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September 18, 2024
Ethnicity drives poor health response
Gideon Porter
Posted On September 18, 2024
Download AudioThe first Indigenous woman to hold the presidency of the World Federation of Public Health Associations says trying to separate health needs and ethnicity is like trying to separate ethnicity from the impacts of colonisation.
Emma Rawson-Te Patu, from Ngāti Ranginui, Ngai te Rangi, Ngāti Raukawa, and Ngāti Hauā, directs an Indigenous consultancy and studied institutional racism for her master’s degree in public health.
She says ethnicity was the basis used globally by colonisers to strip Indigenous communities of their lands, cultures and political power.
“When this Government talks about ‘it’s not race but needs’, actually we find Māori in New Zealand, the indigenous populations of Australia, Canada and America, it is about the ethnicity of the people that experienced the greatest issues in terms of access to those things that make them well and happy,” Ms Rawson-Te Patu says.
The health inequities are the result of stripping Indigenous peoples of their resources and self-determination.
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