Margaret Mutu

Margaret Mutu was born in Auckland and attended Waikōwhai Primary School and Mt Roskill Intermediate School. She continued her education at New Plymouth Girls’ High School boarding Rangiātea Māori Girls’ Hostel and later Scotlands at the High School. She studied at the University of Auckland completing a BSc in pure and applied mathematics (1973), and an MPhil in Māori Studies (1983). In 1983 she was awarded a Mana Motuhake (Naumai) Doctoral Scholarship and an ASB Postgraduate Scholarship to commence studies for a PhD and in 1984 a University Grants Committee Postgraduate Scholarship, a Ngarimu VC and 28th Māori Battalion Postgraduate Scholarship and a research internship at the East-West Center to study at the University of Hawai’i and the University of Auckland. She graduated PhD in Māori Studies and linguistics in 1990. Margaret taught mathematics and Māori studies at Epsom Girls’ Grammar School in 1974 and 1975, mathematics part-time at Auckland Institute of Technology in the late 1970s and early 1980s before taking up a lectureship in Māori Studies at the University of Auckland in 1986. There she has been teaching and conducting research on Māori language, tikanga, history and traditions, rights and sovereignty, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and treaty claims against the English Crown, the treaty claims settlement process, constitutional transformation and Māori-Chinese encounters. In 1994 she received a University of Auckland Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2001 she was appointed Head of Department of Māori Studies, a role she continued in until 2013. In 2002 she was appointed Professor of Māori Studies. She was a Visiting Fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at Australian National University in 2001 and a Visiting Professor in the Postgraduate School of International Affairs, University of Le Havre in France in 2007 and in the Departments of Native American Studies, Linguistics and Anthropology at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA in 2009. In 2015 Margaret was awarded the Pou Aronui Medal by Royal Society of New Zealand for distinguished service to the humanities-aronui over a sustained period of time and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi in 2017. Margaret has been the chair of Kāpehu marae in the Northern Wairoa since 1992, of Karikari marae in the Far North since 2004 and of Ngāti Kahu’s parliament, Te Rūnanga-ā-Iwi o Ngāti Kahu since 2002. She represented Ngāti Kahu on Māori Congress in the 1990s, on National Iwi Chairs Forum since 2005, in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues since 2009 and represents National Iwi Chairs Forum at meetings of the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Margaret writes non-fiction books, articles, book chapters and keynote presentations on a range of issues affecting Māori and is called on frequently by local, national and international media to provide information and expert commentary.

Biographical sources

• Email from Professor Margaret Mutu 12 February 2018.