Sailing in a new direction: Multicultural mental health in New Zealand
Ruth DeSouza
Centre for Asian & Migrant Health Research
National Institute of Public & Mental Health, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
PP: 155 - 165
Abstract
Migrants and refugees make up an increasingly significant number of Aotearoa/New Zealand's population with one in five New Zealanders being born in another country compared with one in eight people in the United States and one in fifteen in Europe. Increasingly efforts are being made to ensure that settlement services are provided and that mental health service delivery is cognisant of their needs.
This paper describes some of the efforts being undertaken in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the implications of such efforts; in particular the mental health of Asians, a growing group, is explored. The author suggests that there is a need to learn from Pacific people's ventures, to broaden the bicultural dialogue and finally to expand the new focus from Asians, refugees and migrants to also include the needs of long term settled communities and international students.
Keywords
multicultural, bicultural, multicultural mental health, mental health policy, Māori, Pacific peoples, Asian people
Article Text
Simply by sailing in a new direction
You could enlarge the world.
(Curnow, 1997, p.226)
A sailing metaphor seems apt as the focus of this paper is on the people who have crossed the ocean to reach Aotearoa/New Zealand. Around 1300 AD the ancestors of Māori used the stars and the winds to sail southward from Hawaiiki in their waka (canoes) to Aotearoa/New Zealand. Thousands of years earlier, the world's first seafarers had set off from South-East Asia, sailing into the Pacific on rafts. Tasman's arrival in 1642, followed by Cook in 1769 marked the arrival of Europeans. Organised settlement followed the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Pacific migration increased from a trickle after World War II as manufacturing and service industries grew. Asians too had been coming to New Zealand since the 1800s but their numbers were small until after 1987.
Young Chinese men from Guangdong province travelled to the goldfields of Otago in the 1860s (Ip, 2005) and Indian connections with New Zealand began in the late 1800s with Lascars (Indian seamen) and Sepoys (Indian soldiers) arriving after deserting their British East India Company ships (Swarbrick, 2005). The earliest refugees arrived between 1870-1890 and included Danes, Russian Jews and French Huguenots. Subsequently, refugees from Nazism (1933-39), Poland (1944), Hungary (1956-58), 'handicapped' refugees (1959), Chinese (1962-71), Russian Christians from China (1965), Asians from Uganda (1972-73), Chileans, Soviet Jews, Eastern Europeans, people from the Middle East, South-East Asia (Indo-Chinese), Somalia, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iran and the Sudan have resettled in New Zealand. More recently, Asian foreign fee-paying students have impacted on the education system, becoming important to the national economy and more visible in society (International Division & Data Management and Analysis, 2005).
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