Home Births to Hospital Births: Interviews with Maori Women Who Had Their Babies in the 1930s

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My involvement in this project is a very personal one. In 1994 I began sorting through the papers of my mother, Emere Kaa Mountain, who had been a Maori health nurse and district nurse in the Bay of Islands during the 1930s.1 Her papers included pages of notes about Maori home births, and it was interest in this aspect of her work that led me to this study. Over the next six years I interviewed twenty-four Maori women who had given birth to at least one child in the 1930s. They were women known to me, while my parents, an uncle, and the Kuia [old ladies] themselves gave me other names. The extracts from the interviews follow. They display a moving candour because of the esteem they held for my mother, my father Walter Mountain, a beef butcher for fiftyseven years, a taxi driver, a Kawakawa town councillor and the force behind the rebuilding of the Te Rawhiti Marae and my uncle, Hauraki Heta, a mutton butcher for fifty years and a Mormon elder. I was helped by an aunt, Ngareta Wharerau, and another relative, Rangimarie Hakaraia Higgison, one of whom came with me when I knew that the Kuia might speak rapid and idiomatic Maori leaving me floundering. Yet another relative, Marara Tetai Hook, translated parts of some tapes. And for two, I went back to the families for their help.