Abstract:
[The first paragraph:] Colonization occurs in many fields, from the scientific to the philosophical, and involves all forms of life including flora, fauna and micro-organisms. All these forms of life can colonize or be colonized by others. The various processes of colonization connect in new and deadly ways in the current pandemic of COVID-19: on both sides of the Tasman Sea, Māori and Indigenous Australians are faring the worst in terms of illness and death as ethnic groups relative to the national populations. It is already colonized peoples who are being hit hardest by the colonizing viral pathogen (McLeod et al., 2020; Power et al., 2020). And this epidemic is but the latest in a series of epidemics since the arrival of Europeans in these lands, each of which has impacted disproportionately on the Indigenous populations there (see Crosby, 2015). For example, the Māori death rate in the 1918 influenza epidemic was eight times higher than that for Pākehā (Gooch, 2021). The skewed rates by ethnicity of COVID-19 illness and death signal a broader lack of progress towards social justice in these societies.