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Image: Getty
Image: Getty

ĀteaApril 17, 2018

Rongoā Māori completes the health picture

Image: Getty
Image: Getty

One hundred and fifty Māori medical practitioners, doctors, nurses and medical graduates converged on Rotorua in April to discuss the Māori health Kaupapa Inquiry. Ātea’s rongoā expert Donna Kerridge made the case for Māori health framework before her peers.

“Rongoā Māori is a threat to the medical economy because it is about sharing knowledge, not selling it.” – Erena Wikaire, National Hui on Māori Health Issues, April 2018

Our health system is focussed on owning the problem rather than capitalising on it.

That said, there is a lot to be hopeful about amidst our current health system. We have a new government that is strongly advocating for improving Māori health outcomes. We have a growing number of Māori medical professionals, culturally appropriate research methodologies to guide our researchers and an ever increasing culturally competent workforce. Our leaders are more confident navigating our health system, despite the system. Yet health statistics for Māori continue to reveal shocking inequities.

We need to acknowledge, through action, that disease is a social issue before it is a health issue if we expect to see marked improvement in current health statistics. New Zealand’s healthcare system is premised by offering prescription before acknowledging a clear description (diagnosis) of what is really at the root of health issues for Māori and indeed many of New Zealand’s wider population. The only tools available to our medical professionals in order to respond to disease are surgery, drugs, health education and ongoing research. All of which are offered in isolation to the social issues that predicate our appalling statistics. How much of an effect do we really think drugs, surgery and health education will impact our health statistics? People are not eating the wrong foods because they are unaware these foods are not good for them, people are not missing health appointments because they would rather not take their children to the doctors. They are not embracing addictions because they want to be dependent on substances.

Those charged with the responsibility for improving New Zealand and in particular Māori health statistics need to clearly define and act on what is making Māori sick. When a wellbeing framework entrenched in te ao Māori is used it is obvious that the things that impact our health most are disconnection from people, place and purpose. That is, a world that values independence rather than a social structure based on the natural lore of interdependence.

Many in our population decline rapidly as a result of loneliness, hopelessness, homelessness and lacking a purpose beyond meeting their own immediate needs. These things are reflected in Māori over representation at the wrong end of our health statistics.

Māori can lead interventions and preventions that will deliver better health outcomes for Māori, based on a Māori framework. Understanding and acting on the things within a Māori framework that underwrite Māori health inequities is a good place to start. For example, how many people truly understand and value connections to wairua, whakapapa and to the whenua? How connected are they to their whānau and local community? Do they know where they belong, the place they belong to that no-one can move them on from, their tūrangawaewae? Do they have hopes and aspirations? Do they know their special gift to the world and how they contribute to their community?

A Māori health framework with a prescription that reconnects people to the whenua, tūpuna, community and their tūrangawaewae; that lifts the aspirations and hopes of people and reflects the special gifts individuals bring and contribute to their whānau and communities might be cause for excitement when hoping to turn around some of New Zealand’s most shameful health statistics.

Without a doubt, the prescriptions offered within the current health system have a role to play in improving hauora Māori but if it is traction we want then rongoā Māori completes the picture. A Māori framework for success would invoke lifting the mauri and mana of our whenua and her people; re-establishing a health system focussed on reconnecting people to land they live upon….as the whenua (placenta) is to the unborn child so too is the whenua (land) to the people. When we whakamana, lift the mana of the population by reconnecting the people to the land so that they can recognise within them the legacy of their tupuna, they will come to know that the blueprint for good health, the recipe for the healing and wellbeing of the land, is the same as the recipe for the healing and wellbeing of people.

To heal a whānau we first need to whakamana, heal our mamas, Papatūānuku me ngā wahine. Rongoā Māori is not about giving focus or energy to disease, it is about people caring for people.

Rongoā Māori is the framework for the wellbeing of our people based on matāuaranga Māori. It does not exclude the use of medical interventions, in fact it embraces them as and when most appropriate.

Over time, New Zealand’s health fraternity has somehow managed to mix things up. It tirelessly tries to operate in isolation from and outside of the influences that are the true determinants of our nation’s health and health equity. It is a system that is built on disease and injury rather than wellbeing.

Somehow, we have enabled a medical economy that is hell bent on wanting to captain the wellbeing waka. While the achievements of modern medicine and the natural health industry are truly amazing and warrant acknowledgement for all the suffering they save people, if we are to turn this very large ship that has resulted in the over representation of Māori in all the wrong statistics we must embrace and engage the Māori framework for health and wellbeing that is Rongoā Māori.

More by Donna Kerridge:

Everything is related: an introduction to rongoā Māori medicine

Isolation is making us unwell: a rongoā Māori perspective

How to make a tonic with kūmarahou

How to make kawakawa balm

Mamaku: the native ingredient in the best green smoothie yet

How to prepare the delicious – but poisonous – karaka berry

Autumn harvest: native berries and the rongoā journey

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ĀteaApril 17, 2018

Pākehā Māori: The American soldier who switched sides in the Taranaki Land Wars

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In this instalment of Black Sheep, the RNZ series about the controversial characters of New Zealand history: Kimble Bent, the American soldier who fought – and switched sides – in the Taranaki Land Wars of the 1860s.

It’s reasonably common knowledge that large numbers of Māori fought on the side of the government during the New Zealand Wars. We even have a name for them, kūpapa Māori.

A less well-known story is the handful of Europeans who went in the other direction – Pākehā soldiers who deserted the British army and joined the cause of Māori “rebels”.

Most of these people are poorly documented, but there is one exception: Kimble Bent.

June, 1865. A Ngāti Ruanui chief, Tito Hanataua, was riding his horse along a track near the bank of the Tangahoe river. He was there to scout a nearby British army fort.

To his astonishment he came face to face with a soldier wearing a dripping wet scarlet uniform. That soldier was a 25-year-old American, Kimble Bent.

Decades later, Bent recalled the conversation that followed to historian James Cowan, who published it in a book, The Adventures of Kimble Bent.

Tito Hanataua: “Here you Pākehā! Go back quick! Haere atu, haere atu! Go away back to the soldiers. I shoot you suppose you no go! Hoki atu!

Kimble Bent: Shoot away, I won’t go back. I’m running away from the soldiers. I want to go to the Māoris. Take me with you!

Tito Hanataua: You tangata kuware! You Pākehā fool, go back! The Māori kill you, my word! You look out!

Kimble Bent: I don’t care if they do, I tell you I want to live with the hauhaus.

Tito Hanataua: E pai ana (it is well). All right, you come along. But you look out for my tribe – they kill you.

– The Adventures of Kimble Bent

An illustration of Bent in the Tangahoe river from Chris Grosz’s graphic novel ‘Kimble Bent Malcontent’. Image: Chris Grosz

The events which led Kimble Bent to that life-changing meeting with Tito Hanataua began five years earlier, when he travelled from his home in Eastport, Maine, to the United Kingdom.

He quickly burned through the money which had been given to him by his father for the trip, and was left stranded with no way to return to the United States.

While he was drowning his sorrows at a pub, Bent’s eye was drawn to the smart uniform of a British Army recruiting sergeant. Bent had formerly served in the United States Navy as a teen, and he decided to sign up.

It was the worst decision of his life.

“The discipline and parade ground drilling was a far cry from the rather more relaxed US Navy way of doing things. Floggings were common,” said Chris Grosz, who wrote a graphic novel on Bent’s story: Kimble Bent Malcontent.

Bent was deployed first to India, and then, with the outbreak of the Second Taranaki War, to New Zealand.

One rainy day he was ordered by an officer to go and collect firewood. Bent refused and was sentenced to imprisonment for insubordination, and 50 lashes with a cat o’ nine tails (this was later reduced 25, after a doctor stated that he was physically incapable of withstanding the full 50).

It’s this event which prompted Kimble Bent to desert his comrades. He is quoted in James Cowan’s book as telling his camp mates that “I can’t be worse off with the Māori’s than I am here. If they do Tomahawk me it will be the end of all my troubles. I don’t very much care.”

And so, on June 12th 1865, he pretended to leave the camp for a wash, swam across the river and met his very first Taranaki Māori, the Ngāti Ruanui Rangātira Tito Hanataua.

Luckily for Bent, Hanataua decided against killing him on the spot. As a follower of the Pai Mārire faith he had received instruction from the prophet Te Ua Haumene to welcome any Pākehā deserters and give them protection.

But this didn’t mean Kimble Bent’s life among Taranaki Māori would be easy.

“They gave him menial tasks like clearing scrub, chopping wood,” says Chris Grosz. “He was a slave, but he had this ability to make ammunition. He became an armourer.”

Bent seemed to gain a measure of trust within Māori society. Te Ua Haumene met with him personally, partly to place his tapu on him to provide protection against other Māori who had some reservations about accepting a Pākehā into their midst.

He was also married to a Māori woman, although, according to James Cowan’s book he didn’t find her particularly attractive and she left him for another man. He was later remarried, to a 16-year-old girl called Rihi, the daughter of a Taiporohenui chief, Rupe.

Bent claims that he never took up arms against his former comrades in the British army and this was backed up by Māori whom James Cowan interviewed. However, he did serve as a maker of ammunition. Bent was also regarded as a healer, and actually claimed to have gained status as a Tohunga (expert practitioner of a skill) for his abilities in traditional healing and making dyes for tattooing.

A portrait of Kimble Bent taken when he was interviewed by James Cowan in the 1900s. Image: James McDonald/Te Papa

However, he was still an outsider in Māori society and he recounted several stories of threats against his life, most of them driven by anger over the wars with the colonial government.

One close shave came when he was on a hunting trip with a Ngāti Maniapoto warrior who had come from the Waikato region to live in Bent’s kāinga (village).

“After days of hunting, Bent became very wary of this guy… At night he used to have these heated rants against Pākehā and do haka around the fire,” says Chris Grosz. “One particular evening, Bent kept one eye open and managed to prevent an attack by this angry warrior because he lunged at him with an axe. Apparently Bent wrestled the weapon from him … and he stayed awake all night and forced this antagonist to walk in front of him in the morning back to camp.”

When they returned to camp, the Taiporohenui chief Rupe was furious that this warrior had violated the protective tapu placed on Bent and he chased the man from the village.

Another disturbing incident came after the battle of Te Ngutu o te Manu, which ended with catastrophic defeat for the attacking British forces.

Bent said he saw the famous war leader Titokowaru order that the bodies of British soldiers be distributed among the warriors who fought in the battle. He told historian James Cowan that one group of warriors took a body away and that sometime later he went to investigate what had happened to it.

“I presently went down to the cooking quarters to see what had become of the body that had been dragged away. There I found a large earth oven full of red-hot stones, and there they were engaged in roasting the white man’s corpse. They had prepared it for cooking in the usual way, and were turning it over and over on the hot stones, scraping off the outer skin. The cannibal cooks looked round and asked me savagely what I wanted there. They threatened that if I did not leave instantly they would throw me into the oven too and roast me alive.”

– The Adventures of Kimble Bent

At the time, these incidents were seen by European authorities as evidence of the hauhau ‘lapsing into barbarism’ thanks to the influence of their ‘deluded’ prophets.

Modern historians like James Belich maintain that these acts had military purposes. Belich argues that cannibalism, along with raids on British settlers, provoked European forces into making rushed, poorly planned attacks on fortified pā.

If this really was the plan it was a successful one. The British made several further attacks on pā which ended in bloody defeat, despite superiority in numbers and weapons.

Titokowaru’s War only ended after he lost the support of his allies, following an affair with the wife of a fellow chief, but this wasn’t the end of the story for Kimble Bent.

Bent continued living among Māori for several decades, fearing retribution for his desertion in 1865. Eventually, however, he became more a figure of curiosity than hostility and was able to make a partial re-entry to Pākehā society, working to build shearing huts and giving occasional interviews to journalists about his life among Taranaki Māori.

He died in Blenheim, at Wairau hospital, in 1916.

Listen to the full Black Sheep podcast for more on Kimble Bent’s astonishing life story, including the rumours he shot and killed his former commander.

 

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