Reflecting on Diverse Experiences of Health, Wellbeing, and Climate Change Amongst Wāhine Māori (Māori Women) in Northern Aotearoa

Abstract

Drawing on participatory, ethnographic research in Te Tai Tokerau (Northland, Aotearoa), this thesis explores Māori women’s diverse experiences of health, wellbeing, and climate change. Employing the lens of intersectionality in combination with theories of Māori wellbeing, decolonisation, loss and damages, racial capitalism, maladaptation, and cultural resurgence, I examine how Māori women’s multiple subjectivities influence their encounters with and responses to the health dimensions of climate change. I consider how subjectivity generates varied impacts, loss, and damages to health and wellbeing amongst wāhine Māori (Māori women) and their whānau (families/extended kin-groups), and differential vulnerability to these impacts. Māori women’s subjectivities are also the conduit for distinctive forms of wellbeing-centred, flaxroots (grassroots) climate adaptation in Te Tai Tokerau and serve as a platform to re-imagine equitable, transformative, and appropriate responses to climate change. In attending to the dynamism of local climate impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation I seek to enhance existing climate scholarship and policy on a national and international scale. Instead of marginalising the perspectives of Māori and other Indigenous peoples altogether, or approaching Indigenous groups as internally homogenous entities, I encourage research and policy to engage more seriously with Indigenous peoples’ heterogeneous lived realities of climate change, health, and wellbeing. More nuanced engagement with the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, location, and other markers of difference is required in order to pursue and support climate adaptation that better reflects Indigenous peoples’ daily lives, needs, capacities, and aspirations for the future.