Body and spirit: a glimpse into the world of traditional Maori medicine

Body and spirit: a glimpse into the world of traditional Maori medicine

Tim Hume - Sunday Star Times Last updated 05:00 21/06/2009



Atarangi Muru an Auckland grandmother of Ngati Kuri descent.

THE MAORI healers came to Knoxville, Tennessee, at just the right time
for Coby Gordon. A 30-year substance addiction, an abusive marriage and
her burnout son's clashes with the law had left the American housewife
broken, desperate to be put back together. She was dead, she says;
she'd just "forgot to lay down".

The 48-year-old had little idea what she was signing up for when she
booked a session at a local healing centre, where staff gushed about
the strange powers of the visitors from the South Pacific, in town for
a short time only. She'd never met a Maori before never met a New
Zealander but had heard a little about them through her son, who had
once spent time in a Samoan rehab facility, overseen by several Maori
staff.

"I'd gotten the impression they're typically large people, who can pick a runaway teen up by his collar," she says.

Undaunted, she was led into a room containing several massage tables,
each bearing a scattering of leafy branches, smooth stones and sticks.
Dressed in medical scrubs, the healers men and women as physically
imposing as expected began by softly chanting and stroking her body.
Then they just went to town. At one point, the back of her heel came
into her line of sight. More alarming was the glimpse of the rock in
the healer's hand, moments before it was jammed into her temple.

"An explosion of brilliant white light went off in my head. I had a
rush of memory and emotion like I'd never felt before," she says. "I
wasn't aware of anything, until I heard her say something that shot to
my core: `You have a son who wanted to kill himself. It will all work
out."'

Gordon started sobbing, her tears and mucus puddling on the floor. A
male healer approached and slugged her in the stomach, then began
wringing her neck.

"It seemed as if a thousand Maori were standing around my table, singing and chanting," she recalls.

When the strangling stopped, she experienced "a massive outrush of
everything inside of me, every feeling I'd ever owned". It was "like an
exorcism". The healer wiped his hands in a cleansing gesture, wandered
off, and began strumming a guitar. Gordon came to some time later on a
heap of pillows, a healer stroking her back, cooing. She made an
appointment to return the next day, and ambled outside into the glare
of the carpark, trying to remember how to drive home.

A YEAR ON, Gordon has kicked her habit, found religion, and is giddy
with excitement that the healer she credits with saving her life is
back in town for three days.

About five times a year, Atarangi Muru, an Auckland grandmother of
Ngati Kuri descent, takes her travelling medicine show overseas,
bringing traditional Maori healing techniques to hundreds of patients
across the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East. The frequency
of the trips is a reflection of foreign demand for her services,
particularly from people seeking help with fertility; Muru gets about
15 inquiries a day, her reputation spread through a network of new age
healing centres, internet, and word of mouth. Those not prepared to
wait until her next visit sometimes fly to New Zealand for treatment,
where she operates a small clinic opposite an internet cafe in a West
Auckland shopping arcade.

The tours tend to be spontaneous, last-minute affairs, embarked on
suddenly when Muru discerns signs typically arriving in threes
announcing the time is right. An old lady wearing a Yankees cap, a
billboard emblazoned with a London cityscape: time to buy a plane
ticket.

The iPhone-toting healer is a modern day tohunga, a practitioner of
rongoa Maori, or traditional Maori medicine. Muru is among the hundreds
of practitioners working in diverse capacities around the country to
keep an age-old cultural knowledge alive: in clinics and hospitals,
university and marae, city and countryside. Some receive a cut of the
$1.9 million the Health Ministry spends on rongoa each year, the only
public funding given to alternative health providers. Others, like
Muru, prefer to work independently of the health system.

It is an esoteric and once-outlawed practice which has operated
covertly for generations, run by practitioners who defer to
supernatural authority rather than science, and operate according to
their own specific, localised protocols and it should come as little
surprise that rongoa does not fit neatly into a public health paradigm.
While the ministry has guidelines for rongoa practitioners, these are
only recommendations; the sector is essentially unregulated.

Exacerbating the issue of accountability is the tendency of some
healers to drift beyond the ambit of their official public health role.
Christopher Tuaupiki, a tohunga employed as a cultural adviser at
Waikato Hospital, was sentenced to 3 1/2 years' jail in 2005 for
sexually assaulting two women with potatoes during healing sessions.

Both his victims were referred to him by colleagues at the hospital,
although rongoa was not part of his job description, and his bosses
cautioned him against practising it at work. He assaulted one in the
process of lifting a makutu, or curse, he said had been placed on her.
The other he violated in his hospital office, while treating her for
breast cancer and liver disease he had diagnosed. Subsequent tests
showed his victim had neither.

FOR MURU, like many in the field, healing is a vocation passed down
through the ancestral line. Her grandfather was a tribal midwife. She
says while anyone can learn her techniques, which are based on
activating her patients' power to heal themselves, the most powerful
healers inherit their talents genetically. Her five-year-old grandson
is a regular member of her touring party, and has already exhibited
signs of the gift, laying hands on patients during healing sessions.

"Some of them have no understanding of what innocence a child can give
in their energy, so they think it's just a lovely touch. Others
appreciate the depth," explains Muru, a baby-faced woman with a playful
manner, a constant smile, and a riddling, anachronistic turn of phrase
("It matters not to me," she writes in an email).

Muru's specialty is mirimiri, traditional Maori massage; she is the
"owner" of five unique bodywork manoeuvres she inherited from an
elderly tohunga. The work can appear brutal: kneading to the bone,
walking on backs, agitating navels with her arm like a washing
machine's spindle. But it involves more than roughing up patients on
the massage table.

The Maori approach to health differs from conventional medicine in its
appreciation of the spiritual dimension to wellbeing. In pre-European
Maori society, the tohunga, revered as mediums for the gods, were
responsible for maintaining the health of the community, which could be
jeopardised by two categories of illness. Mate tangata, or human
illnesses, were treated with massage, bloodletting, and herbal
remedies. Mate atua, or supernatural afflictions, were caused when
sacred tribal laws (tapu) were broken, or makutu imposed by enemies,
and could be remedied by the tohunga through prayer and purification.

Belief in the latter persists among some Maori today. Mate Maori, or
Maori sickness, a spiritual affliction likened by one healer to bipolar
disorder, was blamed for the actions of a Christchurch man who, in
2007, smashed into a woman's home, threatening her. A Christian
minister explained to the court that the young man's illness was caused
by his carrying around a taiaha and walking stick, the use of which was
reserved for elders. Once the items were blessed and taken away, he was
cured. Coroners and health workers have called for wider recognition of
the concept, in contexts such as suicide risk assessments in prisons.

For Muru, the physical and spiritual aspects of her work are
inseparable. Manipulating the body into its proper alignment releases
the emotional pain stored inside, resulting in the sobs, howls and
hysterical laughter heard on her massage table. Insisting "the body
tells its own story", she routinely ignores patients' accounts of their
ailments, and will often concentrate her attentions on a different area
of the body to the one she is directed to.

Sometimes she won't touch her patients at all, relying instead on
chants and prayers, or stones, tapped rhythmically or laid on the skin.
She'll take her charges to mud-pools, the bush, the ocean for spiritual
cleansings. She can lift makutu, provided they are not too powerful,
and "clear" houses of bad spirits, even when the homes are in America,
and she's not.

"If somebody gives me their address, and I get a fix on it, I can spiritually cleanse it," she says, matter-of-factly.

Recently, from Auckland, Muru emailed an American woman and apologised
for leaving her living room in a state following a remote cleansing.
"She lives by herself and was trying to figure out how her chair was
knocked over. I did it when I was backing out of the room."

AS A rule, statements like this no matter how guilelessly expressed
tend to invite disbelief, if not ridicule. But for Muru's followers,
her results drown out any questions about her supernatural claims.
Auckland schoolteacher Lisa Smith's elder child was born with one leg
shorter than the other; specialists warned she might need a corrective
procedure or casts. Muru cured her through reworking the infant's body,
then set about helping Smith conceive her a sibling.

"With our first baby we conceived very quickly, but with this one we
had tried for about a year," says Smith. Muru gave her emotional
counselling, and one of the healer's colleagues performed deep work on
her belly, dislodging afterbirth remaining from her first pregnancy.
She bled heavily and fell pregnant a month later. Smith credits the
healthy arrival of her second daughter, Kahukura, in equal part to the
healers' physical and spiritual work.

Her mother, early childhood educator Carol Smith, is Muru's second
cousin, and another fervent believer. She thinks much of the
treatment's effectiveness comes from the sense of wellbeing derived
from re-engaging with Maori traditions.

Massage has obvious therapeutic benefits. And some plants used in
traditional herbal remedies, an aspect of Maori healing that is not
publicly funded, have proven antiseptic and antifungal qualities. Lewis
Wheeler, a Pakeha farmer from the Waikato, is an unlikely champion of
the medicinal properties of kumarahou, a shrub he credits with curing
his symptoms of chemical poisoning after Tuaupiki taught him how to
brew it into a tonic. But the spiritual component of rongoa seems to
hinge entirely on naked belief in the cure for its effectiveness.

Percy Tipene, spokesman for Te Paepae Matua mo Rongoa, the national
body for Maori healers which is being established with $300,000 of
Health Ministry funding, says that crucial to rongoa's effectiveness
"is the psychological belief by our people that what they're obtaining
is going to heal them".

To sceptics, it sounds like the placebo effect dressed up in cultural
justifications, but rongoa expert Rob McGowan says it amounts to more
than faith healing.

Viewed holistically, the benefits of rongoa's spiritual and pastoral
care become apparent, especially in countering "lifestyle diseases",
like type-2 diabetes or alcoholism, which afflict Maori
disproportionately.

"If you take a person who eats or drinks too much and becomes unwell,
why is that so? Is it because in their background there's a sadness or
hurt that hasn't been attended to? To enable the person to become well
again, you have to address those root causes."

RONGOA HAS endured despite significant assaults on the tradition.

Although pre-European Maori were noted by scientist Joseph Banks as
being of "sound health", diseases subsequently introduced by colonisers
were no match for the tohunga's powers, and damaged Maori confidence in
their healers. Later, the rise of travelling charlatans known as
"second-class tohunga" prompted the passing of the Tohunga Suppression
Act in 1907.

Supported by Maori members of parliament, who viewed tohunga as a
threat to their people's health and an impediment to progress, the law
threatened six months' imprisonment for anyone who misled Maori by
"pretending to possess supernatural powers in the treatment or cure of
any disease, or in the foretelling of future events". Few prosecutions
were made under the act, which was repealed in 1962, but it drove the
practice of rongoa underground for generations.

But the cultural renaissance of recent decades, combined with concerns
about Maori health disparities and a perceived lack of an adequate
spiritual dimension to modern medicine, has led to a revival. Today
there are about 30 rongoa clinics around the country, 15 of them funded
by the Health Ministry to promote wellness through massage, prayer,
spiritual counselling and cultural support. The ministry likens its
role to those performed by publicly funded hospital chaplaincy or
counselling services, and says it also has value as a potential entry
point for Maori into primary health services.

Says Tipene: "At the end of the day, if we can have rongoa Maori
providing wellness for our people, and eliminating some of the symptoms
before they become critically sick, it's going to save us all money."

Teresa Wall, the ministry's deputy director-general of Maori health,
told a newspaper earlier this year that "the mere fact that people use
rongoa and go back to the practitioners is testament that the services
they are given are contributing to their wellbeing". Although the
ministry does not review rongoa clinics' health outcomes, she says it
plans to work with Te Paepae Matua to review existing standards for
healers, explore training requirements and investigate mechanisms for
self-regulation.

But the fact that many healers operate under their own idiosyncratic
protocols, handed down from elders, presents an obstacle to
standardisation. Similarly, the arcane spiritual maladies they
encounter can easily lead them beyond the scope of their official roles.

Alice Nuku, manager of the Whaioranga Trust, which provides
ministry-funded rongoa services in Tauranga, likens her team leader to
a medium, and says her staff occasionally lift makutu, bringing in
Ratana ministers and kaumatua for assistance.

"Within the contract itself, I'm very careful about how far we go,"
says Nuku. "But that doesn't necessarily mean when we finish work, we
don't do it; in our own lives we might practice it."

NOW 68, and out of prison, tohunga Christopher Tuaupiki warns about the
vulnerabilities of his profession, saying he wants better frameworks
established between healers and health authorities "for the protection
of what we're doing".

Tuaupiki, who has stopped practising rongoa until he clears his name,
maintains the assaults of which he was convicted were a legitimate part
of his work. His treatments involved rubbing affected areas of the body
with a cut potato to remove toxins, before burying half in the ground.
"It's all part of the healing," he says. "That's where the breakdown
was. They didn't have the common understanding."

Muru says while she knows nothing of Tuaupiki's case, tohunga can
legitimately work on the genitals of patients of either gender the same
way a male doctor does her cervical screening.

Of a recent patient, she says: "I could tell by smelling her she had
been abused, so I knew I had to use my foot on her vagina, which is how
I've been taught to clear that area."

Like many of Muru's healing techniques, it's an unconventional
treatment, underpinned by a worldview that does not always appear
reconcilable with conventional healthcare. (Few medical professionals
would offer the view, as Muru does, that the 2007 death of Wainuiomata
woman Janet Moses was something that "maybe went right": "Who's to know
what God's call is? Maybe it was just her time.")

But Muru says the foot-on-vagina treatment worked; it was just a matter
of making sure the patient understood her methodology. Establishing a
relationship of trust is central to her work, which relies on her
patients drawing strength from the belief they invest in her practice.
With so few systemic protections in place, it's largely down to the
healer not to take advantage of the relationship.

The Health Ministry's plans to bring the old tradition of rongoa in
line with the accountabilities of a modern health system holds little
allure for Muru, who works under natural laws perceived as more
powerful than any ministry edict. In fact, it's an influence she
regards as unhealthy.

"I worked in a group of healers once that received government funding,
but our healing was in a box, and we couldn't work outside the box,"
she says.

"In society nowadays, we have too many rules, too many conditions."