It was not until I was wheeled into recovery from my own cancer surgery that I saw Government minister Kiri Allan’s announcement that she had stage three cervical cancer. I was heartbroken and shocked for her in a way I hadn’t been for myself. At stage one, my condition was barely comparable to hers. As Allan revealed in the New Zealand Herald, her predicted rate of survival was 13 per cent because she is a wahine Māori.1 The rate for non-Māori for the same cancer is 40 per cent survival. ‘The total-cancer mortality rate among Māori adults was more than 1.5 times as high as that among non-Māori adults’,2 and at times it is much higher.
When I think about Kiri and about academic and writer Teresia Teaiwa, who is sadly and sorely missed, as well as others who have been sick while working in high-level, high-stress environments, I wonder if I should write about the cost of success for Māori and Pasifika women, even though I can’t tell anyone else’s story but my own. In a session called ‘Fast Burning Women’ at the 2018 WORD Festival in Christchurch, Selina Tusitala Marsh and Tusiata Avia talked about how to manage the demands of success on our time and wellbeing, the strategies we must use to place limits on what others ask of us. It’s a frequent conversation amongst Indigenous Pasifika and Māori women: how to keep success from swallowing us up with its demands on our energy and our voices. The cancers that grow in our bodies, and the other illnesses we manifest, tell us that it is a life and death conversation.
— TINA MAKERETI, FROM ‘LUMPECTOMY’
1 ‘Kiri Allan reveals grim cancer prognosis’, New Zealand Herald, 4 May 2021, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/kiri-allan-reveals-grim-cancer-prognosis/4Y5PTU7COFCIJVA2OGQULNWLQA/ (accessed 17 July 2022)
2 ‘Cancer’, Manatū Hauora — Ministry of Health, 2 August 2018, https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/populations/maori-health/tatau-kahukura-maori-health-statistics/nga-manahauora-tutohu-health-status-indicators/cancer (accessed 17 July 2022)