58 Fun Facts About Māori

Māori are descended from settlers who voyaged by canoe from which part of the Pacific?

East Polynesia launched the last great Pacific voyages: ocean-going canoes reached New Zealand roughly 700 years ago, and the settlers, isolated for centuries, developed a culture all their own.

In the Māori language, what does the word "māori" itself mean?

Normal or ordinary: in legend the word set mortals apart from gods and spirits, and it became a people's name only after Europeans arrived, to tell the locals from the newcomers.

What is the traditional Māori greeting in which two people press their noses together?

Hongi shares the breath of life, recalling the story of the first woman, who was shaped from clay and came alive when a god breathed into her nostrils; on the East Coast, people press noses twice.

What is a hāngī?

Cooking food in a pit oven with hot rocks takes hours: meat and vegetables are layered over the heated stones, covered with leaves or wet cloth, then buried under soil to trap the steam.

Which war leader is credited with composing "Ka Mate", the haka made famous by the All Blacks?

Te Rauparaha hid from his pursuers in a food-storage pit while the local chief's wife stood over its mouth to shield him; the haka celebrates his escape from death.

What did the Crown's 2009 agreement over the haka Ka Mate give Ngāti Toa?

Authorship credit was the heart of it: the Crown agreed to record the tribe's authorship but offered neither royalties nor a veto; the tribe's aim was to stop misuse, such as a 2006 Fiat advert in which Italian women performed the haka.

The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was signed between Māori chiefs and which monarch's representatives?

Victoria never saw it signed: William Hobson signed on her behalf at Waitangi, and copies then toured the country, gathering about 500 more signatures.

Norman Kirk's government briefly renamed Waitangi Day as what when it became a nationwide holiday in 1974?

New Zealand Day was Kirk's bid for a broader sense of nationhood; Robert Muldoon disliked the name, and his government restored Waitangi Day in 1976.

Which chief, first to sign the Treaty of Waitangi, later had the British flagpole at Kororāreka cut down?

Hōne Heke signed first in 1840 hoping for prosperity; four years later, disillusioned with British control, he ordered the flagpole felled, and its fourth fall in March 1845 began the Northern War.

Which word, coined from 'governor', did the Treaty of Waitangi's Māori text use where the English text said 'sovereignty'?

Kāwanatanga came from kāwana, a rendering of 'governor' that Māori knew from the Bible and from New South Wales; it suggested government rather than sovereignty, which is why the two texts are argued over.

Which missionary translated the Treaty of Waitangi from English into Māori?

Henry Williams and his son Edward translated the draft in a single evening on 4 February 1840, and he read the Māori text aloud to the chiefs at Waitangi the next day.

Te reo Māori became an official language by law in 1987; which language waited until 2026?

English had been official only by custom until Parliament passed the English Language Act in 2026, 39 years after te reo Māori and 20 after New Zealand Sign Language.

The Kōhanga Reo movement, begun in 1982, revived te reo Māori by doing what?

Immersing preschoolers in the language gave the movement its name, 'language nest'; its success led on to kura kaupapa Māori, schools that teach in te reo.

What did a 1972 petition of over 30,000 signatures ask Parliament for?

Māori taught in schools was the demand; the day it was delivered, 14 September, became Māori Language Day and by 1975 had grown into Māori Language Week.

Te reo Māori's closest relatives are Tahitian and the language of which Pacific island group?

The Cook Islands' language is even called Cook Islands Māori; with Tahitian and the Tuamotu languages it shares te reo's Tahitic branch, while Samoan sits on a more distant limb of the family.

What is the most popular translation of Aotearoa, the Māori name now used for New Zealand?

Land of the long white cloud is the commonest translation; the name first meant only the North Island, and William Pember Reeves borrowed it for the title of his 1898 history of the whole country.

In Māori tradition, Māui hauled up the North Island using a hook made from what?

His grandmother's jawbone made the hook in the best-known telling; his brothers refused him bait, so he punched his own nose and smeared the hook with blood.

Māui's final trick, which cost him his life, involved which goddess?

Hine-nui-te-pō, goddess of death, killed him as he tried to pass through her sleeping body to win immortality; in the classic telling a fantail's laugh woke her.

Why, in Māori legend, did Māui set out to snare the sun?

It crossed the sky too fast, leaving the days too short for work, so Māui and his brothers roped it at dawn and beat it until it crept along slowly.

In the Māori creation story, which god forced apart the sky father and earth mother?

Tāne, god of forests and birds, succeeded where his brothers failed by bracing against the earth and pushing the sky up with his legs; some tribal versions have him use a post instead.

Which god of storms and winds was angered by the separation of his parents and attacked his brothers?

Tāwhirimātea sent storms against the brothers who had parted his parents; in one tradition he tore out his own eyes and flung them into the sky, where they became Matariki.

Matariki, the Māori New Year celebration, is named for which star cluster?

The Pleiades' return to the dawn sky opens the Māori year; the name is usually explained as short for Ngā Mata o te Ariki, 'the eyes of the god', though an older reading was 'little eyes'.

Matariki, a public holiday since 2022, marks the Māori New Year in which season?

Winter: the star cluster returns to the dawn sky in late June or early July, and because the date follows the Māori lunar calendar, the holiday falls on a different Friday each year.

In the best-known Māori tradition, who was the first person to discover New Zealand?

Kupe, in the best-known telling, chased a rival's giant octopus across the Pacific and killed it in Cook Strait; other tribal traditions name different first arrivals.

What is Hawaiki in Māori tradition?

The homeland the ancestral canoes sailed from is also, in tradition, where spirits return after death, so Hawaiki stands for both the origin of life and its end.

Which descendants of early Māori settlers became the pacifist indigenous people of the Chatham Islands?

The Moriori kept Nunuku's law, a centuries-old ban on killing, even when two Taranaki tribes invaded in the 1830s, and most were killed or enslaved as a result.

Which large flightless bird was a mainstay of the early Māori diet before it was hunted to extinction?

Moa had been hunted only by the giant Haast's eagle before people arrived; hunters wiped them out within a few centuries, and the eagle, robbed of its prey, died out with them.

Who was the first European explorer to reach New Zealand, in 1642?

Abel Tasman anchored in what is now Golden Bay, where a canoe attacked one of his boats and four of his crew were killed; he named the place Murderers Bay and sailed away.

What is the Māori term for New Zealanders of European descent?

Pākehā is of uncertain origin; one common suggestion links it to pakepakehā, pale-skinned beings of legend whom the newcomers were thought to resemble.

Which crop introduced by Europeans let Māori war parties of the Musket Wars travel further and fight for longer?

Potatoes gave more food per hectare than traditional crops and could be tended by women and slaves, freeing warriors; surpluses were carried on campaign or traded for more muskets.

Which crop brought from Polynesia became the most important food plant of pre-European Māori?

The colder climate meant tropical staples struggled, and the tuber became linked in myth to Rongo, the god of cultivated food.

What is pounamu?

Green nephrite jade from the South Island is found nowhere else in the country, which is why that island's Māori name, Te Waipounamu, means 'the greenstone waters'.

What is the open space in front of a wharenui (meeting house) called?

Marae ātea is the domain of Tūmatauenga, god of war, and so the proper place to air disputes, while the house behind it belongs to Rongo, god of peace.

Traditional tā moko left grooved skin where other tattoos heal smooth, because it was made with which tools?

Bone chisels called uhi, often made from albatross bone, were dipped in pigment and tapped in with a small mallet; needles replaced them in the late 1800s and left smooth skin.

On which parts of the face did Māori women traditionally wear moko?

The lips and chin carried the design called moko kauae, and it outlasted men's full-face moko: women were still receiving it in the 1920s and 1930s.

What is the largest social unit in traditional Māori society, usually translated as "tribe"?

Iwi also means 'bone' in te reo; each one is made up of several hapū, or sub-tribes, which are in turn made up of whānau, or extended families.

At the 2023 census, which Northland-based tribe was New Zealand's largest?

Ngāpuhi counted about 184,000 people, nearly a fifth of everyone of Māori descent; two centuries earlier, trade through its Bay of Islands harbours had made it among the first tribes armed with muskets.

Who was crowned the first Māori King in 1858?

Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, an elderly Waikato chief, was approached only after several others had turned the crown down; he reigned two years before his son Tāwhiao succeeded him.

Tūrangawaewae Marae, headquarters of the Māori King Movement, is in which town?

Ngāruawāhia is where the eighth monarch, Nga wai hono i te po, was raised to the throne in September 2024, under the same Bible used to install the first king in 1858.

What did Whina Cooper, 79, march to Parliament against in 1975?

Māori land loss was the grievance, under the slogan 'Not one more acre'; she set out from Te Hāpua in the Far North and a month later led about 5,000 marchers into the grounds of Parliament.

The all-volunteer 28th (Māori) Battalion ended the Second World War with which distinction?

Most decorated New Zealand battalion: its 99 honours and awards were the highest tally of any of the country's infantry battalions, won at a heavy price, its casualty rate running well above the average.

What is the name of the national kapa haka competition, running since 1972, held every two years?

Te Matatini means 'the many faces', a name coined by the scholar Wharehuia Milroy for the number and diversity of its performers; the contest dates from 1972.

Under what name did a mostly Māori rugby side tour Britain in 1888–89?

New Zealand Natives played more than 100 matches on that tour and are credited with bringing the haka to rugby; the official Māori team that followed them first played in 1910.

Which Marlborough site, settled around 1300, holds graves of some of the first people to reach New Zealand?

Wairau Bar's oldest burials are of people whose tooth chemistry suggests they grew up somewhere else, likely among the first arrivals; their Rangitāne descendants reburied the remains at the site in 2009.

What did 34 chiefs declare at Waitangi in 1835?

Independence: in He Whakaputanga the chiefs, calling themselves the United Tribes, asked the British king to protect their 'infant state', and 18 more chiefs had added their names by 1839.

Which 1994 film of an Alan Duff novel, about an urban Māori family, broke New Zealand box-office records?

Once Were Warriors, a hard look at domestic and gang violence, passed Jurassic Park to become the highest-grossing film ever released in New Zealand to that point.

What were the four Māori seats of 1867 first meant to be?

Temporary: the seats were meant to last only until Māori land had been converted into individual titles; that took far longer than expected, and they were made permanent in 1876.

Who became New Zealand's first female Foreign Minister in 2020?

Nanaia Mahuta's appointment sat well down Jacinda Ardern's list of announcements yet made headlines around the world, many noting that in 2016 she had become the first woman MP to wear moko kauae.

In the 2023 census Māori were 17.8% of New Zealanders, just ahead of which group?

Asian New Zealanders made up 17.3%, close to double the 8.9% share of Pacific peoples; the totals pass 100% because people could tick more than one box.

Which Australian state had the most residents identifying as Māori at the 2021 census?

Queensland was not the early favourite: Māori migrants first settled mostly in Sydney's suburbs, yet by 2021 Queensland was home to 65,031 of Australia's 170,057 Māori, ahead of New South Wales.

Why was Māori Television's first chief executive fired in 2002?

He faked his qualifications on his CV and was later jailed for eight months; despite that start the channel went to air in March 2004, and in 2022 it took the name Whakaata Māori.

In 2024 a young Māori MP led a haka in Parliament and ripped up a copy of which bill?

The Treaty Principles Bill sought to redefine the 1840 agreement's principles in law; more than 40,000 people marched on Parliament against it, and in April 2025 it was voted down by 112 votes to 11.

What kind of building was a whare tapere in pre-European Māori culture?

They were sites of storytelling, dance and puppetry; Māori theatre later flourished in the 1970s and 80s with groups like Te Ohu Whakaari.

Who played an imaginary Adolf Hitler in Jojo Rabbit, the Oscar-winning 2019 film he also wrote and directed?

Taika Waititi, the film's Māori writer-director, won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay and dedicated it to all the indigenous kids in the world who want to make art, dance and tell stories.

Around 1900, what did many New Zealanders expect Māori to do?

Die out was the common forecast when the Māori population hit a low of about 42,000 in 1896; instead numbers recovered rapidly through the twentieth century, and 887,493 people identified as Māori at the 2023 census.

Which Māori athlete, New Zealand's most successful Olympian, won her eighth gold medal at Paris 2024?

Lisa Carrington won her eighth gold even though the 200-metre sprint she had won at three straight Games was cut from the Paris programme; she took three 500-metre kayak titles there instead.

Which pair are both Māori novelists, one of them the author of The Whale Rider?

Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera: her Waiariki (1975) was the first story collection by a Māori woman, and his novel The Whale Rider became the 2002 film that earned young lead Keisha Castle-Hughes a best actress Oscar nomination.

In 2017, which New Zealand river became the first in the world granted the legal rights of a person?

The Whanganui is now spoken for by two guardians, one chosen by the Crown and one by the river's tribes, under a law that ended what the minister called the longest-running litigation in New Zealand's history.