Day 24! Dame Whina Cooper
Whina Cooper was born Hohepine Te Wake in 1895, the daughter of Heremia Te Wake, a Te Rarawa Maori clergyman and academic. When she graduated high school, her father wanted her to marry Tureiti Te Heuheu Tukino V, son of the legendary Ngati Tuwharetoa chief and then a rising politician, but Whina refused, working first as a store clerk and then as a teacher - and, increasingly, as a community activist. When a white land-leaser attempted to drain an estuary where the Te Rarawa harvested seafood, Whina’s father filed against him in court, and she led a group of protesters to the property, filling in the drains to prevent the estuary from being lost before the court case was won. In 1949, now a widow with grandchildren, Whina moved to Auckland and became an activist full-time, helping found the Maori Women’s Welfare League. She continued her work with that and other organizations through the tumultuous sixties, as New Zealand, under the Maori Affairs Amendment Act and its predecessors, seized more and more “unused” Maori land. In the 1970s, several Maori organizations merged together to plan a massive protest - and Whina Cooper was, quite literally, at the forefront.
At eighty, in 1975, she led a massive hikoi march from Northland to Wellington, a distance of over a thousand kilometers. Upon reaching the capital, they gave speeches and presented a petition to the Prime Minister. The land march brought international attention to the land seizures, and helped spark the next generation of Maori activism.
Whina Cooper has gone down in history as Whaea o te Motu - Mother of the Nation.
