Apirana Ngata

Apirana Turupa Ngata was born on 3 July 1874 at Te Araroa, a small settlement on the East Coast of New Zealand's North Island, into the Ngati Porou iwi ^[1]. His father, Paratene Ngata, was a respected tribal leader and an authority on Ngati Porou tradition, while the boy also grew up under the influence of his great-uncle Rapata Wahawaha, a noted military leader who had fought alongside government forces in the 1860s ^[1]. From childhood Ngata moved between two worlds: the marae at Waiomatatini, where he absorbed genealogy, oratory, and song, and the English-language schooling that his elders believed would equip him to defend Maori interests ^[2].

He was sent to Te Aute College in Hawke's Bay, an Anglican school that deliberately trained Maori boys for professional careers. Ngata excelled there, and in 1890 he won a scholarship to Canterbury College in Christchurch ^[1]. In 1893 he completed a Bachelor of Arts in political science, becoming the first Maori to earn a degree at a New Zealand university, and he followed it with a law degree from the University of Auckland, admitted as a barrister and solicitor in 1897 ^[2]. For anyone asking who was Apirana Ngata, this double grounding, in tribal knowledge on one side and Western law on the other, explains much of what followed.

Rather than settle into legal practice, Ngata threw himself into Maori community work. He became a travelling secretary for the Te Aute College Students' Association, the network of educated young Maori that contemporaries called the Young Maori Party ^[2]. With colleagues such as Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) and Maui Pomare, he toured villages promoting health reform, sanitation, and economic self-help at a time when the Maori population had fallen to roughly 40,000 and many commentators predicted its extinction ^[3].

His administrative gifts were quickly recognised. He worked on the implementation of the Maori Councils Act of 1900, which created a measure of local self-government for Maori communities, and his drafting and organisational skills brought him to the attention of national politicians ^[1]. In 1905 he stood for the Eastern Maori seat in Parliament and won it decisively. He would hold that seat continuously until 1943, a span of 38 years that made him one of the longest-serving members of his era ^[2].

Inside Parliament, Ngata aligned with the Liberal Party and worked closely with Native Minister James Carroll. He served on the 1907 commission (with Chief Justice Robert Stout) that investigated Maori land holdings, and the resulting reports shaped land legislation for years ^[1]. He became a minister without portfolio in 1909, an early sign of the influence he would later wield.

Any account of Apirana Ngata achievements has to begin with land. Ngata believed that Maori survival depended on turning remaining tribal land into productive farms owned and worked by Maori themselves. From the early 1920s he pioneered land consolidation and incorporation schemes among Ngati Porou, pooling fragmented interests so that dairy farms and sheep stations could operate at commercial scale ^[3]. When he became Minister of Native Affairs in the United government of Joseph Ward in 1928, he gained the power to fund this vision nationally. The Native Land Amendment Act of 1929 allowed state money to be advanced to Maori farmers for development, the first time the government had financed Maori agriculture in this way, and by the early 1930s dozens of development schemes were operating from Northland to the East Coast ^[1].

His second great cause was cultural revival. Ngata drove the establishment of the School of Maori Arts and Crafts at Rotorua in 1926, which trained carvers who went on to build and restore meeting houses across the country ^[4]. He championed the construction of carved houses as centres of tribal pride, promoted action songs and haka competitions, and helped organise the 1934 celebrations at Waitangi after the Treaty grounds were gifted to the nation. He also secured government support for Maori participation in the 1940 centennial commemorations ^[4].

Ngata was a scholar as well as a politician. Over decades he collected traditional waiata, publishing them with annotations as Nga Moteatea, a multi-volume anthology that remains a foundational text for the study of Maori song poetry ^[5]. He supported the Board of Maori Ethnological Research, encouraged the anthropological work of his friend Peter Buck, and in 1921 helped persuade the government to endow a chair in anthropology at Auckland. His long correspondence with Buck, later published in three volumes, is one of the richest records of Maori intellectual life in the twentieth century ^[6]. He was knighted in 1927 for his public service ^[2].

In 1895 Ngata married Arihia Kane Tamati, a union arranged in customary fashion between leading Ngati Porou families. The marriage lasted more than three decades and produced a large family; several of their children died young, losses that Ngata bore while maintaining a punishing public schedule ^[1]. Arihia died in 1929, shortly after Ngata reached the peak of his ministerial power, and contemporaries noted how deeply the loss affected him. He later married Te Rina Tatae ^[1].

Home for Ngata was always Waiomatatini, in the Waiapu Valley, where he built a house known as The Bungalow near the great carved meeting house Porourangi. Even as a cabinet minister he returned constantly to the East Coast, running farm schemes, judging cultural competitions, and attending tangihanga across the district ^[3]. Colleagues in Wellington remarked on his stamina: he was known to work through the night on legislation, correspondence, and the annotation of song texts. A tall, energetic figure with a formidable memory, he moved with equal ease between parliamentary debate in English and whaikorero on the marae ^[2].

Ngata's ministerial career ended in controversy. The rapid expansion of the land development schemes had outrun the small Native Department's capacity for careful accounting, and in 1934 a commission of inquiry criticised administrative irregularities in the department, including favouritism toward East Coast interests. Although the commission did not find that Ngata had profited personally, he took responsibility and resigned as Native Minister in November 1934 ^[1]. He remained in Parliament, and the development schemes he had begun continued under later governments, vindication of the underlying policy if not of its early bookkeeping ^[3].

During the Second World War Ngata became one of the strongest advocates for Maori enlistment, arguing that service in the 28th (Maori) Battalion was, in his phrase, the price of citizenship, a claim he developed in his 1943 pamphlet The Price of Citizenship ^[4]. He helped organise recruitment on the East Coast and supported the whanau of soldiers killed overseas, among them men from his own extended family.

In the 1943 general election Ngata lost Eastern Maori to Tiaki Omana, a candidate backed by the Ratana movement and the Labour Party, ending nearly four decades in the House ^[2]. He did not retreat into idleness. He continued editing Nga Moteatea, worked on a Maori translation projects committee, helped plan the restoration of carved houses, and remained the acknowledged elder statesman of Maori affairs. Sir Apirana Ngata died at Waiomatatini on 14 July 1950, eleven days after his seventy-sixth birthday, and his tangi drew thousands of mourners to the Waiapu Valley ^[1].

Few figures in any Apirana Ngata biography escape comparison with him; he set the standard against which later Maori leadership has been measured. The land development schemes he created kept significant areas of tribal land in Maori ownership and demonstrated that Maori farming could succeed with adequate capital, an argument that shaped policy for the rest of the century ^[3]. The carving school he founded at Rotorua trained the artists who rebuilt marae throughout New Zealand, and Nga Moteatea continues to be studied, sung, and republished ^[5].

His face appears on the New Zealand fifty dollar note, alongside the meeting house Porourangi, making him the only Maori individual so honoured on the country's current banknotes ^[7]. Schools, scholarships, and buildings carry his name, including Ngata Memorial College at Ruatoria. The definitive modern study, Ranginui Walker's He Tipua: The Life and Times of Sir Apirana Ngata, published in 2001, weighs both the achievements and the compromises of a man who worked inside a colonial state to serve his people ^[3].

Among the most cited Apirana Ngata facts is the whakatauki he wrote in a young girl's autograph book in 1949: grow up in the days of your world, your hand to the tools of the Pakeha for your material wellbeing, your heart to the treasures of your ancestors, and your soul to God. That saying, E tipu e rea, is still recited at school prizegivings across New Zealand, a fair summary of the balance he spent his life trying to strike ^[4].