How a Hokianga iwi inspired an Oprah book

It was here that Dr Bruce Perry, a pioneering US neuroscientist and psychiatrist, gained inspiration to continue his work in trying to heal kids reeling from a tough start in life. Perry, now 68, is an internationally recognised expert on the effect of abuse, neglect and trauma on the child’s brain. In his 2021 book written with Oprah Winfrey, What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, he mentions his formative New Zealand experiences.

In 1997, through Kiwi connections impressed by his burgeoning work in neuroscience, Perry visited Te Kai Waha Marae. During that period, Perry was challenging the medical models of the time and writing about how early childhood experiences affect the wiring of the brain.

His colleagues working in mental health and child abuse pushed back. His work was “bullshit”; he didn’t know what he was talking about. But one doctor was listening. New Plymouth paediatrician Robin Fancourt read one of his articles and asked to study alongside him in Chicago. A very surprised Perry, who was still quite junior, said come on over.

At the time, Fancourt, also a pioneer in her field, was founder and chair of the newly formed Children’s Agenda. She later invited him to New Zealand to speak around the country on the “assessment and treatment of maltreated children: a neurodevelop-mental approach”.

Before he arrived in March 1997, Perry asked Fancourt to arrange for him to stay at a marae, which led to the people of Te Kai Waha, at Waiwhatawhata, hosting him at their beautiful, carved wharenui. A seed was sown.

This was 26 years ago, so long ago that many who were there have died. Fancourt died of brain cancer in 2009. Most of the kaumātua who welcomed Perry at Te Kai Waha are gone. But the account of that influential visit is now in his book. He describes the feeling over the two days as that of a family reunion – “the warmth and strength of the community were palpable”.

The elders and rongōa healers were very patient with him, he tells the Listener, and when he asked how they handled depression, sleep problems, drug abuse and trauma, they were “gently amused” at his Western ideas. “They kept trying to help me understand that these problems were all basically the same thing. The problems were interconnected. In Western psychiatry, we like to separate them, but that misses the true essence of the problem. We are chasing symptoms, not healing people.”

Instead of different parts of the body being treated by different specialists – eye doctors, bone doctors, etc – many of the healing practices passed on by the locals involved reconnection. “If connectedness – whanaungatanga – wasn’t addressed, the potential effectiveness of Western interventions was blunted,” he says.

Whanaungatanga is at the heart of any marae in Aotearoa, but in 1992, it was the focus of the legendary Pā Henare Tate, a Catholic priest and leader from north Hokianga. It led to the development of the Dynamics of Whanaungatanga (DoW) programme, a practice framework still used today (see “Someone by your side”).