The Cicada Tree

Irihapeti Ramsden: We’ve got almost no knowledge about traditional birth customs really, or a very limited view, and a lot of it we’re making up now as we go along. That’s ok, that’s a reconstruction of culture. In traditional culture there were hard times, times not to be sentimental about. I think in those days you had very few deaths from childbirth, because women with bad pelvises died and there were no daughters born with bad pelvises. It's only with new genes, back into our make-up that we are getting bad pelvises through again. Societies like our’s which were isolated, didn’t have too difficult a time with birth. We know that, like other traditional societies, the women giving birth had ways to squat and lean. Essentially babies went in the same way and they came out the same way! Our family midwife  delivered my mother and grandmother, helped me with mine, and she was in her 90s. She was able to give us our obstetric history, that's the important thing. She never lost a baby, but she said that all had good pelvises. So childbirth was not the kind of unusually traumatic thing.

Shona Rapira-Davies: I’ve heard quite a few stories about infanticide and abortions, and there’s a particular plant, my aunt told me about, that induces abortion.

IR: Our people did practise induced abortion and infanticide. Every culture has done this. There were certain very tapu things around miscarriage. If you’ve got a small society, people couldn’t be having babies at the wrong time of the year when there wasn’t enough kai and the mothers weren’t in condition. Also they wanted to have their babies in the springtime, so that they would have a summer baby. People then, because their diet was often poor, couldn’t ovulate below a certain fat level in their bodies as well. They were hard times.