Māori

Recent changes to health ethics oversight in New Zealand has presented a number of challenges for the way in which health and disability ethics committee (HDEC) members handle Treaty of Waitangi responsibilities. Informants suggest that indigenous research ethics has either virtually dropped off the table or taken a “cultural turn” in the sense that the meaning of consultation has been “trivialised”; however, this fate is not indicated uniformly across all HDECs.

The high rates of indigenous peoples exposed to traumatic experiences are exacerbated by the affects of historical trauma passed from generation to generation. Research exploring the individual and collective impact of this phenomenon is growing internationally. Yet little is known about Māori practices that facilitate healing from historical trauma. This article aims to analyse the affects of this trauma on Māori by exploring them in the context of the growing body of international historical trauma research.

Māori wellbeing is the foundation of Māori development, yet Indigenous peoples (including Māori) are often invisible in universal measures of wellbeing. In 2006 Mason Durie outlined Māori-specific measures of wellbeing, built upon Māori understandings of what constitutes a “good life”. Following Durie this paper describes developments in the culturally responsive measurement of Māori wellbeing. These have culminated in Te Kupenga, the 2013 survey of Māori wellbeing by New Zealand Statistics, and two Māori mental wellbeing assessment tools, Hua Oranga and the Meihana Model.