The newness and excitement of classes made me feel focused and happy for a while but anger was just below the surface. As I sat through the lectures, I began identifying things that really pissed me off. I felt like my temper was constantly at a simmer.
First of all, the nursing curriculum in the 1980s was built around the assumption that the ‘ideal nurse’ was young, female and white. Apart from the sciences and two stand-out men in the mental health teaching team, all the lecturers were older, female, straight and white. Their worldview was narrow, smug and – in my view – unchallenged. They didn’t seem to turn a reflexive eye over their own experiences. Consequently, their lecture content was filled with assumptions that their student audience was the same and that no alternative perspective existed. I was one of very few mothers in the class, and apart from me there were three wāhine Māori students who were also mothers, and only one man. The bulk of the class were young white women who had just left school.
I was stunned, hurt and furious at her ignorance and casual dismissal of my whānau.
In class, the phrase ‘those people’ was applied freely to anyone non-white and not straight, and lecturers drew heavily on prejudicial stereotypes that often veered into outright racism and bigotry. The example that has stayed in my mind all these years, and still raises my blood pressure, came in a social science lecture. The topic was something about how people could improve their wellbeing by making healthy lifestyle choices. Examples were things like drug and alcohol use, education, contraception and healthy eating.
Remember – this was in a small rural city, distant from the political centres of the 1980s, and an early year-one class filled with mostly privileged white girls who had little life experience. In a wider context, HIV and AIDS were coming to the attention of the Aotearoa population, but most media attention erroneously framed them as a problem for the marginalised and stigmatised populations of gay men and intravenous drug users. The land march led by Whina Cooper in 1975 and the 1981 Springbok tour protests were mere blips in white memory that had been eclipsed by the interwoven myths of Godzone as a place of heterosexual nuclear family bliss, racial harmony and meritocracy.
The class started as expected, with a description of what we now refer to as the ‘social determinants of health’. They’re logical. The healthiest among us tend to have a warm and dry house; a good education, which leads to a steady source of liveable income; a secure, nutritious food supply; social inclusion; and access to good healthcare within a healthy, non-toxic environment. Like I said, they make sense.
In that moment, and for the remainder of my first year, I was raging. I felt overexposed somehow, as though every injustice was a personal cut.
The difficulty with these social determinants of health comes when someone with a narrow life perspective tries to explain why some groups of people don’t have what they need to make them healthy.
This lecturer was a small woman, grey haired, white skinned, with a British accent, and many years of nursing experience. Her concern for unhealthy populations related to ‘those people’ making poor choices. Her lecture started with the problems related to teen motherhood, known then as ‘being a solo mum’. I switched off for a moment when she made a statement about the unforgivable ignorance of those people who either get pregnant or allow their child to get pregnant as a teenager.
At that point, my brain thought: ‘So she’s saying my mother – my mother – was ignorant and made a poor choice when she had me?’ When I zoned back in, she was in full flight about Māori (pronounced ‘Murries’, of course) because they didn’t care about being healthy and constantly made bad choices that overburdened poor nurses. I promptly switched off again, and instead started linking her statements together. This woman was running my mother down; now she was doing the same with my adored grandmother, and by extension, she was dismissing, discounting and disrespecting me as well, a ‘solo mum’ reliant on a benefit to stay in my nursing course. I was stunned, hurt and furious at her ignorance and casual dismissal of my whānau. It was a highly personalised, powerful moment of realisation for me, albeit still uninformed.
I was also frustrated at nursing in general: how we functioned, our hierarchy, our narrow minds, our lack of power.
I’ve recounted my experience of that moment quite a few times over the last three decades. In all her ignorance and smug superiority, that nurse ignited in me a fire that underpinned my need to make a difference, to do everything I could to challenge ignorance – in myself and in other nurses, to furiously resist those neat, devastating stories about what it meant to be Māori. And I knew I needed to start paying attention to my whakapapa, because I could see that her way of thinking was going to damage it irreparably. Until that moment I hadn’t considered that Māori were under threat. By extension, my precious daughters were threatened too.
In that moment, and for the remainder of my first year, I was raging. I felt overexposed somehow, as though every injustice was a personal cut. And there were a lot of injustices. I stood for election for the student association and became president. In that role, I attended the polytech’s board meetings, where I personally encountered, for the first time, what seemed to be the absolute power of white businessmen. With my blue-collar, avoidant upbringing, I hadn’t really encountered them before. There was one kuia who attended those meetings on behalf of her iwi. I would watch her shakily deliver requests for the development of structures to support Māori students, which were immediately voted against by men with eyerolls and smirks. I always cast the student vote with her, but it was two against everyone else.
I was also frustrated at nursing in general: how we functioned, our hierarchy, our narrow minds, our lack of power. I can’t believe I managed to graduate with all those thoughts in my head. Everything felt so unfair. Nobody listened. Nobody was interested in the people who didn’t have the power. I focused on injustices and inequalities, which meant I was always looking at deficits. I hadn’t reached the point where I could articulate issues of equity and the possibility of multi layered change.
Jacquie Kidd, Ngāpuhi, is professor of Māori health at Auckland University of Technology. She has a clinical background in nursing and almost two decades of expertise in whānau-focused Māori health equity research. In 2022, she was diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer. Her book, Ngākaurua, was published in April by The Cuba Press.
- Disclosure: Kaitiaki coeditor Mary Longmore worked with Kidd to edit Ngākaurua.