One of the towering figures of New Zealand scholarship and public life has died. Sir Hirini Moko Mead, the founding professor of Māori studies at Victoria University of Wellington and a curator of the landmark Te Māori exhibition, died on Thursday in Whakatāne at the age of 99.
His death was confirmed by RNZ, which reported that tributes were expected to flow from across the country and overseas as iwi, universities, former students and political leaders reflected on a life that spanned almost a century and helped reshape the place of Māori knowledge in everyday New Zealand life.
Mead was born in Wairoa in January 1927 and raised through the Depression years in Te Teko and Murupara, in the eastern Bay of Plenty. He belonged to Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāi Tūhoe and Tūhourangi, and grew up inside the strong family networks and tribal knowledge that would shape the rest of his working life.
He trained first as a teacher, attending teaching college in Auckland in the 1940s before taking up posts at Māori schools along the East Coast and through the Bay of Plenty. He went on to serve as a headmaster at Minginui, Waimārama and Whatawhata, then pursued university study in earnest, completing a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at the University of Auckland and a doctorate at Southern Illinois University in the United States in 1968.
After teaching in Canada in the early 1970s, Mead returned home and in 1977 became the first professor of Māori at Victoria University of Wellington. There he built something that had never existed in this country, a stand-alone department of Māori studies, and alongside it he established Te Herenga Waka, the first marae on a mainstream university campus. The combination gave Māori students a place to stand within the academy and gave the wider university a doorway into te ao Māori, the Māori world.
His most visible national achievement came in 1984, when he served as one of the curators of Te Māori, an exhibition that gathered together some of the country’s most treasured carvings and other taonga, or ancestral treasures, and sent them on tour through major museums in the United States. The show drew enormous crowds in New York, St Louis, San Francisco and Chicago, and when the taonga came home the welcome was so emotional that the return leg was given its own name, Te Hokinga Mai, the homecoming. Many historians mark Te Māori as a turning point, the moment Māori art was finally treated as living treasure rather than museum curiosity, and a spark for the wider Māori cultural revival of the decades that followed. The NZ Herald described him as one of the most influential Māori intellectuals of the modern era.
Mead was also a prolific author, writing or editing more than 70 books, chapters and academic papers over his career. Among them were studies of carving and weaving such as Te Toi Whakairo, The Art of Māori Carving, and Taniko Weaving, along with a collection of ancestral sayings, Ngā Pēpeha a Ngā Tūpuna. His best known work, Tikanga Māori, Living by Māori Values, became a standard reference in schools, universities, iwi organisations and government departments, offering a clear guide to Māori customs and the thinking behind them. He kept writing into his late 90s, launching a major book on mātauranga, the body of Māori knowledge, at the age of 98.
For his own people he was a builder of institutions. He helped set up the Ngāti Awa Trust Board in 1980 and became the inaugural chairman of Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Awa, the iwi’s governing body. As chief negotiator he led Ngāti Awa through its Treaty of Waitangi settlement, a process that ran from the early 1990s until the settlement was passed into law in 2005. He was also central to the return of the carved meeting house Mataatua to Whakatāne, a wharenui that had spent more than a century away from home before it was reopened in the town in 2011.
After leaving Victoria University in 1990 he turned to Māori-led tertiary education, helping to found Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi in Whakatāne and chairing its council well into his 90s. The wānanga, a Māori tertiary institution, grew into one of the country’s three such bodies, teaching thousands of students from foundation courses through to doctorates.
His work was recognised at the highest levels. He was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2006 for services to Māori and education, and was knighted in 2009.
Reflecting on his legacy in an interview with RNZ’s Mapuna programme, Mead was characteristically modest about the mana, or standing, that he had earned. “They just know ‘He has a bit of mana around here’,” he said. “One could say that yes, I did walk the talk.”
Sir Hirini was predeceased by his wife, Lady June Te Rina Mead, of Ngāti Porou, whom he married in 1949 and who died in 2019. She was widely credited with supporting his work and helping to build the wānanga. The couple’s daughter, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, became a celebrated professor of education in her own right, and his wider family remain active in Māori arts, education and conservation.
He is remembered above all as a teacher, a man who spent a lifetime making sure that Māori knowledge was written down, taught and respected, and who lived long enough to see ideas he once had to fight for become part of the everyday fabric of New Zealand.
How did Sir Hirini Moko Mead’s work touch your own life or learning? Share your memories and tributes in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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