New Zealand’s Maori Name a New Queen

Asia Pacific|New Zealand’s Maori Name a New Queen

The Maori of New Zealand named a new monarch on Thursday, selecting a 27-year-old queen in a symbolic but weighty role as some of the Indigenous group's hard-fought rights have been rolled back.

Nga Wai Hono i te Po succeeds her father, Kiingi Tuheitia, who died last week after 18 years as king and was laid to rest in funeral rites that ended Thursday. The new queen, his youngest daughter, is the eighth Maori monarch since the role was created in 1858 to unite the tribes as European settlers encroached.

She was chosen by Maori leaders and introduced on Thursday in a ceremony before thousands gathered for Kiingi Tuheitia’s last rites, the Kiingitanga, the Maori King Movement, said in a statement.

Live footage of the ceremony carried on Radio New Zealand, the public broadcaster, showed her taking her place on a wooden throne with intricate carvings, next to her father’s coffin, amid cheers from the crowd and with some in attendance wiping away tears.

Nga Wai Hono i te Po is the second woman to lead the Maori, after her grandmother, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu, who reigned for four decades starting in 1966. She is the second-youngest Maori monarch and had been serving on the Waitangi National Trust to represent the Maori people on the management of that historic site, according to Radio New Zealand.

In 2022, Nga Wai Hono i te Po traveled to London as her father’s representative to meet with then-Prince Charles. She said at the time that she felt conflicted about meeting royalty from the country that had invaded and colonized her people’s land, but said that she would share the stories of her ancestors and contribute to the relationships between the Maori and the people of England.

“I feel angry, but it’s only right that I feel angry,” she said in Maori, according to a short documentary of her visit. “I have a loud mouth, so I need to be careful.”

Almost a million New Zealanders are of Maori descent, about a fifth of the population, according to the 2023 census.

Since coming to power last year, New Zealand’s current government, the most conservative in a generation, has scrapped a Maori health agency and has been pushing to abandon other policies that benefit the community, which has higher incarceration rates and poorer health outcomes than the general population.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon of New Zealand, who is on a trip to South Korea, welcomed the new queen in a social media post, saying that she “carries forward the mantle of leadership left by her father.”