Ma ori have a right to be worried Opinion
The juxtaposition of recent news items about illegal road blocks at Te Araroa and Hicks Bay with Dr Lance O’Sullivan’s exasperation at the number of cars on the streets of Kaitaia probably set some eyes rolling at the apparent contradictions within the Maori community.
While East Coast Maori were taking matters into their own hands to protect small settlements remote from medical services, some inhabitants of Northland seemed to be treating it all as a joke and going about their daily business as usual.
Now that we are in a level four lockdown it is much to be hoped that all Maori, regardless of their location, are taking the threat from coronavirus seriously.
On the precedent of New Zealand’s last major pandemic in 1918, they have good reason to do so, and to be anxious about the likely outcomes if present measures fail.
Most Pakeha are probably still unaware of how much Maori society suffered during the great influenza pandemic of 1918.
About 6600 Pakeha died from the so-called Spanish Influenza in November and December 1918, and an estimated 2500 Maori.
But the death rates were very different. Pakeha died at a rate of 6.1 per thousand, but Maori died at a rate of 49 per thousand, or nearly five per cent. In some districts the rates were even worse.
Bay of Islands, Dargaville, Otamatea, Thames, Ohinemuri, Whakatane, Opotiki and Waitomo all saw death rates around 60 per thousand, while Taumarunui and some counties in South Taranaki saw rates of 90 and 100 per thousand.
Yet these were only the registered deaths. It has been estimated from careful research that about a third of Maori deaths in 1918 were never registered. The remaining numbers were gleaned from local newspapers and police reports.
Admittedly some of the rates may be exaggerated because of the defects of the 1916 Census. Maori in the Waikato, for example, boycotted both the Census and vital registration as part of their protest against conscription during World War I.
Even so there is good reason to believe that more than 600 Maori died in Northland, 400 in Bay of Plenty, 200 in Waikato and 220 in Taranaki.
Why did Maori die at such a greater rate than Pakeha ? As explained in an article in last year’s New Zealand Journal of History, there was no single cause, but rather a perfect storm of contributing factors.
Pakeha in towns and cities had gained some degree of immunity from the mild first wave of the 1918 pandemic during September and October. East Coast Maori appear to have shared this benefit.
But most Maori in 1918 were rural dwellers, and some of their settlements were quite remote from the towns, especially in the roadless North. This left them vulnerable to the more severe second wave of the pandemic which swept through New Zealand in November 1918.
Maori in 1918 were a vulnerable population on other counts as well. Loss of land had left most of them povertystricken, with lower levels of nutrition and housing quality than the bulk of the Pakeha population.
A communal lifestyle proved
a liability in a pandemic. Many Maori still slept in traditional raupo whare, huddled together on sleeping mats for warmth at night. This was a dangerously perfect setting for the transmission of infectious
respiratory diseases, especially influenza and pneumonia.
Maori health in 1918 was also compromised by widespread tuberculosis. One of the ways this was spread was by the sharing of chewing gum by children. Droplet infection from coughing was the other main vector.
Maori lungs were also compromised by the popularity of tobacco, both smoked and chewed, with both sexes. This may help to explain why the death rates for male and female young adult Maori in the 1918 flu were almost the same, whereas those for Pakeha in those age groups had a marked male predominance. An estimated 60 per cent of Pakeha males smoked in those days, but very few females.
Most of those who died in the 1918 flu had influenza first and then secondary pneumonia accompanied by high fever, sweating and headaches. Survival in those pre-antibiotic days depended on good nursing and fluid replacement.
Aspirin was used in some Maori settlements as an effective
febrifuge and pain-relief. But where most of the adults were laid low at the same time, children did not know how to nurse the sick, or how to prepare the herbal remedies for fever.
Some tohunga remedies were positively dangerous, such as sending pneumonia patients to sit in a sacred stream or pond. The shock of cold water would have been enough to finish off many such cases.
Out of the prevailing picture of despair and death there were a few shining examples of effective treatment. At Ngaruawahia, Te Puea nursed flu cases while her husband helped bury the dead. At Arahura pa on the West Coast of the South Island, Emma Tainui organised the children to nurse
the sick, and saved all of the flu cases there.
Pakeha nurses and medical students were sent into some Maori districts to do what they could, but sometimes they arrived after the worst was over.
Dr Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) declared the 1918 flu ‘‘the severest setback’’ Maori had suffered since the musket wars of Hongi Hika. Yet the survivors remarried and the Maori population started a steady increase that has carried on to the present day.
The Health Act of 1920 set up a separate division for Maori health, and as funds allowed in the 1920s sanitation and water supply were improved in many settlements, along with better housing and nutrition.
Dr Turbott undertook the first scientific investigation of tuberculosis among Maori on the East Coast in the 1930s, and new drugs in the 1950s at last brought that dreadful scourge under control.
Maori still remember the 1918 flu as one of their darkest hours. But many useful lessons were learned from 1918, and have been incorporated into New Zealand’s current Pandemic Plan.
Now that we are fighting another highly infectious virus in Covid-19, those lessons need to be remembered, and our best protection as a nation is to follow the advice of our health experts.
Dr Geoffrey Rice is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Canterbury and author of Black November: the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand (second edition, 2005), Black Flu 1918: the story of New Zealand’s worst public health disaster (2017), and That Terrible Time: Eye-witness Accounts of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand (2018).
Ma¯ ori still remember the 1918 flu as one of their darkest hours. But many useful lessons were learned from 1918, and have been incorporated into New Zealand’s current Pandemic Plan.