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Easter Weekend Checkpoints In Place As New Zealanders Are Told To Stay Home For Easter During Coronavirus LockdownAMBERLEY, NEW ZEALAND - APRIL 10: A police officer stops cars travelling north towards Hanmer Springs at a checkpoint on April 10, 2020 in Amberley, New Zealand. With New Zealand in lockdown due to COVID-19, police are setting up checkpoints across the country to ensure people on the roads are travelling for essential purposes only. The Easter long weekend is a popular time for New Zealanders to go on holiday, however current Level 4 restrictions in place due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic requires everyone to remain at the place of residence they were in as of midnight 25 March when New Zealand went into lockdown. (Photo by Kai Schwoerer/Getty Images)
New Zealand police have acknowledged iwi for helping stop any community transmission of Covid-19, including by setting up checkpoints Photograph: Kai Schwörer/Getty Images
New Zealand police have acknowledged iwi for helping stop any community transmission of Covid-19, including by setting up checkpoints Photograph: Kai Schwörer/Getty Images

New Zealand's Māori tribes deserve recognition for their part in vanquishing Covid-19

This article is more than 3 years old

Māori memories of past epidemics meant iwi were instrumental in forcing Jacinda Ardern’s government to act quickly

In the space of a few days in 2017 New Zealand’s Labour caucus made Jacinda Ardern their leader. In the space of a month the country made her their prime minister, and in the space of a few years the rest of the English-speaking world would turn to her as a global leader. That might sound cliché, and in a small sense it is, but it captures the adoration and esteem in which large parts of New Zealand and the world hold Ardern. She has apparently committed to a social democratic programme of old, from public housing to subsidised tertiary education, and – more importantly – she has dealt successfully with the virus. Global business leaders and others rightly rate New Zealand’s Covid-19 response as the best in the world.

But is it equally right to simply credit Ardern and her government for this success?

Partly, of course, but another group deserve credit too – iwi. When the country went into lockdown in March 2020 iwi on the East Coast of the North Island, its west coast, and its northerly tip swung into action distributing masks, sanitizer, written advice, and food parcels to vulnerable people in their region. Crucially, they also set up checkpoints to regulate movement in and out of their territory, ensuring the virus had no chance to transmit as the country went about its restrictions. In the early days some New Zealanders were furious with that particular intrusion on their movements. Even today talkback hosts take calls on the issue with one particular host running a Twitter poll asking if his followers would obey iwi checkpoints or drive straight on through.

One follower said he would drive on through – with bull bars.

But despite the small yet vocal backlash, the government came around to the iwi initiatives. Police place their own personnel at the checkpoints to ensure the public’s compliance, and publicly acknowledge iwi for helping get on top of any possible community transmission. The government also acknowledges iwi social service providers, including with extra funding, for helping ensure the community is resilient and well-resourced. In the Taranaki local iwi were distributing food parcels and more to ensure that in the event of any lockdown the people who need support the most – the elderly, young families, and the immunocompromised – had it.

It seems apt this Waitangi weekend to reflect on this. That is, on iwi efforts to keep Covid-19 out. But it’s equally apt to consider: why did iwi go, to borrow the prime minister’s words, “hard and early”? The short answer is long memories. Pandemics and their fallout are encoded in our ancestral memories. The stories of the “Spanish flu” are still with many iwi, and so too the mass graves that memorialise its victims. The stories of the 19th century, and the arrival of European settlers and their diseases, is alive as well. Between 1840 and 1891 the Māori population was cut in half as venereal infections, measles, influenza, typhoid fever, dysentery, tuberculosis, wars, and colonial dislocation took their toll. At the end of the 19th century settler politicians were declaring that their job was to “smooth the pillow of a dying race”.

For most New Zealanders, this is history. In its obvious sense, as in the past, but also in an abstract sense: population decline in the 19th century is just numbers. But for Māori the memories survive in stories from the time, like the parents who buried their children or the children who buried their parents. My marae marks its mass grave with a simple cross and simple text describing the toll the flu pandemic of the early 20th century took. This is why iwi were so quick to act. And why iwi were instrumental in forcing similarly quick action out of government. After the first lockdown police correctly concluded that checkpoints work to control the possible movement of the virus and, when Auckland went back into a semi-lockdown some months later, police set up their own checkpoints in and out of the city.

This Waitangi weekend we can thank the prime minister and her government for keeping the country safe from Covid-19 – and we can thank iwi too.



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