Pīkari Mai is a web-browser plug-in designed to let the indigenous people of Aotearoa, New Zealand switch off news about the royal coronation – a traumatic reminder of British colonisation – and replace it with indigenous articles. The browser plug-in cleverly hijacked international news, weaponising the massive volume of coronation coverage against itself by turning every piece of royal gossip into indigenous news.

The royal coronation was the biggest news event of 2023. It was impossible to avoid.

Everywhere you turned, local and international news peddled royal gossip on 24-hour rotation.

But for Māori, and other indigenous cultures across the globe, the sensationalism of the monarchy was an unwelcome reminder of a painful colonial past.

As more digitally native young people turn to activism, Kōpū O Te Rangi needed to find a technology-first way to reshape the cultural narrative and raise the profile of Māori voices, at a time when they were actively being squashed by the very family who colonised Aotearoa.

Our objective was to earn news coverage and conversation behind our cause in Aotearoa and beyond, while elevating Māori voices in the media during the coronation conversation.

Aotearoa, New Zealand has a fraught and complicated history. It’s even there in our name.

We consider ourselves a ‘bi-cultural’ nation, with a Treaty that’s supposed to honour it – but that has always meant a European-privileged society, whilst Māori culture and communities suffered.

And for Māori who never ceded sovereignty to the crown, our history is contested.

So when King Charles’ coronation reared its head, it intensified the mixed emotions this country has towards its own history. The crown is the primary guarantor of indigenous rights and sovereignty under The Treaty of Waitangi, as well as the institution responsible for its breaches.

But none of this social context stopped the fanfare around the upcoming event.

As per usual, the narrative became one-sided, and Māori voices were pushed aside in favour of stories on what Camilla would be wearing and if Megan was going to attend.

Intergenerational trauma lives on within families and continues to marginalise Māori within Aotearoa, influencing structural racism and inequities.

Pīkari Mai is an online web browser tool that instantly replaces royal gossip, with indigenous content pulled from a range of news sources.

The plug-in works by using a data scrape to automatically scan web pages for keywords and visuals relating to the royal family. It then switches this content out for indigenous articles, sourced from multiple indigenous publishers.

The more articles the royal PR machine pushed, the more Māori voices Pīkari Mai elevated, weaponising the power of the Royal PR machine against itself.

Pīkari Mai. The browser plug-in that unplugged the royals.

When many would've seen the coronation as a lost cause for Māori interests, we saw it as an opportunity to stand up and give Māori voices a seat at the table. The royal coronation was the biggest media event of 2023, so we needed our idea to lean into the mountain of media coverage.

Our strategy was to weaponise the the Royal PR machine against itself to elevate Māori voices when it was at its most powerful.

Kōpū O Te Rangi’s credibility gave our idea a solid foundation – but without support from Māori communities, Pīkari Mai wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. We knew that garnering the support of these passionate voices would give Pīkari Mai the greatest chance for success, so we partnered with a collective of Māori publishers, from whom we could source engaging content to create a highly regarded, indigenous news database.

Pīkari Mai was available to download on every major web-browser, including Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

By design, the ‘business’ of the monarchy use events and fanfare to bolster popularity numbers and the coronation is the crown jewel in the royal family’s event arsenal. So, we went live with the plug-in right when royal fanfare reached its peak – the week before the King’s coronation.

The beauty of this idea was that it was everywhere. The more the royal PR machine pushed coronation gossip, the more indigenous news and media Pīkari Mai elevated.

In just 48 hours with a paid media spend of $0, our campaign reached 23 million people across traditional and social media. Our website was visited by people in over 1100 cities around the world and the plug-in was downloaded by over 9000 people from 98 countries.

While the technical capabilities of the plug-in prevent us from being able to measure the exact number of articles that were replaced by Pīkari Mai, news of the plugin reached the world’s most influential news outlets including the UK print edition of The Guardian, Reuters worldwide, BFM TV (France), Designboom, garnered extensive TV, online and press coverage throughout Australia and New Zealand.

The more coronation content media published, the more opportunities we created for a Māori voice to be read instead.

Further validation of our success came as people from other indigenous nations reached out asking for the plug-in to cover content from their people. So, in partnership with indigenous media from around the world, we created a global version of Pīkari Mai.