Lay summary
In Waikare, various inequities create poor health outcomes driven by factors such as poverty and exacerbated by the ongoing impacts of intergenerational trauma. While trauma can be a normal part of life, if social and cultural systems have been disrupted, the person or family experiencing the trauma may have few resources to call on to deal with that trauma. As well as the intergenerational impacts, that may result in ‘embodied trauma’; i.e. how the body internalises emotional and/or spiritual impacts of trauma, resulting in various diseases and health issues. This project seeks to gather information to develop a further project on understanding how trauma responses can become locked in the physical, spiritual and emotional dimensions of a person. We can then draw on traditional knowledges to help shift embodiment of trauma into embodiment of healing, and therefore impact the prevalence of health inequities for Māori.