The Guardian reports that 90% of people currently locked up in New Zealand’s COVID containment facilities are Māori or Pasifika.

When James Cook first sailed to New Zealand in 1769 the Encyclopedia of New Zealand estimates there were 100,000 Māori living on and about the island. By 1896 there were only 40,000 left.

Death came at the end of muskets when the natives rebelled over the “sale” of their land. An “epidemics of introduced disease” was another big factor, according to Wikipedia, as was a drop in fertility due to malnutrition.

Now, I don’t know if the indigenous people of New Zealand today are being purposely labelled as COVID cases as an excuse to quarantine them. They may simply be more susceptible to illness because of their impoverished living conditions.

Rather, I allude to the irony of the situation. History books stack high with accounts of governments stealing natives’ land and then exterminating those who rebel. Today, we see big government stealing money through disruption of the economy, debt and inflation; and even killing people through lockdowns, social distancing and aggressive ventilation. (Indeed, The UN’s World Food Progamme predicts that COVID measures will result in an additional 130 million people “being pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020.”)

Therefore, I see New Zealand’s déjà vu incarceration of its indigenous people as a reminder to us of what governments are capable of doing and excusing. This is actually an underlying theme in my forthcoming novel. The first act of the story focuses on the protagonist’s grandfather who was abducted as a child by the Canadian government and forced to live at a residential school. Now he’s dying in a nursing home under lockdown.

As the CBC reports, “about 150,000 aboriginal, Inuit and Métis children were removed from their communities and forced to attend residential schools” in Canada. There are many disputes over how many children died in those schools. Native voices like Thomas King believe as many as 75,000; while Canada’s recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report estimates somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000.

Regardless of how many children perished from physical and mental abuse, it was certainly the attempted genocide of a culture. Children were forced into a “new normal.” They were forbidden to use their native language, and sent letters home in either French or English to parents who could read or speak neither.

More abhorrent, according to government documents, the House of Commons gave approval for medical experiments to be conducted on the children in the 1940s. The children were kept on starvation-level diets to test the effectiveness of vitamin and minerals supplements.

As aboriginal novelist Bred Jensen says: “Pull back the curtain and jump down the rabbit hole.”

Today, similar experiments are being indiscriminately forced upon billions of people: Masking, social distancing, self-isolation, excessive sanitization, contact tracing, and, of course, forced quarantine at government facilities.

In tomorrow’s post, I will share five ways to avoid being kidnapped by your government and forced to participate in a quarantine experiment at some four-star COVID hotel.