Panel Session: Indigenous Wellbeing
TRANSCRIPT
This session includes practical issues associated with supporting whanau through whakamomori. It will look at the tikanga of tangihanga, and how whanau talk about pouritanga, recognising the need to embrace whanau who have gone through whakamomori, to support them through the experience and come to terms with what has happened.
[Apologies for the variable quality of the sound in this clip; it was due to a microphone fault at the venue]
FEATURING:
Carolyne Hall (Te Runanga o Ngati Pikiao)
Keri Lawson-Te- Aho (Health Lecturer, Centre for Hauora Maori, University of Otago, Wellington)
Mapihi Raharuhi (Kia Piki Te Ora, Te Runanga o Ngati Pikiao)
Mike Pehi (Funeral Director, AAA Colenso-Pehi Ltd Funeral Services)
Normand D'Aragon (Co-founder, Director of First Nations and Inuit Suicide Prevention Association of Quebec)
Rawiri Wharemate (Cultural Advisor, Mental Health Foundation)
Stephanie Bell (Director of Central Australian Aboriginal Congress)
Maui Te Pou (Maori Historian, Ngai Tuhoe Waimana)
Carolyne Hall: I wear three hats, my first hat began some nineteen years ago where I believe and I think that I was the first woman to graduate from CIT in Wellington in the Certificate of Embalming. I believe, that was nineteen years ago. I had a huge cultural shock when I went to CIT, and I can speak to that later.
My second hat is quite different from that; I now coordinate the LILAC Study which, with Auckland University, is studying life and living in advanced age, so we interview Maori between the age of eighty and ninety.
My third hat is... and one I’m extremely passionate about, and tautoko Norman’s korero this morning is I am a Panel Member on the Advisory Panel in Rotorua to our CYFS... to CYFS. Now we’re the only external group that is... that Child, Youth and Family have some form of accountability to, so there was a lot... there is a lot of awhi have for Norman about intergenerational transfer and how we see that coming down the line.
Keri Lawson-Te-Aho: Suicide found me in 1986 when my brother ended his life after a period of years as a drug dealer with the Mr Asia network. He died over in Australia, and so there was a long journey of lobbying trying to get his... to bring him home so we could bury him. He died five days before Christmas in 1985, so we had a... it was a big kaupapa trying to get somebody to sign this bit of paper that would bring our brother home.
I wrote the Kia Piki O Te Ora O Te Tai Tamariki, the first Maori Suicide Prevention Strategy. What we got with that strategy was not what we wanted, what we wanted was a strategy that would address suicide amongst our people across the whole lifespan, from a whakapapa base, based on the principles of self-determination with a reclamation of tinorangatiratanga. What we ended up with was a very limited version of a programme that had been over in Canada in Alaska.
I’ve been all around the world working in suicide prevention in indigenous populations, and in nine days time I’m submitting my Doctorate, which is the role of hapu in suicide prevention – because you can’t talk about suicide prevention and self-determination, they are co-dependent, they are one and the same thing, I believe.
So, yeah, nine days I’ll go... submit that, and the analyses of historical trauma coming down through the generations in our whakapapa, and its impact on suicide, drug and alcohol, and loss of hope and despair, so... with the purpose of soul healing, or healing our wounded, in our spirits as a people.
Maui Te Pou: Kia ora tatou. My name’s Maui Te Pou. I hail from Te Urewera University. The campus I belong to is in Te Waimana. Most of my Professors were all non-English speaking, so I definitely pay homage to them because they taught us another world view.
So my role is as one of them is I’m Translator, whereby I translate old people’s stories to young ears, and just as important, young people’s stories to old ears. So we walk in a two world view, and I suppose if I’ve... since I’ve been at this hui, I’ve just found me an official tag which is I’m a 21st Century tohunga.
Mapihi Raharuhi: Kia ora tatou. I live in the sweet spot of Otaramarae, and I’m a Kia Piki Te Ora Coordinator. I’ve also just completed an eight month wananga on Te Whakauruora, which is an absolutely wonderful resource for Maori suicide prevention, and those that are working within Maori suicide prevention at a strategic level, but also very relevant to our whanau, hapu and iwi. Kia ora.
Audience Member: I have a question for Carolyne, as an embalmer. There’s something that happens to our whanau, that I think we need to discuss in this room, post-suicide. When my husband suicided, after I’d buried him and had returned from the tangi, I got a letter from the Coroner telling me that they had removed body parts, and that I had to... I had six days in which to get the return of those body parts, and I needed to do that in writing.
Now when you are going through the trauma of suicide, that is one huge thing. My children were put through the absolute horror of digging back to their father’s grave in order to rebury what had been taken from him with no consultation with me or the whanau. And I think it’s a discussion that needs to be had amongst this panel.
Carolyne Hall: Nineteen years ago, when I went to CIT, I was astounded at some of the practices from a Maori perspective. Now in Rotorua where I... I can only speak to Rotorua because that’s where I trained and that’s where I came from, so... in Rotorua we... we did things so well that I didn’t question that other people didn’t do them. So... but my cultural shock was that there were office hours... I’m going to start from the beginning, you know, so we didn’t have that in Rotorua. When we got rung, we were there, and we did what the whanau needed doing at their request.
I thought we... I... I’m shocked now that in Rotorua we no longer have a Pathologist, and as a Funeral Director/Embalmer, we became like the facilitator between the Pathologist, the Coroner and the family, so if you’re intuitive enough and you’re Maori, you know who to sit down with and you know who to explain those processes to, and you would do that to the best of your ability because you only get one shot at it. And that’s when... when I’ve ever spoken to groups about funeral directing or embalming, you get one shot, like you said. There’s no come-back. And the healing process for us begins at that point, so we have to get it right.
So that’s the perspective I came from, being Maori and being a Maori woman, in that I think naturally for Maori women that healing process begins, tangiweto was we’ve spoken about this morning. So that’s the perspective I came from. I... I believe now that we are becoming so much like... I’m going to try and compare it - I don’t know, Mike, if you agree with me here – Australia, where in that process you line up and you take your turn.
And it saddens me to think that we had a good process going, but because of policy, bureaucracy, and resourcing and funding, that’s no longer available to our people. Our people have to go to Hamilton, they wait in line for a Pathologist. Who has the time to do it. Ok. That can take hours and sometimes a day or so. Now we never had that, so we’re going backwards, we’re not going forwards and it saddens me. It saddens me that you actually had to go through that process.
Mike Pehi: If I could ask anyone in here, in this room, who have had similar experiences, I would like to know because I’m taking this to the Treaty of Waitangi. Taking the Coroners Act to the Treaty of Waitangi purely on those types of things, body parts are being held back without the knowledge of the family. There are a couple of other things that I’m taking to the Treaty of Waitangi tribunal... for them to do something about the legislation about them. And I’m thinking of doing the same with the Funeral Directors, because they have their own policies, and where’s our right, as human beings, to be able to follow the process as we want to or when we want to, because it stops at their door, and you go back and we see them in the casket and that type of thing.
Audience Member: I’d like to direct my question to Keri. Developing your Maori Suicide Strategy and Action Plans, how did you incorporate wairuatanga into your action plans?
Keri Lawson-Te-Aho: This has been a thirty-five year journey for me, and way back in the eighties when I spoke to people like Moana Jackson, Hana Tupekino, Tame Iti, and others who were actively involved in the sovereignty movement, the whakaaro then was around healing of the spirit, that there had been things that went down in our whakapapa, all of us, in our history, in this land, pre and post-colonisation. But we were concerned with the denigration of our culture, our practices around tangihanga, wairua, the role of the tangiweto, which is, you know, in my own background that’s... that’s who my kuia was, that’s who her kuia was. We were tangiweto, we had that role in our hapu.
And so then we drafted a strategy. What we got in the end was not what we wanted. What we sought was very, very watered-down, or what we got... ended up with was a very, very watered-down, compromised version that basically was a bastardisation of our tikanga, was a... came through the filter of government policy processes.
That told me that we cannot look to the government to be the big solution. So then I went overseas and looked around and saw what tangata whenua were doing in Alaska. Travelled through the villages in rural Alaska, in Hawai’i, in other parts of the United States, to look at their programmes all around the healing of the spirit, all around as a collective process, all around the analysis of the impacts of colonisation and what it took from us. All around the re-establishment of those of our healing traditions, and I believe that that knowledge is still out there. And I don’t... you know, I don’t see it as a fait accomplis, as a foregone conclusion that we can’t reclaim our practices around tangihanga. We can. We can reclaim this knowledge, we can re-establish these practices.
And so, thirty-five years on, my focus is different, and it is on healing the soul wounds of history. Historical trauma – you can track it, you can track it in whakapapa lines, you can track it in your hapu, you can track it in your whanau – but we have to be honest with ourselves about that... about that mamae.
My PhD mahi was in my own hapu. And there were... there’s a vested interest by some of our hapu leadership around keeping a lid on that korero. You know, we’re not... we’re not... we’re not going to achieve this if we keep silencing it, and silencing it, and silencing it.
You know, I discovered six generations of sexual abuse in one of my hapu. That, to me, says that there is a massive suicide risk in my hapu. Twenty-three young kids from three years of age just, at Christmas gone by, were sexually abused from three years of age, the oldest was fourteen. You know, by... by two of their brothers and cousins – boys and girls raped and sexually abused.
If we are not prepared to look at that history honestly, to look at how that situation has evolved in 2011, then, you know, we need to be honest with ourselves and with each other in the spirit of aroha and the spirit of healing our spirits, our wounded spirits, and in the spirit of getting on with our lives in a very positive and self-determining way.
Audience Member: My question is I think a lot of us actually accept that there’s this... the wairua that comes with us, and that’s why some of the things happen to some of our tamariki mokopuna. My question is where do we find these tohunga – there’s one up there, I hear – in order to help us with our mahi.
Rawiri Wharemate: In essence you know when you’re in your whanau that there is an emerging... and emerging leadership that sits in your whanau. I know that when we’re talking about whakamomori, when we’re talking about suicide, we... we... there are two kaumatua that speak on that, and have done a fair bit of background into their particular korero. And so to a large degree they’ve been able to stand, really, at those tangis and put that korero out there.
And just like the tangiweto process that we talk about, you know, when we were kids you sort of watch the kuia and they’re having a bit of a laugh, the next minute the manuhere come in, and they’re [makes crying noise], and away they go.
Now I know that for us it was almost a standing joke that my eldest sister had these two different natures – one to kapakapa and the other one to tangi But I still remember our grandmother teaching us the kaupapa, and so there’s a... there’s these kind of three important things, you know, you align yourself with your kaumatua, your kuia, and others who sit out there to be able to support you. And there is no doubt in my mind that as you look at your hapu, your whanau, there are these emerging men and women, and even young adults who get to speak to a particular kaupapa. And I want to kind of provide, I guess, a forum for this.
We need to be brave enough to step up and do the korero. And I... I’m thinking of going back home and... this woman, she was thirty-nine, who said ‘you see that kaumatua there, he started abusing me....’ and I went ‘oh’, you know. And I said ‘so, have you reported him, have you spoken to any...’, ‘no, I don’t know, I just decided to talk about it now’. And... and she gave me this incredible story.
Now I decided that I would go and sit beside him and quietly talk, and I said, you know, and I was able to say to him that woman there has just told me about the situation, so we need to come and have a korero. And we held a process within our hapu to talk about it, and he never spoke for quite a period of time on the taumata again. But there was also a whole lot of processes to kind of get that stuff healed. So, in a sense, there are people that identified, whether they’re men, women, or even... well really young adults who step up and say ‘you’re the one’, you know. And we know who those emerging people are in that particular hapu. And I think the time has come, really, to... to add your voice, and to add your voice in a way that is significant, that will make a difference, that will identify who those specific leaders are out there.
You know, and they don’t come in the form of a kaumatua, or it could come as a young adolescent who has been abusing for quite a period of time, and so we need to be watchful when we go and work with our hapu. We know those things are alive and kicking. And like you, we found it in our own family. And everybody came back from all over the world, and the response that I saw as we discussed the issue around abuse and that type of thing, someone had to step up and say we need to take this... this actually further, so that we can stamp it out and draw a line in the sand.
Maui Te Pou: Each generation has its kaumatua, has its tohunga. Now in the traditional sense you were selected, chosen and trained. Nowadays, well you go to university now. So what I’m just following up on is the fact that to have a look at it from another perspective is... is that we... we may need to have a look at examining words like kaumatua, and words like tohunga. Exactly what is a tohunga, and what is the difference between a tohunga and a kaumatua. Because each have a respective role and a duty.
For the sake of tohunga, well my limited understanding of that is that you’re a specialist in the field, whatever your field is.
Now those people were... well, that they were valued, they were looked after, and likewise they had a role to play. So, to answer your question, where do you find them, well, in life. Eh. They could be around the corner, wherever. But the clues are there, the indicator – every hapu has them, every iwi has them. So no matter what iwi you’re from, you’ve got them, whether they be like from... from... from...from dream... from whenua momoia, they’ve got them. First Nations got them. So we’ve got them. So it’s just a matter of just tying back into your tribal ways, and into your hapu, and then the answers will come.
Rawiri Wharemate: While we have these expertise in the things that we do, there is a set of principles that govern the way that we need to behave, you know, in this... in this whole process. And while we have those traditions and lines, there’s still the issue of one’s ability to be able to be trustworthy, to add value and all those types of things, eh.
Audience Member: With intermarriage amongst the Pakehas and the indigenous peoples, some of these children have two lives to live in. Pakeha way of life says ‘oh, you’ve got to go this way’, the Maori way of life says ‘no, you’ve got to go this way’. So what’s the panel’s view on that sort of thinking?
Maui Te Pou: If you look at me, I’m probably the whitest Tuhoe person you’ll ever meet, so I can’t understand where you’re coming from on this one. But however is... is that I look... well we were taught to look at the world in a two world view. That is no matter what iwi you’re from, what indigenous nation on the planet, in a traditional sense it was always looked at in a two world view. There was always a physical reason why things happen, there was always a spirit reason why things happen.
The unfortunate part today is, is we only look at the physical. Now my Pakeha side taught me that one. Eh. But my Maori side taught me to look at the world in a spirit world view. So if you’re rangirua about your bloodline, well the Maori DNA, which I like to call it, which is the Maori Descendent Now Ancestor, which is what we are, will always be there, and it’s just your choice because life gives you those choices. It’s not to say no one’s going to help, but the choice is yours. Always has been.
Stephanie Bell: From an indigenous perspective in Australia, I mean traditional marriages and arrangements were always a part of our society, but young people today, just as the brother said here, that it’s about choice, and people know each of those worlds and societies better than any of us here, and I think that people know how to walk within those and to respect that. And if they don’t respect that, there’s always a mechanism, whether it comes from the community that then sorts out whether those things need to be dealt with.
So it’s like in any society, there are rules, social structures, everyone knows their place. We don’t need text books to help us understand our own culture – people live it and practice it, and if it’s not correct then people address it accordingly.
Normand D’Aragon: I’ll just add a piece of history from Western Canada, the Catholic clergy, in the 17th century, wanted to integrate the First Nations through the French colonial culture, so they favoured intermarriage, you know, for a while. But they didn’t like it, because the French colonisers were integrating to the other side. Oh, they got so frustrated. And it went well, because it... the culture made so much sense, so much more sense than whatever European culture was then.
But the French lost the war against the English, so the Catholic clergy, and I’m not anti-religious when I say this, it’s just facts, and it’s very much denied in Quebec still, but the Catholic clergy made a deal with the British who won the war, and they separated all those families saying ‘well you’ve got a choice, you’ve got to be on that side or on that side, and forever’, and then they even erased the First Nations’ names, you know, everywhere. And, you know what, nobody talks about it, it’s still a big, big, you know, denial.
But what I mean is like people were more than ok with it. It is, you know, it is political and, you know, other levels that were not ok with it.
Mapihi Raharuhi: We, as Maori, understand the concept of manake, and so manake, for me, is about understanding that whatever, wherever, or whoever you are, my job is to ensure that when you are here, that it is my responsibility to make sure that you are ok, and these are some of, I think, Margaret Mutu’s korero that she’s just been talking about of recent.
So I think too, partly it’s about us understanding what the meaning of our kupu are in terms of not separating who and what we are. And so understanding what, for example, manake is, the whole hunutanga of that kupu. And it is about a responsibility that I have to others who may not be Maori as well.
Keri Lawson-Te-Aho: I just want to respond from a... from a... my role as a mum. My kids are... we’re also Danish, Scottish and Samoan, and my kids, I encourage them to participate in two worlds – in a Pakeha world, and to take from that which... those things that will provide opportunities for them in life, but never, ever to forget who they are and where they’re from in terms of their whakapapa.
There’s been a whole pile of international research conducted…[there’s] a higher degree of resilience in American Indian youths who have competency, comfort, capability to walk those two worlds. But at the core of their being in their existence is an acknowledgement about who they are in terms of their kinship and their genealogical lines is important for their spirits, it’s important for their identity. And we all know... hopefully we all know about the relationship between suicide prevention and identity – that when you know who you are you’re less likely to end your life by suicide.
Audience Member: Having lost my mum to suicide in 2000, what have you done at home with your people to encourage them to talk, to get over the whakama, to korero?
Normand D’Aragon: What’s been happening in some communities is that sometime these are more ready than others, because they... they desperately need to talk and to understand where all that comes from, while others... you know, probably like here and everywhere around the world, that things were done in a way, like I was saying this morning, for the families who were victimised eventually in the past to... even with the behaviours that we just talked about like incest or sexual abuse, or... of course we end up being so stigmatised, and now it’s us, the problem, and... and... well, you know. So that the burden of the shame that was forced on us has to be clearly identified. And each time a family touched by suicide has the courage to, or the need to find some meaning, they’re helping everybody else in the community – it’s a contagion, that freedom to acknowledge who were are and what we went through, and our behaviours are not so happy about are a direct consequence of all this, it helps a lot.
Again there is a contagion from family to family of, you know, just getting back to that freedom of honouring who you are, and understanding what was forced on your people, and working on it. Working on the…but it’s not the same if you acknowledge that all those behaviours that were shameful are also a direct consequence of that oppression.
Maui Te Pou: I’ll answer it this way – we were taught that everybody, male or female, black, blue, brown and white, were all given a wairua, at a certain stage in one’s life – call it the nine month journey. And at that time, the role of wairua, and it still is, is to protect you, because the creator gave it in order to look after you, to help you live life and go through life.
Now without sounding... writing a book here, so when you mentioned the word whakama, if anything from our world view, that’s the killer – that’s the real killer. That’s the one that hardly anyone sees, eh, but that’s the killer.
And it just keeps growing until you deal to it. And I think one of the... why I like this hui is talking about it, discussing it with like-minded people, getting different world views.
And the sister from Aussie, eh, I’ve got a ton of questions for her. And my understanding is, is that once we can pull out the whakama and work with it, and all I’ve done at home is work where there... and mainly with the young ones is... is be proud of who you are, eh. Let’s look at all these things that make us ‘us’ – your uniqueness. And there’s a start. It’s just... there’s a start. And then as the dialogue continues, then you know, then you’ll see where the whakama lies, because that saying is still alive and well – ma te whakama te patu. And well I think... don’t have to tell many Maoris about that one. But it’s still alive and well, and it’s just managing the dialogue with that.
