The Māori tohunga teaching back a practice her country banned by law over a century ago

On the World Tribal Alliance (WTA) podcast, the elder introduced as Auntie Effie T. tells a story that begins with a law. In 1907, New Zealand's Parliament passed the Tohunga Suppression Act, which criminalized the work of traditional Māori healers — the tohunga — on the grounds of protecting the public from "harmful" practices. In practice, the law struck midwives, healers and spiritual guardians like Auntie Effie T.'s own family, and she was beaten at school for speaking her own language.

Today she stands on the other end of that story. Born already destined for the role, she says, by her midwife grandmother's decision, she now volunteers unpaid at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, a Māori education institute founded in the 1980s by Rongo Wetere to give back carving, weaving, language and healing knowledge that colonial repression nearly erased. According to her, many who seek out the classes come from contexts of suicide or grief — New Zealand, she says, is among the countries with the world's highest youth suicide rate, a claim the WTA's own materials do not independently verify.

Auntie Effie T. also took part in the WTA's Origins gathering in South Africa — the same ceremony recounted by other elders at Cape Point and on Robben Island. She describes walking into the ocean to, in her words, return to the Earth the trauma carried by her lineage. It is a spiritual gesture, not a verifiable fact, but consistent with the monthly full-moon sea-healing ceremonies she says she leads back home.

The most delicate part of her account involves spiritual healing itself: she recounts the case of a student who had a seizure with no medical explanation — doctors found no brain bleed or other cause — after saying she had seen tall, dark figures. Auntie Effie T. attributes the episode to an entity and describes protection rituals with salt and chants. The account stays firmly in the realm of belief: the absence of a medical diagnosis does not confirm a spiritual cause, only that medicine, in that case, found no answer.

Worth watching for the contrast between the harshness of the history — a banned language, a craft hidden by force — and the serenity with which she now teaches back what was nearly lost.