Dr Jean Hera is an 'ecofeminist' closely working with the Palmerston North Women's Homedeath Support Group in New Zealand, helping to organise funerals without funeral directors - the group was highly commended in the 1994 Social Innovations Awards (see R-Inventing Society, Institute for Social Inventions, 1994, page 245). Her 376-page PhD thesis, Reclaiming the Last Rites (Rights) - Women and After-death policy, practices and beliefs in Aotearoa/New Zealand, draws inspiration from the community-based, often matriarchal, death rites of the Maori peoples, so as to suggest an alternative approach to what she sees as the patriarchal, institutionalised and environmentally hostile approach currently dominant. In the following extracts, Hera uses interviews with women to suggest some of the ways in which the open emotion and informality of Maori death rites could provide a more therapeutic alternative to conventional, European-style funerals.
Karen spoke of the importance of the honest sharing at the tangi Maori funeral rites) and how this can involve humour:
You bloody bitch, what about that fifty dollars you still owe me? ... I'll never get that now ... You better have it when I get to see you, when I get up there.
Patricia expressed the importance of honestly releasing her feelings of anger at her father's suicide and how she was given the opportunity to do this at his tangi:
I can remember the night we buried him ... I was so angry I screamed and yelled and shook the sides of the coffin. I shook the coffin so really hard ...Nobody hassled me or said don't do this ... they just let me go ... and it was good.
Mere talked about the open expression of grief at the tangi over a number of days and the therapeutic value of this:
I've always loved what they say at the finish ... "join the lines of the dead to the dead and join the lines of the living to the living and you've done your grieving and now you must pick up life again" ... the family has got no more tears left often by the time the period's finished and they can start picking up the pieces.
Dr Jean Hera, Palmerston North Women's Homedeath Support Group, PO Box 4253, Palmerston North, New Zealand (tel 06 3587139).
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