Rongoā Māori: Completing the Picture of Health

“Rongoā Māori is a threat to the medical economy because it is about sharing knowledge, not selling it.” – Erena Wikaire, National Hui on Māori Health Issues, April 2018

In April, 150 Māori medical practitioners, doctors, nurses, and graduates gathered in Rotorua to discuss the Māori Health Kaupapa Inquiry. It was an opportunity to reflect on how our health system is serving Māori — and how it must change.

The Limits of Our Current Health System

Our health system is designed to “own” the problem rather than resolve the causes. While we have seen positive shifts — a government committed to Māori health outcomes, culturally appropriate research, more Māori professionals in the system — health statistics for Māori remain starkly inequitable.

Why? Because disease is first and foremost a social issue, not just a medical one. Drugs, surgery, education, and research all play a role, but they are offered in isolation from the social realities that make people unwell.

People are not eating poorly because they don’t know better. They are not missing appointments because they don’t care. Addiction, poor diet, and disengagement often stem from disconnection, poverty, loneliness, and hopelessness.

A Māori Framework for Health

When viewed through a Māori lens, the causes of ill health become clearer. The most damaging influences are disconnection from people, place, and purpose — a worldview that prizes independence over interdependence.

Key questions emerge:

• How connected are people to their whakapapa, whenua, and whānau?
• Do they have a tūrangawaewae — a place they belong that no one can take away?
• Do they have hopes, aspirations, and a sense of their unique gifts to the world?

A Māori health framework prescribes reconnection: to whenua, tūpuna, community, tūrangawaewae, and purpose. When people know who they are and where they belong, the mauri (life force) of both people and whenua is lifted.

Healing People and Land Together

Medical interventions have their place. But rongoā Māori completes the picture by restoring balance to the whole system — people, whānau, whenua, and wairua.

As the whenua (placenta) nourishes the unborn child, so too does the whenua (land) nourish us all. To lift the mana of our people, we must also lift the mana of Papatūānuku. Healing begins with our mothers — with the whenua, with wāhine, with whānau — and radiates outward.

Rongoā Māori is not about focusing on disease. It is about people caring for people, within a web of relationships that includes the natural world.

A Way Forward

The current system, built on disease and injury, cannot on its own deliver equity. We have created a “medical economy” that tries to captain the waka of wellbeing. Yet the blueprint for good health has always been with us — in mātauranga Māori, in rongoā, in the balance of land and people.

To truly change the statistics, we must embrace a Māori framework for health. It is not an alternative to medicine, but a partner. Together, they can create a system that restores mauri, mana, and hope.