E oho! Tāngata Ngāi Tahu: Wāhine Ngāi Tahu

Speakers

 Tā Tipene O’Regan, Puamiria Parata-Goodall, Helen Brown

Mihi

 Tā Tipene O’Regan: E Kāi Tahu i ruku i te raki. Karaka mai, karaka mai, mihi mai. Ō kupu e Kura , ō kupu whakarakatira ki a mātou o te pae o te rā nei, kākā wahanui o Kāi Tahu mō tēnei rā.

Tēnei te mihi ake i raro i te maru o Te Ahumairaki e tū nei. Mātairaki anō hoki i tērā taha o Te Whakanui-a-Tara. E mihi atu, e mihi atu. Kei te mihi a Aoraki ki ō koutou mauka tēnā koe, tēnā koe.

Tīhei mauri mate, tīhei mauri ora. K outou katoa kua tae mai nei e mihi atu, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

 The Ngāi Tahu Archive

 I first — I know you're not supposed to begin with an apology. But I'm grateful to those of you who have introduced yourselves to me when you're coming up to renew acquaintance. Because I can't recognize people very well, except by shape or sound. And that may be a complimentary matter or it may not. But I'm now battling with vision and I've now got a new hapū to which I belong. And I'm told I'm [*** 2:28 te rakatira hou o Ngāti Kāpō]. That being the case, I'll conclude with that and get on to business.

 When I established the Ngāi Tahu Archive as we now have it in 1978, I was basically concerned with conserving and saving some photographs and some manuscripts. And I worked away on them and I was given more to look after.

The evolution of the archive has been somewhat torturous but we are now in a situation where we are able to say, with some confidence, that we've got a world-leading model. I say that because the United Nations Committee on Geographic Names, for instance, keeps inviting us to New York, a place to which I have no wish to return.

And having just been to London, I've got no wish to return there either particularly. Because I can't read the inscriptions anymore and I can only recognize things by the shapes of the buildings and they change all the time. I still have not however tired of Wellington.

It was Doctor Johnson I said, he said, "The man who is tired of London is tired of life. Well I take the view that the person who is tired of this city, Te Upoko o te Ika, is also in a similar condition, tired of living. It's still got a magic that draws me with affection. Mainly because I learned to sail here.

But in 1978, we never envisaged what the archive has become. We were doing things somewhat haphazardly. We had a relationship with MacMillan Brown Library archive. And they were very supportive in all sorts of ways, but we did not set out to build what we have actually built. It has accumulated by accretion. But the burning realization for me came from this fundamental point. Kāi Tahu established the Ngāi Tahu Kāti Māmoe claim in 1849, it was done by Matiaha Tiramōrehu with his first letter to the lieutenant governor.

And in many ways, over the seven to eight generations to settlement, 1998, the claim, Te Kerēme, itself became our culture. And we face the great challenge of most settlements. It was pointed out to me by John Upton QC, or now KC I suppose, in front of the Waitangi Tribunal one day, when listening to Sandra Lee — an MP and of Kāi Tahu descent — he passed me a note that said, "You're taking away my grievance and I want it back."

And the point is, without a grievance, there's not much use. And if your grievance has become your culture, what are you going to have left when you settle? And we started getting into our heads the idea, we've got to rebuild our own memory. We've got to rebuild our heritage away from grievance and onto the roots of our past.

We did this, in very large measure, through the area of place names. And I note that one of my relations who has greeted me here today is Bill Robertson, who was, at the time, the Surveyor General and all sorts of things. But he was also the functional chairman of the New Zealand Geographic Board.

And we started working, systematically, on those things. And particularly as we built towards 1990, we started publishing, through the geographic board, the Māori oral history atlas and a little book of place names. We had some wonderful assistance and support in doing that work. But we were building our competence. And I have been succeeded after 30-odd years with the New Zealand Geographic Board. I've been succeeded by highly competent members of a highly competent new generation, culturally more competent than we were, with insight into Te Reo, into the composition of waiata. Doing all sorts of stuff that was well beyond my generation.

In fact, at that time, there was three or four of us that worked over the whole of Te Waipounamu, just standing at gravesides so that people could be buried in some pretty rudimentary Te Reo. And it was a significant challenge to us. So we have been engaged, in short, on a process of rebuilding, of remembering to remember, on forging memories of key people.

I tried at one stage to persuade the Ngāi Tahu whakapapa unit to just start the simple collection of obituary notices when people passed away records against the day when we would need them. And one of the first people I tried by way of an example to the whakapapa unit of Ngāi Tahu was that of Irihapeti Murchy, widely known as the mouth of the South, not in a derogatory way. But when Kira Brown and the other tauwa were wanting someone to call for us, she would be called out to attend to that.

Now we have a number of people, one of them sitting on my right, who performs that function in an ordinary, regular way. But we are now composing. We are now writing. We are now competing. We are doing all sorts of things in the cultural space which we were not doing when I was coming to notice, as the constabulary put it. Now, that process, as I said, has been one of accretion. And we now have a model of archive and history which has allowed us to start the production of these volumes we celebrate today. It has already been pointed out, my colleague and relation Helen Brown, as the editor and functional manager of that work.

And we keep thinking of new things we could be publishing. And it is quite wonderful that that is happening to us. And the demand has exceeded all expectations that we might have had of it, the process. And our very dear friend, both personally and tribally, Bridget Williams and her team at Bridget Williams Books have become part and parcel of this process that I describe.

Because I'm not one really to quote gospel very often— it seems to me my own one liners are almost as good.

[LAUGHTER]

But— in all humility. But the point is, Saint Paul said— I quote Saint Paul who said, "Unless there is charity, you have nothing." And, "Unless you've got your heritage, and it's intact, and you realize that culture must be cultivated and allowed to grow, we must remember to remember, we must build our understanding of our culture and our heritage, and we must disown the [puruhete 13:54] — the rubbish arguments about where Māoris are from, and that we must continually lead a very high standard of interrogating our own history and understanding it better, where we're from.

And when I think of Aoraki, I can also think of the fact that the peak above Pape'ete on Tahiti Nui is Aora'i. And not far away from it, you'll always find an I'ura'i, a Hikurangi, or a Hikuraki. These things are fundamental when you go to the Northern end of the island of Raiatea, you go to Murienua, Muriwhenua, and you go to the other island of that complex, Muri'i'u Murihiku.

So, in the South, we tend to think of the tail of the whale and things like that. Or the head of the fish. But the ideas that are in these names are to be found right back through South Polynesia, to our heritage roots that have been brought here to these lands and given new life.

But enough. My main purpose today is to stress to you that we have accumulated far more than we thought we would. We have achieved better than we set out to do. And all we have seen is that we must continue to identify and own our own memory. We are the primary proprietors of our memory, of our culture, of our heritage. But it should be available to all who wish to visit it, as long as they remember we are the primary proprietors.

That sounds a little bit precious, perhaps. But if we don't keep it together, it's going to belong to someone else's archive instead of ours.

Now, I have said enough. I can feel the messages coming from the seats, just not far from me, to tell me that I have said enough about what we're engaged in. But I take great joy, at this stage of my life, in knowing that we have a culture that is in good hands and our heritage will continue to build in the whare whataraki of our people and be the treasure house of the next and coming generations.

Anei taku kōrero ki a tātou mō tēnei. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā rā koutou katoa.

Ka tahuri au ka kite ake rā, ngā tōmairangi e heke ana mai ki runga o Aoraki e, tau iho ki runga ngā mokopuna nei. Te whakatipuranga nā Tahupōtiki, ngā mokopuna nō Te Waipounamu e. Nō Te Waipounamu e, te iwi e.

Tēnā rā tātou, pai te hui.

Kura Moeahu: Ki taku pāpā, te rahirahinga o ngā taonga mai i tō kōrero, mō ēnei ngā manu hiakai, nō reira tēnei ka mihi.

Ladies and gentlemen, our next speaker, as mentioned earlier, is a haka freak, but also has dedicated her life to serving her people, like Tā Tipene and the many others. So I'd now like to invite tēnā koe e te tuahine, Puamīria, haramai rā.

Waiata

Puamiria Parata-Goodall: Ko te kōpū uriuri te puna heke takata i rere i a Waiariki o aio, i a Hotumāmoe e. Ka hora te Aitaka a Kahakui e, Tū mai rā Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu whānui e.

E aku nui, e aku rahi, tēnei te mihi, tēnei te mihi o tēnei uri o Te Ruahikihiki, tēnei uri o Kurī, tēnei uri o Tūahuriri, tēnei uri o Mako, o Irakehu, o Kurakura Kāi Tahu. Nei rā a Kāi Tahu e mihi ana ki a koutou. Nei rā a Māmoe, nei rā a Waitaha e mihi kau ana. Ko wai tēnei, ko Puamīria tēnei, ko au tētahi o ngā tokotoru tapu e noho mai nā i runga i te paepae, ana Te Paepae o te pae Kōrako.

Growing up as Ngāi Tahu

Puamiria is the name. I'm the third of the sacred three that sit on Te Pae Kōrako, our Ngāi Tahu archives advisory committee. I am a descendant of several generations of Tahu marrying itself, and I'm very pleased to say I do not have a sixth toe or a third eye or anything else which might have occurred since I kept marrying myself generation after generation.

I runga i tērā, nei taku mihi ki a koutou, me te harikoa ki te kite i a koutou, i a tātou i tēnei wā, me te aroha nui ki tēnei nā, ōku tungāne, e Kura, koutou o te hau kāinga nei, nei te aroha ki a koutou mō ō koutou whakatau mai i a tātou i tēnei wā.

Anyone who knows me knows I hate doing this stuff. I will happily sing to you, but talk to you? Not really my biz. Engari this is an important kaupapa. It is an important kaupapa, not for me, but in fact for my mokopuna, for my mokopuna Tākiriao.

I stand here today for her. To bring her voice to this place, because all the work that we have done, and that we continue to do is actually about our mokopuna. It's not about me. It's not about this generation. It's about making sure that the world is ready for our mokopuna when our mokopuna arrive, and mine just recently arrived, and apparently, this is what new grandparents do. They talk about their moko all the time. I'm still waiting for my morning fix of the video from this morning when she woke up, so I'm a little bit mm.

But we'll get on. So if I was clever enough, and if I had time in my life, and if I wasn't always being distracted by cool stuff happening all over the place, I would sit down and I would write. And I figured out what it is that I would write about. I would write something that talks about humbly proud. Growing up in a Ngāi Tahu world that is dominated by formidable Ngāi Tahu women. Pretty sucky sort of title. Bridget would work with me on that about thinking about that title.

But the real point of that is that I was fortunate enough to be a Tahu kid growing up in a Tahu world. And my world view is somewhat different from those who haven't had the fortune of growing up in a Tahu world, surrounded by a number of these women who are in this volume of Tāngata Ngāi Tahu, but also who were in the previous volume and will come into the volumes hereafter.

I sit in a privileged place to have some of these women, and some of these pōua in my life. They're in my living memory. I sat at their tables and ate kai. I sat as a child and listened to the kōrero into the early hours of the morning, the kōrero around whakapapa, that kōrero around the gossip of who did what to whom and why. But also learning those kōrero that are not recorded anywhere else but in their memories. So I sit in that privileged space with these toa, with my tuakana who get to tell, we get to tell their stories.

Often when we think about stories and about our history, we sit in a construct which is not necessarily of our making. When we think about the language we use, we talk about his story. Tāngata Ngāi Tahu this version tells her story.

So we set ourselves up in a space that talks about his story and our place within his story. With this version of Tāngata Ngāi Tahu, and with the way that I grew up in a world, in a Ngāi Tahu world, my whole world was these formidable Ngāi Tahu women.

Ngāi Tahu women in my world, everything pivoted around them. My mother, my aunties, my tāua, particularly when you walk onto our marae. A number of the women in this book were stoics on their marae.

I remember that, as a child, being taken onto the marae and — you know I did my tea towel-tanga. I started at my apprenticeship in that kitchen on the end of a tea towel. I knew that I was starting to, you know, find my stride when I got promoted to the whare kai. And when I'd done my apprenticeship in there, I knew that I was starting to really get into my stride now, because now the teapot's taken off me and I'm pushed out into the front, into the whare to sit behind our taumata kōrero.

What I learned in all of that is the power that sits behind the scenes. By and large, that power is being driven by our mums, our tāua, our tuakana, our taina, and it is the forgotten unsung heroes. What Tāngata Ngāi Tahu does is it helps to bring those heroes back to the fore.

In Tāngata Ngāi Tahu, we have our tāua who are mahinga kai, practitioners of doom. They're of doom. These fellas are leading the way for their whanau and they're doing it generation after generation. You know I think of our Auntie Janie Davis, and her mahi around mahi tītī. And you look in that book, you know, one of the lines that struck me when I was reading through it, and it really epitomises this thing about, you know this book I want to write about being humbly proud, and she makes the statements made about her, though small in stature and softly spoken, she had the reputation as a strong leader, with a sharp mind, and who acted with grace and humility.

And that is the world that I grew up in. These were the people that I got to sit beside, to learn from. She was a mahinga kai practitioner of doom. When you read her kōrero, you hear that here's a baby being thrown off the boat onto shore. She's starting as a baby. Learning those practices of our mahinga kai. And then you see in the images later, her with her mokopuna. Her mokopuna is now learning the practice of mahinga kai. Mahinga kai is not just about that we're getting a feed. It's all of that kōrero, all of that tradition, all of that practice that sits under, that is being led by our tāua. Sometimes we forget these stories.

So Tāngata Ngāi Tahu becomes really important in my world because it starts to open up the world and makes us think a little bit harder about our role as women, our role as māreikura.

So we often talk about wahine toa, mana wahine. When you're getting into this league, these fellas are our absolute leaders. They are the ones that sit at the top of the chain. They are māreikura. And we are privileged to see and to hear and to feel the kōrero. When you start to look through Tāngata Ngāi Tahu, yes they are wahine toa, but more importantly, they are māreikura. They are the ones that have led the way from us from the back of the house all the way to the front.

So when I reminisce about that and I think about, here I am as a 15-year-old being pushed out of the kitchen and sitting behind that taumata kōrero on my marae. And I'm thinking, oh I'm just being pushed here because I can kind of sing in tune. They need someone to sing a waiata. Okay, yeah right, okay, sweet.

What I learned while I was sitting there for many years was about the role of the wahine, the role of the wahine in ceremony, the role of the wahine in maintaining our tikanga, maintaing our whakapapa, and balance. More than anything, I learned about balance. I learned that when we are working in balance as wahine and as tāne, we are being our best selves.

I used to think, you know I'm out here to sing a waiata. Sweet, I can do that. What I hadn't appreciated is, I can't sing the waiata unless that kōrero is being done. That kōrero can't be done unless that karanga has been done. That karanga can't be done unless someone's opened the front door and cleared that ātea.

I can't do that as a woman. I can't do all of that myself. Neither can my papa, neither can my poua. We do that together. And it is a fine balance. That's what I learned. You know and I sit there and the feminist in me goes, "Hang on, man. I need my voice." I've got my voice. I have my voice in this space but I have it alongside, so that we are in balance. Mana wahine for me therefore talks about that balance. That we aren't islands unto ourselves, we might like to think we are.

However, that was the biggest lesson I learned as a child, as a teenager sitting behind that taumata, about the fine balance that happens on that taumata. The fine balance between the paepae wahine and the paepae tāne.

And that set me on a course that I hadn't expected, to be honest. When you start to unpack that stuff, you start to realise really quickly, you know, all of the kōrero we hear about our tīpuna. Whose view are we seeing that through? Whose construct is that? Am I really subservient? You know, I had this perception that women were secondary, that we were subservient, that the boys did all the talking and the girls sang a song and we're good to go.

What I learned along the way was that that power shifts backwards and forwards, constantly. And that actually, we were doing this together. We were being in balance. And when we were in balance, we were being our best selves. The women in Tāngata Ngāi Tahu are being their best selves.

We are recognizing in Tāngata Ngāi Tahu those women who led our people, often quietly, from the middle or from the back. They were our practitioners around mahinga kai. They were our teachers, they were leaders in the health field. They were leaders not only for tahu. They were leaders for the nation. Around looking after our whanau, our people who are at home keeping those fires burning, keeping those traditions going, are the people we are starting to recognize in Tāngata Ngāi Tahu.

So although I didn't think I knew what I wanted to say today, I think I probably do. And I guess that message is around being our best selves and looking back at this template, looking back at our toa, that have been. But more importantly looking at our toa now. And being our best selves to ensure that that legacy — I need to be the best toa now so that my mokopuna is the best toa when it's her turn. And taking responsibility for what we are doing now.

I think of these toa and I got a bit teary this morning when I was thinking of these toa and thinking what I needed to say about them. And I thought, yes I've eaten with them, I've talked with them, I've worked for them, I've worked with them, but I've also had to mourn them. I've had to mourn the loss of these toa. This book opened that wound up for me again.

And so I guess my challenge to myself and everyone else is about how do we make sure their stories live on, how do we make sure that the story we have right here, right now, lives on for our mokopuna. This is the opportunity— one of the mechanisms that we are using is Tāngata Ngāi Tahu. But with Ngāi Tahu archives, we have a number of ways of which we are remembering to remember. Because it's important for our mokopuna.

I runga i tērā. probably not where I had expected I was going with that. Sorry about that, Helen.

I runga i tērā nei te tuku mihi ki a tātou i tēnei wā, nā reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

Kura Moeahu: Kei te tuahine, Puamīria, tēnei ka mihi. And no doubt in your mokopuna. Your mokopuna will watch you being a responsible tupuna, like those tūpuna behind you. And so that's the role of us is to create responsible tūpuna from our mokopuna.

Oti anō rā, ka huri atu te rākau kōrero kei tēnei mātanga kōrero o Ngāi Tahu, tēnā koe, Helen Brown, haramai.

Ngāi Tahu women

Helen Brown: Tēnā koutou katoa, he mihi mahana ki a koutou. Ngā mihi nui ki ngā whanaunga o Ngāi Tahu, ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa.

A dear friend of mine is here today and I recall standing on stage with her at Breens Intermediate, which is in Christchurch, when somehow I had managed to get to third place in a regional speech competition. And I was absolutely petrified. And the advice I was given was to look at the people's foreheads. So I may employ that today.

So, unlike my whanaunga Puamiria, I did not grow up immersed in te ao Māori. And yet, my understanding of the centrality of wahine to Ngāi Tahu culture and identity was embedded from a young age, in kind of an entertaining way.

So raised in te ao Pākehā, the received family mythology, in terms of my Ngāi Tahu whakapapa, was that we were descendants of a Māori princess. Distant and regal, royal even. My 19th-century tipuna Te Wharerimu, whom I share in common with Puamiria, loomed large in my childhood imagination, a powerful female figure. But as a young person, I quickly discovered that any mention of princesses invoked quiet nods and some internal eye-rolling among Māori friends. But when I began as an adult to reactivate my connections with the iwi, I realized that the archetype of the Māori princess was ubiquitous within many Ngāi Tahu families, and that there was actually some truth to this princess trope.

The whakapapa of Te Waipounamu includes many cross-cultural relationships between highborn wahine Māori — that's our princesses — and European sailors and traders, known collectively by our tīpuna as 'tāngata pora' or 'boat people'.

Such relationships were widespread by the 1840s and these strategic marriages connected Ngāi Tahu communities with new resources, created strong trade alliances, and helped to maintain peace. The mana and influence of this group of Ngāi Tahu women is beautifully represented in the pou wāhine that stand inside our wharenui, Tahupōtiki at Te Rau Aroha Marae in Bluff, which is on this slide.

So each carved figure — and Wharerimu is among them. She's not one of the big ones she's one of the little ones which I think is appropriate for me. So each figure represents a specific Ngāi Tahu woman, who married tāngata pora in southern Murihiku between the 1820s and the 1840s. Present-day descendants of these wāhini constitute much of Ngāi Tahu as an iwi.

Sometimes referred to as our founding mothers, these wahine, their tupuna wahine before them, and their female descendants have always been central to Ngāi Tahu life. But as I write in the introduction to Tāngata Ngāi Tahu Volume 2, the dual impacts of colonization and patriarchy have frequently led to our women's contributions and accomplishments being omitted or overlooked.

So as a contributing author and co-editor with Mike Stevens of this volume, it has been my privilege over the past four years to work closely with our Ngāi Tahu families to pay tribute to some of our beloved hākui through researching and writing their life stories. And there are a number of amazing Ngāi Tahu women, some of them sitting quite close right now, who've been an integral part of this project. And it's been a huge collaboration and just a real honor for me to be able to work with a lot of my whanaunga on this work.

Like its predecessor, Tāngata Ngāi Tahu Volume 1, this volume features 50 short biographies of Ngāi Tahu people that span 200 years of tribal history. Of the 50 biographies in Volume 2, 28 are of Ngāi Tahu women — so we've got majority. And there are also 27 individual authors, most of whom are women, and most of whom are also descendants of their biographical subjects.

So I'll move on to talking about a few of them but I actually have copious notes because I love all of them. And sort of having the opportunity to spend time with each of these lives and their families and connections has been an incredible process. And I kind of find it difficult to, you know, weed information out.

But we'll start with Tokitoki. So she kind of bookends the book at the beginning. Tokitoki embodies the story of cross-cultural marriage that was such a defining feature of 19th century Ngāi Tahu life in southern Te Waipounamu. The earliest known Ngāi Tahu woman to have a Pākehā partner, Tokitoki was born in the late 18th century. She was a granddaughter of the renowned chief, Te Hautapunui-o-Tū. And her life story has become integrally tied to that of her partner, James Caddell, who was English-born.

So his life was spared by the power of a kākahu. And this is why there's an image of this korowai on the slide here. According to one account, Tokitoki's act of throwing her kākahu over Caddell rendered him tapu and thus saved him from death at the hands of the rangatira, Honekai.

Tokitoki also holds the distinction of being the first recorded Ngāi Tahu woman to travel beyond the New Zealand archipelago, including as a member of a Ngāi Tahu party who spent a period of four months in Sydney in 1823 demonstrating the extraction of whītau, of flex fiber, from harakeke.

There's also a range of other tipuna, of course, who were part of that movement between Te Waipounamu and Australia in this period. It's unclear whether Tokitoki had any children but there are no known descendants. However, she was an important figure in Ngāi Tahu history at a pivotal moment in time and deserves to be widely remembered.

So it is evident, we have no photographs of Tokitoki. But as per other biographical entries in the book, where photographs are either scarce or absent, the illustrative story is told through taonga or paintings; sketches; documents; landscape images, because of course a lot of our tīpuna are just so deeply connected to place. But also photographs of descendants in instances where there are descendants.

So as I said earlier, this book was four years in the making. Planning for it began in 2018 and coincided with the 125th anniversary of women's suffrage in New Zealand. During that year, aside from the important acknowledgment of Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia for her role in advocating for Māori women in Te Kotahitanga, the Māori Parliament, the suffrage commemorations mostly celebrated the lives and achievements of Pakeha women. This drew attention to the need for us to make more Māori woman's stories visible. That's both in a general sense, but also specifically in the context of the suffrage kaupapa. That also provided a further impetus for us to make mana wāhine a key focus of this book.

So wāhine Māori, as most of us know, along with all women in New Zealand, were given the right to vote in 1893. And the story of the fight for the women's franchises, predominantly a Pākehā one, as most wāhine Māori of the 1890s were focused elsewhere, on other matters more pertinent to their people and their survival. And that included seeking— well just survival actually, but also seeking redress for the loss of land and resources.

However, there is a small number of Māori women, and we believe it's fewer than 20, who are known to have signed the 1893 suffrage petition, or its 1892 predecessor. And an interesting fact about this is that most of them are Ngāi Tahu. And they include Ngāi Tahu women from Rāpaki, Moeraki, Pūrākaunui, and Awarua, Bluff.

Rora Orbell

And one of these signatories is this woman, Rora Orbell. And like many wahine Māori from this period, we can only catch fleeting glimpses of her from the historical record. She was born around 1838 to Mata Whio of Ngāi Tahu and Peter Wilkie, who is a Pākehā who was employed at the Weller Brothers whaling station at Ōtākou.

Rora married an Englishman, Arthur Orell, and raised a large family at Moeraki. She ostensibly led a humble Life as a mother and a Ngāi Tahu woman. But in 1893, through a simple act of personal conviction, she joined the ranks of this very special group of wahine Māori, and that year, Rora and her daughter, Frances Ada Amelia, were among the small number of women who signed Te Petihana Whakamana Pōti Wahine — that's the women's suffrage petition that lobbied the government for universal suffrage. So on this sheet, down here, is the signatures of Rora and her daughter.

So they signed the petition at Oamaru, so this is a sheet that came from Oamaru. But the extent to which they may have been involved with the wider suffrage movement is unknown.

But in this period, many Ngāi Tahu women were supporting their communities in the pursuit of the Ngāi Tahu claim and their land entitlements through the native land court. Some Ngāi Tahu women worked alongside their Pakeha sisters and the associated temperance movement, though Māori involvement with the women's Christian Temperance Union, the WCTU, that only really began a pace in the years after universal suffrage had been secured.

Hera Stirling Munro

This next woman, who I love, I love all of them. But Hera Stirling Munro, she was too young to sign the suffrage petition, but she played a pivotal role in temperance in New Zealand. So she was born in — sorry that keeps skipping for some reason. She was born — she's from Aparima, from Riverton, she was born in 1876.

And, so her brother, Duncan, married Mihi Kōtukutuku, whose descendants are the East Coast Stirlings that some of you will know, of Te Whānau-a-Apanui and Ngāti Porou.

And as a teenager, she joined the Salvation Army. And in this image she's in her Salvation Army uniform. And there, she was heralded as the cadet with the golden voice. She was a powerful soprano soloist and she used her voice to spread the gospel. In the 1890s and the early years of the 20th century, she travelled with the Salvation Army concert party to Australia and also throughout New Zealand.

And there are incredible newspaper articles — I guess they're reviews — documenting her performances. And one of them, I think it's in Melbourne, she performs to a huge audience of five-thousand and they refer to her performance "simply electrifying the audience", which I thought was quite entertaining. And electrifying.

But she went on to dedicate her entire life, really, to missionary and social service, initially for the Salvation Army but then later for the Anglican Church. She was an ardent prohibitionist, involved with the WCTU from a very young age, like from when she was a teenager, often as a keynote speaker and always as a singer. In 1911, she helped run the first— there was a big National Māori Convention of the WCTU at Pakipaki. And at that time, her role as the general organiser of the Māori branches of the Union was formalized. So she basically ran the Māori branch of the WCTU.

She married Pieri Munro of Te Awarua, and they worked closely together on missionary and social services throughout all of their lives together.

Another interesting thing about Hera is that she was a vice president of the Young Maori Party. And, I mean, I know that generally when we think of the Young Maori Party, we think of men. But there were a number of women and, as I said she was— who were in leadership roles, I should say. And she was one of these vice presidents.

She also was a leader within the Anglican Church. In 1922, she was appointed the first Woman Diocesan Synods person in New Zealand, and probably the Anglican Church worldwide.

She lived most of her life in Hawke's Bay and Rotorua, but maintained strong connections with her whanaunga in the South, making regular trips back to Riverton. And there her Southern relations were deeply impressed and still recall her powerful karanga which made this lasting impression on them. When she would arrive at the train station and when she would visit people's houses when she was coming back, she would send out this amazing karanga. She died in 1950 and is buried at Ohinemutu.

Pani Te Tau

A contemporary of Hera is this woman, Pani Te Tau, and she was born at Puketeraki, north of Dunedin, and was the seventh child of Tame Parata and Peti Hurene Brown. She was the first person to become a licensed interpreter in Te Waipounamu, that was in 1903. Her father arranged her marriage to Taiawhio Te Tau, who was a rangatira of Ngāi Tūmapuhiārangi in the Wairarapa. And the couple lived in Masterton and raised three children.

Like Hera, Pani was a gifted singer. She was a mezzo soprano. And in 1904, when Alfred Hill composed his popular piece, Waiata Poi, she was the first to perform it here at government house. And she also sang this waiata at the Wellington Town Hall during a benefit concert for Hill in 1909.

Taiawhio established a Māori language newspaper in the Wairarapa, and it was called Matuhi Press. And Pani became its editor. And along with other niupepa of that time, it was a really important avenue for women to communicate with each other about social and political causes. And also at this time, the Young Māori Party emerged out of the politics of that period. And she was involved with the Young Maori Party as well, as a member. Also of course

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— policies. She was a temperance advocate, and she actually traveled around the Hawkes Bay and Gisborne Districts with Hera and with Mary Powell, who was the leader of the WCTU. And Pani actually translated into te reo Māori, Mary Powell's speeches. And she was also involved with that big WCTU meeting at Pakipaki.

Later the family moved to Puketeraki. And Pani was then really involved in— she set up a concert party, and that was at the start of the breakout of the First World War, and they were raising funds, the concert party, for the Patriotic fund. She also did similar stuff during the Second World War with concert party fundraising.

And she also presented a regular radio program about Māori history, place names and culture on the 4YA in Dunedin. And that was in the 1930s. And in 1936, she was the first person to deliver a broadcast entirely in te reo Māori. And among her successes in that field of broadcasting, were these two wahine Ngāi Tahu, Airini Grennell and Emma Grooby, who both had careers in radio. And so both of these wahine have their biographies in the book.

Some of you may remember — well I do — Emma Grooby on Beauty and the Beast from maybe the mid-70s to the mid-80s. If I was off school sick, watching Beauty and the Beast, she was there.

But getting back to Pani and Hera, these two women involved with the WCTU which really, you know, comes out of and is associated with the whole suffrage movement. Pani and Hera are both Ngāi Tahu women who maintain strong connections to their Southern tahu roots, but they live in the North Island. And there's actually— it wasn't intentional, but it just emerged with the development of this book that there are quite a large number of the wahine in this book actually lived the greater part of their lives outside of the Ngāi Tahu takiwā.

And among them are these three who were based in the Wairarapa. So Pani was in the Wairarapa but so were these three. So her niece, Kuini Te Tau, who was also from Puketeraki. And she was an amazing sportswoman but became deeply involved in social work, basically. So she was one of the first welfare officers appointed under the Māori Social and Economic Advancement Act. And then she goes on to be — what comes out of that, of course, is the Māori Woman's Welfare League, and she's a founding member and secretary of the league.

The second woman, in the middle, is Martha Bragg. And Martha was from the neck on Rakiura, Stewart Island. And she was raised mostly on Ruapuke. But as a young woman, and against two families wishes, she eloped and married Whare Hūtana from Pirinoa in the Wairarapa.

When Whare died young, she went on to raise their children single-handedly, and that included several whāngai children. And she ran their dairy farm. She sounded like an incredible woman. And later she remarried, Joseph Bragg. And in total, she personally raised more than 30 children. She fostered numerous children and was deeply involved in voluntary child welfare work in the Wairarapa.

She was also active in the planning and building of the meeting house at Kohunui in the Southern Wairarapa. And I know that she's fondly known in that region as Nan Bragg.

And the third wahine here is Flo Reiri, who's whakapapa is to Moeraki. So Flo, as a young woman, followed her sister to the Wairarapa, where she met and married Sam Reiri. Flo is a renowned weaver. She was a contributing artist to numerous exhibitions and made many kākahu during her lifetime, including garments for our Ngāi Tahu rangatira, including Tā Tīpene, Bill Solomon and David Higgins, and these kākahu have all been worn at significant tribal events.

She was also one of a senior group of Ngāi Tahu women who offered ongoing support during the years of the Ngāi Tahu claim, attending many of the tribunal hearings and giving evidence describing her early life at Moeraki.

Tini Taiaroa

Speaking of Moeraki, this is another significant wahine from the Moeraki region, Tini Taiaroa, who is one of these wāhine who gets described in reference to her husband, Hōri Kerei Taiaroa, who of course was the MP for Southern Māori.

But she is also a really important figure in her own right. She was born at Moeraki, which is the North Otago, in the 1840s, the daughter of Pukio, of Ngāi Tūahuriri, and a Scottish Whaler, Richard Burns. And you see that name Burns is transliterated as Pana.

And some time in the 50s or 60s, we're not sure of the date, at Ōtākou, she married Hōri Kerei, who was the son of Mawera, and the Ngāi Tahu rangatira, Te Mātenga. I mean, I would note again that often you'll hear Hōri Kerei referred to as being the son of Te Mātenga, but you don't hear about his mama. So, just making a little point there.

They raised a family of six sons. And in the 1860s, when Hōri Kerei was really starting to get into his work on Ngāi Tahu land claims, whilst also being a farmer, Tini was also working as, you know, a mother, a farmer's wife, but increasingly a political spouse. So he enters parliament in 1871 and, during his frequent absences, Tini's letters, which are amazing, keep him up to date with details of family life.

Her correspondence suggests a loving relationship and reveals the pivotal role that she played in the management of household affairs, financial affairs and business. She also advised a lot of her relations on all kinds of things, on everything actually. And there's a lot of written correspondence around that. Around money matters and, anything, gold mining it's quite a broad church.

In 1879, the Taiaroa family moved to Taumutu on the shores of Te Waihora, where they built Te Awhitu, which was this beautiful, large, European-style house, set amid beautiful garden of exotic plants and trees that Tini personally selected. And she ran that house in a manner that was reputed to be highly organised and elegant. And much of the housework was done by servants. The family never sat at a table without saying grace and prayers were always said before bed.

Tini had monogrammed linen and silverware and a green stone-handled cutlery set. She also had her own drawing room in which she entertained, and she was renowned for her manaakitanga. And these two images here — there are a lot of images of taonga and objects in the book, which brings this really beautiful intimacy to the stories. And thanks to Hauangi , we've got these silver napkin rings, which are engraved with 'TKT', Tini Kerei Taiaroa, and a little kete muka, which Tini made.

I'll just add that this biography was originally published by the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, and we have this ongoing reciprocal relationship with DNZB, whereby we republish, in our volumes, a selection of DNZB biographies. And this one is a really good example of how new information that's come to light has enabled us to really bolster those existing entries on the DNZB.

So, I would specifically mention Papers Past, which is, you know, an incredible resource. And that wasn't available when this was published first in the 90s. And we've been able to uncover a lot of beautiful detail about Taiaroa Tini and her life through new information that's come to hand.

Hira Traill

Another wahine who I'm very attached to. Hilda Traill, Hira Pōhio Trail, whose biography I co-authored with her mokopuna, Roimata Kirikiri, who's here with us today. Hira was born at Arahura in 1894. She was the daughter of Huri Pōhio and Reita Kōrako Kere.

Her father was a son of the well-known Ngāi Tahu leader and land rights activist, Horomona Pōhio. Hira was orphaned at just nine years old, and she and her sister were raised by the their aunt at Arowhenua. She married Ernest Sinclair and had two children, Lorraine and Doug, and she later remarried William Trail.

In this beautiful portrait — you can't see it because we clipped it out for publication but, just coming back to my princess thing at the beginning, Roimata might not want me to mention this but, the original gold embossed annotation that was printed on the mat that surrounded this, by the photographic studio, I would say, not necessarily her or the family, but we don't know, was 'Princess Hira Pōhio'.

Hira was a proponent of the Arts. She composed and published music and she carved pounamu. In the 1930s and 40s, she emerged as a prolific and outspoken Ngāi Tahu commentator on social, economic and political issues.

And from 1938 to the early 50s her ardent letters to the editor were regularly published in the Christchurch Press and I strongly recommend that you go and search for her name on Papers Past. They're brilliant.

In these letters, she's outspoken, forthright and radically pro-Māori. She railed against both central and local government about the inequity of treatment of Māori under the law. Te Tiriti o Waitangi was at the heart of her thinking, which was unusual at that time. Yeah, her thinking around seeking equality and justice for Ngāi Tahu, and she frequently questioned why Te Tiriti had not been honored.

Irihapeti Ramsden

Which leads me on to another incredible woman who had Te Tiriti at the heart of a lot of her thinking, Irihapeti Ramsden.

Born in Wellington in 1946, Irihapeti took her first steps in the Ngati Pōneke Young Māori Club in Wellington. She had an extraordinary childhood. Following the death of her mother, Merenia, of Ngāi Tahu and Rangitāne whakapapa, she was raised largely by Pākehā father whom, many of you will know his name, Eric Ramsden, the journalist who was well known for his work as a confidant and advisor to Te Puea.

Irihapeti trained as a nurse and initially chose to work in respiratory medicine. Her mother had died of tuberculosis. And she and her brother, Peter, suffered from chronic asthma. And in that role, she began to address the power dynamics and the nurse-patient relationship, taking simple steps that were then regarded as radical, such as educating patients about their condition and arranging for Māori delicacies to be placed on the hospital menu for Māori patients.

She studied anthropology and feminist studies and became a nurse educator. Then in a groundbreaking move in the mid-70s, she introduced Māori health and the analysis of racism in New Zealand to her nursing classes. She was also very involved in the arts and was a founding member of the Haeata Maori Women's Collective and the Spiral Collective that published Keri Hulme's The Bone People. And from the 80s, she also ran decolonization workshops for Māori. But her enduring legacy is kawa whakaruruhau or cultural safety.

And this is this beautiful painting by Robin Kahukiwa, Kawa Whakaruruhau, which is an educational framework for the analysis of power relationships between health professionals and those they serve. It was written into the nursing curriculum in 1992 and is now part of nursing practice worldwide. Irihapeti was also a strong advocate of mana wahine, encouraging wahine Māori to speak on marae, and urging Māori to hongi women, rather than imitate colonial gender relationships with a kiss on the cheek.

Jane Ruby Karina Davis

The final wahine I want to talk about is Auntie Jane, whom Puamiria referred to earlier. Jane Ruby Karina Davis is one of the few wahine whom I personally knew. She was a much-loved tribal leader and a mutton birder, as Puamiria indicated, who spent her life advocating for Ngāi Tahu whanau, both within and beyond Murihiku, where she was from. She was born there in 1930 to a Ngāi Tahu mother and a Danish father, and raised in and around Aparima, Riverton. And through her tāua and namesake, Jane Newton, she was a direct descendant of Wharetutu and George Newton. And Wharetutu is one of the pou wāhine in the whare at Arahura that you saw the photo of right at the start.

And yeah, that wonderful anecdote of her recounting the first visit to her family's mutton bird island, Putauhinu, as a baby. So she was thrown ashore from a dinghy by an unwitting crew member who saw nothing more than the blankets she was wrapped in.

So it was just fortunate, for her and for us, that she was caught by someone on the shore. She just appeared to be a bundle of blankets. She and her husband Bill, also Ngāi Tahu and a mutton birder, were significant supporters of the Riverton community and the Aparima Māori Committee, and went on to become stalwarts of Oraka Aparima marae, and Jane fulfilled that role as real stalwart of the marae up to the time of her death in 2019.

She was a Ngāi Tahu Māori trust board member and was deeply involved in bringing the Ngāi Tahu claim to fruition.

Auntie Jane was also an original member of Te Pae Kōrako, this triumvirate — well, now triumvirate — that we talk about which, you know, is the Ngāi Tahu archive advisory committee, under whose guidance this Tāngata Ngāi Tahu series is produced. And so it's fitting to end with talking about her.

But also in all this, you can see I love this image just with all the boys and there's Auntie Jane. So she was, yeah, she was only the second Ngāi Tahu woman to sit on the trust board.

Yes, all this talk of wahine. I'll come back to the balance that Puamiria referred to. And Auntie Jane, I actually went to her house to get this photograph from her for another project several years ago and had a chat with her. I never knew Bill and, you know, she's described in her biography, yeah. Bill is described as the love of her life and she conveyed that to me on that day and she kind of just basically said to me, "Look at him." And I said, "Yes, I agree."

And Jane and Bill's biographies, they both sit together in the book, which is really beautiful. And they were written by her whānau, led by one of their mokopuna and with the input of their children. And this is a really important part of the Tāngata Ngāi Tahu project is working with and for families on all of these biographies.

Closing

I've described the book at times as a tribal family album. Numerous whānau have contributed to its making and I think that this collaboration is most evident in the richness of the illustrations. I think there's more than 250 photographs. So you can really just look at it for the pictures.

As per volume one, it's co-published by Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu and Bridget Williams Books. And I would just reiterate Tā Tipene's comments in terms of the importance of that partnership with BWB. The expertise of the BWB team and our shared vision for this project has enabled us together to produce a truly beautiful book. And while it's important for us, to quote Tā Tipene, to be the primary proprietors of our own heritage, and thus to have our own imprint on these volumes, it's also invaluable for our books to be part of the BWB stable and to sit alongside other significant works of Aotearoa New Zealand history.

Tāngata Ngāi Tahu is a taonga for future generations. And it is our hope that it will serve not only as a celebration of lives lived but as an inspiration for emerging leaders and a catalyst for further developments in tribal storytelling. So, I mean, many of the people in this book and the previous volume could have an entire book dedicated to their lives and achievements. And I hope that maybe this work will prompt some of that further research to be done.

Importantly also, it's not just for history buffs. Grounded in whakapapa, the book is as much about the present and future as it is about the past. Biographies provide a personal and relatable way in to understanding broader histories. And it's timely that the second volume has been published ahead of the introduction of the new Aotearoa New Zealand histories curriculum that will be taught in schools, in kura, from next year. I urge you to read it.

Kia ora.

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