New Zealand’s Maori chiefs anointed a 27-year-old queen as their new monarch on Thursday, an unexpected decision welcomed as a symbol of change for the country’s Indigenous people.
Thousands of people celebrated Nga Wai hono i te po Paki as she ascended a high-backed wooden throne during an elaborate ceremony on the country’s North Island.
She is the youngest daughter of King Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII, who died on Friday from heart surgery.
After being elected by a council of chiefs, Nga Wai was brought to the throne by a phalanx of bare-chested and tattooed warriors with ceremonial weapons, who chanted, screamed, and shouted in approval.
The queen sat alongside her father’s coffin, dressed in a wreath of leaves, cloak, and whalebone necklace, as emotional ceremonies, prayers, and chants took place.
After six days in state, the late king was transported down the Waikato River in a flotilla of four war canoes, each with more than a dozen rowers.
His funeral procession proceeded through hundreds of onlookers tented along the riverbanks before coming to a halt at the foot of sacred Mount Taupiri.
From there, three rugby teams served as pallbearers, taking his coffin up difficult slopes to the summit and the final burial place of Maori royalty.
Passing the torch
The Maori king is primarily ceremonial, with little legal status.However, it holds great cultural and political value as a powerful emblem of identification and kinship.
Queen Nga Wai, the king’s only daughter and youngest child, was considered an outsider to succeed him.
One of her two eldest brothers had taken up many ceremonial tasks during their father’s illness and was widely expected to succeed him.
“It is certainly a break from traditional Maori leadership appointments which tend to succeed to the eldest child, usually a male,” Maori cultural advisor Karaitiana Taiuru told AFP.
Taiuru said it was a “privilege” to witness a young Maori woman become queen, particularly given the ageing leadership and mounting challenges faced by the community.
“The Maori world has been yearning for younger leadership to guide us in the new world of AI, genetic modification, global warming and in a time of many other social changes that question and threaten us and Indigenous Peoples of New Zealand,” he said.
“These challenges require a new and younger generation to lead us.”
New Zealand’s Maori make up roughly 17 percent of the population, or about 900,000 people.
Maori citizens are much more likely than other New Zealanders to be unemployed, live in poverty or suffer cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes and have higher suicide rates.
Maori life expectancy is seven years less than other New Zealanders.
The Kiingitanga, or Maori King movement, was founded in 1858 to unite New Zealand’s tribes and provide a single counterpart to the colonial ruler, Britain’s Queen Victoria.
“People think Maori people are one nation — we’re not. We’re many tribes, many iwi. We have different ways of speaking out,” said Joanne Teina, who had travelled from Auckland for the ceremony.
“The Kiingitanga was created to create unity — among people who were fighting each other for thousands of years, before Pakeha (Europeans) came along.”
Second queen
Queen Nga Wai is the eighth Maori monarch and the second queen.
Her grandmother, Queen Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu, occupied the role over four decades, until 2006.
The future queen attended Waikato University in future Zealand, where she studied Maori language and customary law. She also taught youngsters the performing skills known as “kapa haka”.
To commemorate the king’s coronation anniversary in 2016, she got a traditional Maori “moko” tattoo on her chin.
King Tuheitia, a 69-year-old truck driver-turned-royal, died on Friday, days after undergoing heart surgery and commemorating the 18th anniversary of his coronation.
Tens of thousands of Indigenous inhabitants and “Pakeha” (those of European origin) came to pay their respects, mourn, and celebrate New Zealand’s rich Maori heritage.
Among them was Auckland-based Darrio Penetito-Hemara, who told AFP that the king had brought together “many people across Aotearoa (New Zealand) who don’t always see eye to eye.”
According to Penetito-Hemara, the king leaves a legacy established “through respect, through aroha (love)”.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon welcomed Queen Nga Wai in a statement, stating she “carries forward the mantle of leadership left by her father”.
“The path ahead is illuminated by the great legacy of Kiingi Tuheitia,” he said.