80 Maranga Mai! Chapter 5: Hauora The impact of colonisation and racism on health The colonial impact on Māori health The undermining of rangatiratanga selfdetermination, dispossession of land, suppression of te reo Māori, and dismantling of iwi, hapū and whānau has had a devastating cumulative inter-generational impact on the health and wellbeing of Māori. Epidemics (1769-1840) Māori life expectancy at the time of James Cook’s visits to New Zealand was probably higher than some of the most privileged eighteenth century societies (Pool 2011; Reid et al, 2017, p. 33). Māori did not have infectious diseases such as influenza, measles, cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, bacillary dysentery and smallpox. The population was physically robust and in good health. There was a healthy older Māori population (Lange, 1999, p. 2). The arrival of Europeans heralded the introduction of diseases for which Māori had no immunity, and decimated the Māori population (Lange, 2018). This caused a 60 percent decline in the Māori population (Lange, 1999, p. 18). One of the first epidemics to befall Māori was the rewharewha, likely to have been influenza or measles. Both diseases decimated Māori society in multiple successive epidemics. In 1827, Māori told the missionaries that they knew the new diseases killing Māori had arrived with the Pākehā ships (Lange, 1999, p. 18). Social collapse (1840-1900) Following the dispossession of land, iwi and hapū fell into material poverty and hardship. As Crown and colonial settler society took more land, Māori access to land for growing crops, forests for food gathering and hunting, and critical resources like water, declined. Kāinga moved to the meagre remnants of land. Malnutrition impacting health increased: The act of disenfranchisement was an economically and socially abusive act that resulted both directly and indirectly in the traumas of poverty and disease (Reid et al, 2017, p. 33). The introduction of the Native Land Court led to sittings becoming conduits of disease as iwi congregated in townships and stayed sometimes for months on end in impoverished disease-ridden conditions (Taonui, 2012a). At this point, Pākehā regarded the extinction of the Māori population as inevitable and considered it the duty of Europeans to “smooth the dying pillow” of the Māori race (Pool and Kukutai, 2018). Rather than recognise the racism of land alienation, and the resulting impoverishment of Māori, as the cause of the declining Māori population, Pākehā instead proposed that Māori were inherently inferior to Europeans. One scientist commented that “the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race” (Alfred Newman in Pool and Kukutai, Tahu, 2018). The dispossession of Māori land was directly responsible for the disastrous health outcomes Māori suffered throughout the nineteenth century. This is one of the most formidable, enduring impacts of white supremacy and colonisation upon tangata whenua: