Whetu a leader in more ways than one
Exhibition subject changed the attitude toward women and Ma¯ori
In MTG Hawke’s Bay’s exhibition Kuru Taonga: Voices of Kahungunu is Tini Whetu Marama Tirikatene-Sullivan. She is Ngāti Kahungunu from Pāhauwera and Ngai Tahu, which makes her Ngāti Konohi from Whangara, a whale rider, descendant of Paikea.
Her name ‘Whetu Marama’ was given by Rātana, in a prophesy that she would become a political leader.
Whetu Marama is an evocation of the Rātana symbol; star and crescent moon meaning astrology and starlight, a map of the world in the stars.
The prophesy proved true, Whetu was to become Aotearoa’s first Māori female Cabinet minister, the youngest woman elected to Parliament, and its longest serving female Member of Parliament.
In the debating chambers Whetu was well aware of the power of design in her fashion to express a Māori presence and position in the world.
Designing her own clothes, she wore them in the House to enhance Māori visibility in the national sphere.
Whetu was also the first woman to breast feed her children in our debating chambers, an uncomfortable experience for New Zealand parliamentary men at the time.
She wanted to change the attitude toward women and toward Māori, who were reeling against government laws of extinguishment summarised in the 1960 stocktake of Maāri colonisation by JK Hunn. It was on the back of this she entered parliament in 1967.
In Parliament, Whetu brought attention to the 1945 Māori Social and Economic Advancement Act which saw men of the Māori world return from World War ll only to be annulled of their rights on arrival at Wellington Wharf in 1946. Returning to their homes, they found themselves fenced out, gates padlocked, and their lands given away to others as farm ballots for returned Pākehā New Zealand soldiers of the British Empire.
In accordance with the imported British Imperial Acts of Law, Whetu’s father’s generation of Māori Battalion soldiers were to be negated, without receiving the rights of other returning New Zealand soldiers.
The New Zealand Settlement Act did not acknowledge Māori as New Zealanders and, accordingly, the men of the Māori Battalion were not afforded the rights of New Zealanders — seen as ‘natives’ or Māori’s with no liberties, no rights.
These policies, legislated in the New Zealand Settlement Act and Native Land Act, were applied to the men of the Māori Battalion immediately after the war to finalise extinction of the Māori race.
In Hawke’s Bay, these acts were applied and administered by Donald McLean through the 1860s, with a stocktake taken in 1960 to target completion by the Department of Māori Affairs from 1961 onward.
Under these policies Māori language was expected to be extinguished by 1965, and the Māori race by 1975 — to become an artifact of Crown policies.
It is with this back story that Whetu gave presence to Māori design, her clothing targeted at more than meeting the eye.
A fashion trend in the 1960s, Whetu’s version of the mini skirt, with its Sandy Adsett design, met the eye of authority and challenged an Imperial mindset, which saw both women and Māori as second class citizens without equity to New Zealand men.
Tini Whetu Marama Tirikatene-Sullivan, 1932-2011. He mihi aroha.