questionnaire.
It asks whether this platform has earned your trust. It asks whether it has created real value for you. It asks whether the work should continue. And beneath all of that, it asks a harder question: in a media and political environment built to exhaust truth-telling, are we prepared to protect the people doing it?
If this work has served you, then I ask you to say so.
Answer the questionnaire. Share it. Pass it through your networks. And if you are able, support the kaupapa through the official Koha Kiwi page. If money is tight, your reading, sharing, and solidarity still matter. None of it is small. All of it keeps the flame alive.
This is not just a platform.
It is a line of defence.
Koha Consideration
If this request gave you value, please consider supporting The Māori Green Lantern. The official Koha Kiwi page explains that all analysis is free and that koha helps fund research, networks, and the continuation of this kaupapa.
Four pathways exist:
- Koha — Support: app.koha.kiwi
- Subscribe: themaorigreenlantern.maori.nz
- Bank transfer: HTDM, 03-1546-0415173-000
- Facebook: facebook.com/Themaorigreenlantern
Support the kaupapa in the way you can. Koha if you are able. Share if you cannot. Carry the kōrero either way.
Ngā mihi nui,
Ivor Jones The Māori Green Lantern - Fighting Misinformaiton And Disinformation From The Far Right
