Nga Tini Whetu by Mason Durie

Author:Mason Durie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Huia (NZ) Ltd

Indigenous health experience

Indigenous peoples, especially those who have become minority populations within their own lands, have suffered comparable patterns of disease. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, groups as diverse as Māori in New Zealand, Australian Aborigines, Native Hawaiians, the Saami of Norway, Native Americans and the First Nations of Canada, among others, were nearly decimated by infectious diseases such as measles, typhoid fever, tuberculosis and influenza. For some, including the First Nations, smallpox epidemics produced even greater suffering.5

But by the mid-twentieth century, following the near-universal experience of urbanisation in the 1950s, other health risks emerged. In developed countries such as Canada, Australia, the USA and New Zealand, vulnerability to injury, alcohol and drug misuse, cancer, kidney disease, obesity, suicide, depression, and diabetes have become the modern indigenous health hazards.6 Compared to non-indigenous members of the population, life expectancy is significantly lower for indigenous peoples and the incidence of most diseases is higher, sometimes by rates of two or three times (diabetes, mental disorders, some cancers).7

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