Emily | Ōpōtiki, Bay of Plenty

“That’s an interesting question, because it certainly speaks to whakawhanaungatanga, and I guess I do that every day. I’m a GP, and so I have the great privilege of getting to know people in all walks of life, as part of my daily job.

Whakawhanaungatanga is something that I really enjoy, and really value, and it’s one of the things that I am proud of by having come to New Zealand. I’m always asked where I’m from, so I grew up in the States but I was actually born here in New Zealand, so I’m a New Zealand citizen, and I trained here in New Zealand. 

It’s hard for me to pick one, because it’s just part of life, getting to know other people, and it’s one of the things that makes life the most interesting, and the most worthwhile. We know from research for instance, in the health field, that loneliness is probably a bigger cause of ill health than almost any other factor. So, connecting is really, really important and I’m really grateful to be in a place where I feel I can do that with many different people every day, such as I’m doing right now. 

So, I was born here in New Zealand, and that’s because both my mother’s brother, and his wife immigrated here in the ‘70s, and my father’s a geologist, so he was working here also in the ‘70s. I was born here, and because of that family connection, coming to New Zealand has always been a option for me, and I was always interested in doing medicine, and so in high school, I made the choice to come to New Zealand to study, rather than stay in the United States. I’ve been here since I was 17, I started out in Dunedin, and medicine is a profession that often takes you around different parts of the country, which has been really amazing. I met my husband in Rotorua, just over 10 years ago but I had always been interested in living and working in a rural place, and so we ended up coming here to Ōpōtiki, and we’ve been here for about eight years now. 

I might focus on the connection, because that’s more of a positive thing to focus on, but just knowing that loneliness is sort of a problem. In the United States, for instance, there’s a huge outbreak of people dying from overdosing on opioids. It’s called the Opioid Crisis. A lot of that has to do with loneliness. It’s about suffering, and so we certainly have that in New Zealand, and many viewers are probably aware of our high rates of mental health burdens here in New Zealand, and suicide, and domestic violence. So, those I believe, are all connected to loneliness. For me, the fix or the cure is connectedness, and perhaps one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, is why I’m so proud to be here in New Zealand is because of Te Tiriti. Te Tiriti is a document about connection, and it’s a partnership document that really gives me the right to be here, even though I don’t have a New Zealand accent, because of course after tangata whenua, everybody had an accent who came here. So, part of us non-tangata whenua’s right to be here is grounded in that partnership document of Te Tiriti, and that’s what’s really exciting for me about that document is that this country is founded on it, and it demands connection. It demands partnership and fairness, and I think part of the loneliness perhaps that has come about over time has been because of the lack of fairness. As a white person who comes from America, some of my ancestors were part of setting up British Colonialism. And I’ve been learning recently, especially with the Black Lives Matters movement in the US, so much more about what British Colonialism is, and what happened, and the impacts it has here in New Zealand. If you look up Colonialism in Wikipedia, it’s a process of domination, and domination is kind of the opposite of connecting. It’s about having a hierarchy, and there has to be somebody at the top of the hierarchy, who dominates somebody at the bottom, and there’s nothing connecting about hierarchy and domination, but that’s sort of the realty the world has been in for 400 years. Apparently at the time when the concept of multiple races was sort of being developed in the 1600s as part of the white supremacy doctrine, it was actually considered heresy because in the Christian world there’s Adam and Eve. That’s the creation story, and many cultures have a creation story where we’re all descended from two people, and so the concept that there’s multiple Adams and Eves is just crazy. 

But coming back to life here in Ōpōtiki, and why I’m so proud to be one of the more recent settlers here, and uphold my obligation to the partnership document, Te Tiriti, is because it’s about fairness, and I understand that Ti Tiriti might be the only document in the world where a country has been founded on a partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous. That is so exciting. I mean, what a possibility of connection that we have here in New Zealand, and I like to think that we started it with giving women the right to vote. We were the first country in the world to do that. I wouldn’t be speaking to you today as a doctor, if that hadn’t happened. So, what amazing things have come out from the fact that we led the world in fairness in terms of gender equality?  Why not just live up to what our Te Tiriti gives us and have a partnership across every aspect of society?  It would be an amazing country and world-leading. It would just be really exciting, and I think it really does all come back to that whakawhanaungatanga.”