From Mana Wāhine Kōrero to the Midwifery Council of New Zealand.
November 2022.
This letter protesting the removal of the words for Wāhine and Māmā from the Midwifery Council ‘Scope of Practice’ guidelines was sent on the 19th of November, 2022. It was forwarded to every Member of Parliament, as well as the Ministry for Health, the Health and Disability Commissioner, the Maternity Services Council and the College of Midwives. You are welcome to quote or reference it, as long as you cite Mana Wāhine Kōrero when doing so and refer media enquiries to MWK.
Tiakina te mauri o te wāhine. Tiakina te tāpu o te whare tangata. Tiakina te mauri o nga tamariki mea nga mokopuna. Tihei Mauri Ora!
From: Mana Wāhine Kōrero
National & International
Roopu of Tangata Whenua Wāhine & Allies
New Zealand
Attention: The Midwifery Council of New Zealand
Re: Formal Submission of Objection
To: Proposed Midwifery Council ‘Guidelines’
*(‘Guidelines’ will be more properly referred to as ‘Rules’ for the purposes of this letter, as per the link below) Chief Executive Says Guidelines *Not* Optional
*(Please note that a copy of this letter has been provided to the relevant authorities, including but not limited to those listed post-script)
*(We would like to acknowledge the College of Midwives and The Maternity Services Consumer Council for their refusal to support the wording changes proposed in the new Rules)
Tēnā koutou katoa,
We are writing to register our emphatic objection to the removal of the words ‘Wāhine and Māmā’ from the proposed Midwifery Council Rules.
What happened to ‘Whāea’? Where are the words ‘Koka’, and ‘Pēpi’?
Where are the words ‘Hapū’ and ‘Hapūtanga’? Where are the words ‘Whakawhānau’ and ‘Wahine whakawhānau’?
Where are all the words in Te Reo Māori belonging to the Wāhine Māori of New Zealand?
These words mean woman and aunt, conception, ‘to be pregnant’, pregnancy, Mother, Baby, childbirth and midwife.
You speak in reverential terms of Te Tiriti o Waitangi at the very same time that you violate it; that you literally erase our existence from our language and thus from the eyes and ears of everyone around us.
Why have you removed the words for our pēpi; for our tamariki from your new Rules?
What are you intending to do to us and our tamariki that you do not want anyone to remember that we exist?
Are pēpi no longer a priority for midwives? Only ‘whānau’?
Where will wāhine Māori turn to for care if we feel uncomfortable with being called ‘whānau’?
How does this address the care and dignity needs of wāhine Māori who have had little exposure to Te Reo?
Who will the midwives be who attend to the births of the pēpi born to wāhine Māori in our prisons?
Will they be Māori ‘kahu pōkai’, fluent in all three of our national languages, properly trained for whakawhānau in prison?
Will they be able to quickly translate ‘whānau’ from Te Reo Māori into English and NZSL and back again?
What does ‘whānau’ mean in relation to the incarcerated wāhine and her pēpi?
Whom will you be considering as ‘whānau’ in Wellington Women's Correctional Facility?
The prison guards? The sadistic rapist the Department of Corrections locked up with a trapped wāhine Māori because he said he was a woman?
Will he be cutting the cord and being solicitously asked if ‘she/they/them/eir/zir’, or any of the other eleven ‘gender identities’ listed by the Department of Corrections, that a man can claim to say he is not a man, is feeling sufficiently included?
We visited your website, here: (Midwifery Council Website).
We read the revised 'Scope of Practice'.
We read your account of your 'journey', here: (Council Journey).
We carefully considered your drawing (by which we mean image) of your ‘three-whare’ process.
Fifteen women and two men on a Midwifery Council do not an Iwi make.
Six Tangata Whenua representatives, one of whom is a man, and eleven Pakeha (including another man), all going together, in your own words, “On a journey down a path", at the behest of ‘Te Tatau o Te Whare Kahu’.
This is our understanding of the new name for the Midwifery Council of New Zealand in Te Reo Māori, as per your website, here: (All about the new name for our Midwifery Council).
“The Gateway of the House of the Membrane Enveloping the Baby, for the Lying-In and Health of High-Born Women’’.
How very telling, that ‘High-Born Women’ is being used to imply all of us, but that in reality, not one of us whom you consider to be ‘low-born’ wāhine Māori are permitted to even speak in front of you, let alone pass through the Gateway.
Our midwives are now called ‘Kahu Pōkai’; a new term which when translated in the above context, means something like ‘Bird of the Flock of Membranes’.
Two years and three pictures of a whare later, and still there has been no wider national Iwi consultation on this matter. No opportunity to present to your ‘Collaborative Reference Group’.
We read a further article, quoting Dr Sarah Donovan, a Health Sociologist at Victoria University, raising urgent questions for debate here: Sarah Donovan Article
Valid questions - one of which was the preponderance of Te Reo Māori words in the English version of the Rules, with the glaring exception of ‘wāhine’ and ‘māmā’.
We object to our language, a Taonga under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, being appropriated in this way.
We watched a presentation by Dr George Parker; a Pakeha woman who appears to genuinely believe she is either no sex, or two - it is impossible to tell from the contradiction in terms inherent in her wildly offensive Pronoun conceit. (Watch Dr Parker here).
We watched her discussing her incoherent ‘research’ into 'gender' and maternity care, as well as her very interesting connections with:
● The Midwifery Council of New Zealand
● Dr Elizabeth Kerekere, Green Party Political operative and list MP with no pēpi of her own
● The Health Research Lab at the University of Waikato
● The Midwifery School at Otago Polytechnic.
Last but not least, you have a connection through Dr Parker with Jamie Veale, a Pakeha man and Secretary of WPATH, the: ‘World Professional Association for ‘Transgender’ Health’ and promoter of ‘The Eunuch Archives’. Mr Jamie Veale is also the President of the New Zealand Branch of WPATH, known here as PATHA.
Dr Parker’s interview further included the deeply disturbing revelation that the Midwifery Council desires the creation of:
"...Professional bodies inside midwifery to lead and mandate cultural humility'.
‘Mandated Cultural Humility in the House of the Membrane’.
The mind boggles.
‘Cultural humility’ is but one of many things Dr George Parker would like to see the Midwifery Council of New Zealand 'lead and mandate', apparently.
We then looked at who exactly you are answerable to.
You are answerable to The Ministry of Health, that is to say the Crown, and to us. You are answerable, as women’s healthcare providers, to Mana Wāhine and to New Zealand Women.
All two million, five hundred and eighty-one thousand, two-hundred of us. (Stats NZ)
We familiarised ourselves anew with the Ministry of Health's approach to upholding the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, as per their obligations under the law.
It bears no resemblance to yours.
We read the available work histories of Dr Tupara and Dr Mc-Ara Cooper and all 15 other members in your 'Collaborative Reference Group'.
At the end of this reading, and in combination with our experiences as Māmā, wāhine Māori, and as such equally represented by Te Tiriti o Waitangi under law, we vehemently disagree with the conclusions you have drawn.
We consider the updated ‘Scope of Practice’ to be an insult to every single wāhine Māori in New Zealand.
You are familiar with who we are and what our concerns are.
You have chosen to repeatedly ignore our fervent entreaties to halt your assault on our language, our history, our culture, and on our tamariki, who are the very future of our people.
You have graciously, as befits such ‘high-born women’, one supposes, deigned to: “Provide some narrative about the path you have travelled”.
Here is our narrative.
These articles and links are merely a fraction of the mahi we have been doing since we combined our individual, trans-Tasman efforts to protect our people and founded Mana Wahine Kōrero twelve months ago.
It is our mahi; that which you have declined to consider in any of your Zoom meetings - most especially in your four most ‘challenging meetings’, during which the decision was taken to remove all our most sacred words from the language of midwifery.
We remind you to be truthful about your council’s connections and collaboration with:
Pakeha woman Dr George Parker
Pakeha woman Dr Sally Baddock
Pakeha woman Assoc. Prof. Suzanne Miller
Pakeha man Jamie Veale, Secretary of WPATH; an organisation that disgusted the whole world for their promotion of the ‘Eunuch Archives’ less than a year ago, while you were all still deliberating.
The ‘Eunuch Archives’, in case you are unaware, is a violent and fetishistic porn site, including child castration porn, and WPATH insists that ‘eunuch’, a castrated male child - a castrated tama Tangata Whenua - is a ‘sexuality’. (WPATH and the Eunuch Archives).
We demand that you reconsider the conversations your council is having about using this language.
We demand that you extend to us the exact same right to speak to you as the right that you have apparently freely and repeatedly offered to these academic Pakeha men and women who claim they are ‘marginalised’.
All Sovereign Women, all Mana Wāhine, we all speak on matters pertaining to life and to tamariki and to wāhine Māori.
Five highly Pakeha-educated wāhine Māori, with ten other Pakeha and two men, plus four more shadow Pakeha, all researching for two years how best to remove our words for their own gain.
We are truly affronted.
This preposterous proposal, in all its particulars, must be thrown out in its entirety, and an apology offered for this strike at the heart of our culture and what it is to be Mana Wāhine; to be Māmā and to hold our pēpi following childbirth; the Life that only we bring forth into the World.
Your ‘Collaborative Reference Group’ is attempting to colonise not only our language, but our unborn pēpi, prior to them coming forth into Te Ao.
You have not stopped there.
What about our stillborn and miscarried pēpi?
All they have is their naming rights. Our precious stillborn and miscarried tamariki do not make it through the veil into Te Ao. We grieve for them and we take heart in the knowledge that they are still with us on the other side of the veil. We name them.
You have taken their identities in the service of people who want to wear our identities; people who consider us not individuals, but ‘whanau’.
You are colonising our stillborn pēpi. No breach of faith could be more cruel than that - and you are committing this treasonous act for the benefit of twelve New Zealand women who believe that they are men and of which we know not who is (and who is not) Tangata Whenua. (Twelve New Zealand Women)
Are we not Wāhine Tangata Whenua too?
Are not we, the Māori women who live and work and breathe our culture on marae, and care for our mokopuna while we listen to and care for our kuia and kaumatua and our whānau, the very wāhine to whom you should most wish to listen?
Do you not know that Iwi are distinct from one another and must be consulted individually on matters of import affecting our people?
Why do you think Te Tiriti was carried all over the country, so that all the chiefs could sign it? Which not all of our Rangatira did, in point of fact. How did you account for this in your ‘process’?
Do Iwi who refused to sign Te Tiriti (seeing it for the lie that it was) not count to you as legitimate Māori? When did you ask them about these ideas?
This state of affairs at the New Zealand Midwifery Council is especially shocking considering the career histories and high-level positions of trust held by the two co-chairs of this so-called ‘journey’.
In the two years it took to create this proposal, exactly how many kuia from the 103 recognised Iwi have you asked for their submissions?
How many have you visited as manuhiri, with this startling and bizarre suggestion to make?
How many Hapū and Rōpu did you ask before you all decided that the word ‘wāhine’ represents ‘gender essentialism’; a brand-new kind of phobia one can apparently have?
One that has, according to your council, only ever been properly dealt with by mātauranga Māori, from Pre-Pēne Raupatu Te Ao Māori?
Not one single piece of evidence for any of these ideas exists. There are no waiata, no haka, mōteatea or carvings or any other inherited wisdom or artifacts, nothing, in the entire history of our culture, describing such a thing.
You are saying that ‘gender essentialism’ is a ‘phobia’, one which is cured only by a ‘culturally humble’ understanding of mātauranga Māori.
You are saying that this is a phobia that our midwives must avoid displaying at all costs, when we wāhine Māori are giving birth to our children, and that the way to do this is by ignoring the fact of our existence and writing us out of our own language.
You are calling this respectful? You are calling this Sovereignty?
We reject this disgraceful proposal as a way forward for improved outcomes in wāhine Māori maternal health, and remind you again that your council is ultimately answerable not to your ‘Collaborative Reference Group’ and your ‘Project Team’, nor to ‘Te Tatau o Te Whare Kahu’, but to us; the Tangata Whenua, Wāhine Māori of New Zealand.
We are saying enough, with this insolent facsimile of equality, and the dishonesty with which you are approaching this vital work of caring for us.
In the words of Michelle Uriarau, Mana Wāhine Kōrero, previously stated to you in 2021, and included above in the evidence of our mahi that we have provided herein:
“It is you who are in breach of He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”.
We are the Sovereign Women of New Zealand, the Mana Wāhine, and we are also speaking to you now not just on our own behalf, but on behalf of our unborn tamariki and our mokopuna on this matter.
Your proposal is pure hubris; dangerous to the health and the hauora of all wāhine Māori and tamariki in New Zealand, and the gravest and vilest of insults.
We propose that you do your due diligence. Consult with all Iwi throughout New Zealand. We will not accept anything less.
Signed:
Dianne Landy and Michelle Uriarau : Co-founders
Phillippa Landy, Sarah Henderson, Rex Landy, Tania Sturt, Frankie Hill
ManaWāhineKōrero
Important eh...Like Rex Landy says, #holdtheline and #neversurrender. Thanks Annienonymous - feel free to share as you like for MWK ❤️🤍🖤😘
Brilliant, hard-hitting submission, Sarah and the wahine from Mana Wahine Korero.
(Sorry, I haven't worked out how to do macrons on my keyboard. I've googled it, but the advice there doesn't seem to work for me :-) )