Te kōrero o Reggie Collins , Reggie's story (part 3)
I believe you travel a lot to quite a few people in different rohe. Are you handing this knowledge down – ara, ka tuku iho?
Yes. If you lived in Otautahi, I’d tell you because you would take me to the ngāhere there and then I’d show you from there. So that’s how I’ve been doing it, the same over in Nelson.
You’re a registered rongoā practitioner now. You’ve got your tohu through NZQA, which kind of legitimizes it on the Western side. How do you feel about the two medicines straddling with each other, so you’ve got someone striving for hauora and they’re on Pākehā medicines and they’re also on rongoā?
Complementary. When you go complementary you find what rongoā coincides with that pill, and with that one, and with that one. Yes. And that’s what you do. Because you can’t just say “I’ll give you that one, and that one and that one”. It doesn’t work. You can complement both of them. It works. I know people may say it doesn’t work, but it does.
How do you think the GPs think about that?
We won’t go there [laughs]. But working with the GPs has been very, very hard. I suppose I haven’t pushed the boundaries, and I suppose I don’t want to push the boundaries because of our tūroros. Because they will miss out. They have trust. Trust comes into it in a big way. I don’t want us to be in conflict. I want us to work together.
In Norway they work together very well. A friend of ours went to the hospital for something over there when she got sick a couple of years ago now. She went to one place; they then sent her to another place and ended up with something totally different. She thought she had gone into the wrong room, but she said it worked really well. What that doctor couldn’t do, he sent her on. I had another lady, from over that way who went to the hospital here in Blenheim, and they said “Oh, we don’t do that. You’ve got to go to the doctor”. She found out about us, and she came and saw me. I gave her some rongoā that complemented her, and it got her going.
I’m not saying I’m the best practitioner or anything. I don’t like using the word practitioner either. It’s just that, for me, I’m just a vessel you know. A vessel of nurturing. And just keep nurturing to those who need their wellbeing brought back up. That’s all it is.
And when you do work with someone is there a spin off, a positive effect on the rest of the whānau?
Sometimes it can be and sometimes it can’t. Sometimes there’s spin-off from the whānau. It can get out of hand because one partner can say that you’ve been bloody nosey. And, in the middle of that you’ve been looking after their tamariki. Because here we have Māori married to tauiwi. And some don’t like the idea. And then we have whānau conflict. You don’t need it. You just need to look after the tūroro.
You’re also experimenting with some Pākehā stuff; you talked about the Eucalyptus, the camphor and the cayenne pepper?
Yes, because our kuia, at one time got varicose veins and she had nothing to soothe them. It took me three and half hours to do up two litres. The reason is that you have got to powder the camphor and then when the oil comes to a head you turn it off and you sprinkle it like salt. But if you go and put it on a plate like that it goes hard like a rock.
My first medicine took me two and a half years to make. It was with bees wax and manuka honey. It’s for psoriasis (Glossary description: Psoriasis is a chronic, non-contagious autoimmune disease which affects the skin and joints. It commonly causes red scaly patches to appear on the skin. The scaly patches caused by psoriasis, called psoriatic plaques, are areas of inflammation and excessive skin production. Skin rapidly accumulates at these sites and takes on a silvery-white appearance. Plaques frequently occur on the skin of the elbows and knees, but can affect any area including the scalp and genitals.), hakihaki . I’ve got a young fella just at the moment who has got psoriasis from head to toe. I see him again next week. And I’ll say “You better be doing it right sunshine. Cause guess what?” And I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ve got photos of him and of all the other ones I’ve done. I’ve had a man who had leg ulcers with hakihaki for seven years. That koroua was haunga. He actually should have had his legs off. That’s what the hospital was saying at the time. But now he’s walking around on them now. That’s over a year ago now. That’s with the pate koromiko.
It’s been a good journey for me though. Ten years. It’s just that I want to know other things. I want to know if it’ll help our people with arthritis (Glossary description: Arthritis is a group of conditions involving damage to the joints of the body.). I have a few people who have said they’ll try anything. But one for the arthritis is one that I’ve really got to put myself into. The cayenne powder with that is very good but it’s got to sit. I’ve got one that’s been sitting there for a couple of months. It’s got to sit so that the sediment goes down, and then when I tip it out I grind it up again and put it back in. So that takes a week and a half, then I bottle it up.
As long as you are on top of it, that’s the main thing. And you keep going. I’ve got a couple of girls with arthritis pretty bad. I was talking to you about horse radish, it’s pretty potent. But how long it lasts within the pani is what I need to work out, also the lifetime of the horse radish within that mixture; whether you boil it or whether you grate it. So you’ve got to go through all that, before you find the one. And when you do, it’s so good and you feel really good within yourself. If you keep mixing you’ll always come up with something.