Last century Rongoā Māori - the traditional Māori healing system - was banned. But now it's making a comeback.
Rongoā Māori expert Donna Kerridge is a fountain of knowledge of the healing properties of our native plants.
"When I was growing up I didn't know there was a thing called Rongoā Māori - it was just what we did. We took kumarahou for coughs but I thought everyone did that," Kerridge told The Project on Friday.
Once practiced by tohunga and considered tapu, Rongoā is much more than medicine - it's the balance and wellbeing of everything on earth.
Dame Nadia Glavish is the Tikanga adviser for the Waitemata and Auckland District Health Boards. She says Rongoā was passed down to her from her grandmother.
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"One of the prophecies that was said by my grandmother: you must learn to care for the animal life, fish life, bird life, vegetables and fruit that have all agreed to be sustenance for you," she said on Friday.
"Honour it 'cause if you don't, you'll be the sustenance for them."
When colonists brought unknown and deadly diseases to New Zealand, the tohunga struggled to cope.
At the same time, they were accused of claiming to have supernatural powers.
"A law was brought in to stop Tohungaism. To stop us Māori going to our tohunga about these foreign diseases rather than the doctors who understood them," said Glavish.
"It didn't disappear, it just went underground. Māori never ever gave it up."
Educator Wiremu Doherty was the youngest of 13 children raised in Te Urewera by their grandmother - who kept her knowledge of Rongoā a secret.
"She simply knew every tree, bug, and leaf in Te Urewera. Part of that was also an exhaustive knowledge of rongoā," said Doherty.
"The other part is spirituality. At times as a wee person I would see things I couldn't explain," he told The Project.
Doherty says as a child he would be woken up in the middle of the night to his grandmother saying someone she knew was ill. Despite the house having no connectivity to the outside world, his grandmother was never wrong.
"She'd already prepared for all the things that needed to be done for when they arrived."
Now, there are calls for Rongoā Māori to be used alongside western medicine in our public health system.
"Māori medicine is not lesser, it's different. When we can respect what we're both good at and use that, people will be richer for the choice. No one modality has all the answers," said Kerridge.
Newshub.
