The Poison Ivy You Didn’t Plant – Understanding Colonisation — why naming it changes everything
I chose the metaphor of Poison Ivy for a specific reason:
There is a plant called poison ivy. Once it gets into your system, the urushiol oil it carries can take up to three days to produce a reaction. By the time the itch arrives — the rash, the inflammation, the unbearable urge to scratch — you have no memory of the contact. You were not paying attention when it happened. You may not even have been near the plant. It spread to you on the hands of someone who did not know they were carrying it.
This is what colonisation has done to generations of Māori families in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Not only as a metaphor, but also as a clinical mechanism.
