Māori cosmology provides longstanding evidence that wāhine have always undertaken roles that involve navigating boundaries, mediating relationships, and maintaining balance across domains.

Ani Mikaere writes, as context for the Mana Wāhine Inquiry, that “The roles of men and women in traditional Māori society can be understood only in the context of the Māori worldview, which acknowledged the natural order of the universe, the interrelationship or whanaungatanga of all living things to one another and to the environment, and the overarching principle of balance. … Both men and women were essential parts in the collective whole. Both formed part of the whakapapa that linked Māori people back to the beginning of the world, and women in particular played a key role in linking the past with the present and the future.”

At least thirteen wāhine rangatira signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi on 6 February 1840.

Wāhine Māori were recognised leaders, navigators, tohunga and political authorities whose expertise guided our ancestral waka across vast oceanic routes, undertook the required rituals on board, and shaped the establishment of new communities across the motu. They held recognised political, spiritual, and diplomatic authority, exercised alongside tāne. Wāhine authority was a central facet of te ao Māori before colonisation. In evidence to the Mana Wāhine inquiry, Carrie Stoddart Smith [link to her affidavit]. observes how Wāhine Māori upheld their rangatiratanga in Aotearoa for approximately twenty-five to twenty-seven generations before colonial disruption fully took hold. It took only two generations following 1840 for colonial systems to undermine the authority of wāhine Māori. Crown policies introduced patriarchal norms and gendered violence that rapidly disrupted structures that had upheld wāhine leadership for centuries.

That displacement, and patriarchal power structures, was sustained through English law, in legislation and the courts, and international affairs. Tāne Māori were elevated as the preferred interlocutors for both the Crown and international actors, and the extractivist logic of colonial capitalism – what Jessica Hutchings [link to her affidavit] describes as the Capitalist Patriarchy – was embedded in economic life of Aotearoa and international free trade and investment treaties. For decades, women all over the world, including Indigenous Women’s movements, have resisted this economic model and opposed these agreements. In response, states have become champions of “inclusivity” in what Jane Kelsey [link to her affidavit] describes as “pink washing”.

Ngā Toki Whakarururanga was invited by the Waitangi Tribunal to submit evidence on this to the Mana Wāhine (Wai 2700) Inquiry.