Te Rangihiroa's Rich Life, Rich Distinctions, Rich Legacy

Te Ao Hou, Winter 1952, Page 3

Te Rangihiroa's Rich Life, Rich Distinctions, Rich Legacy by G. S. ROYDHOUSE Aotearoa had no better known ambassador-at-large, the Maori people no greater champion than one of their own sons, the distinguished, wise, human, learned but modest, Te Rangihiroa. As Sir Peter Buck, K.C.M.G., D.S.O., M.A., Litt.D., D.Sc., M.D., Ch.B., doctor, politician and soldier, he was the last of New Zealand's Maori knights. His accomplishments in ethnology and anthropology—particularly when he was Director of Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu—spread far beyond the Pacific seas over which the ancestors of his people steered their sturdy canoes centuries and centuries ago in search of land and a home. He died in office at Honolulu on December 3, 1951, in his seventy-second year. Countless people knew him simply as ‘Peter’. The well-deserved honours bestowed on him made him none the less approachable nor warped the strains of modesty and friendliness uppermost in his many-sided character. His greatest asset, of which he was most proud, was the Maori blood he inherited from his mother. This was complemented by the Irish strain of his father. In point of fact his father's name was William Henry Neal, better known in the Taranaki, Whanganui and Wairarapa districts as ‘Buck’ Neal, and his wife as Mrs ‘Buck’. It was from this nickname that Peter gained his European surname, and from his mother's only brother he took, when he had reached his ‘teens, the name Te Rangihiroa, or more correctly, Te Rangi Ihiroa. It was through the death of this same uncle that he received his very first name of Materori— ‘death on the road’. The uncle became ill while travelling to his home and collapsed and died on the roadside. ‘It must always be borne in mind that I had the good fortune to have a Maori mother,’ he said speaking in Ngati Poneke Hall, Wellington, during his last visit to New Zealand and his people. His mother, a Ngati Mutunga chieftainess, Ngarongokitua (‘Tidings that Reach Afar’), taught him to read and write in the Maori tongue. She died when he was but a youth and his grandmother, Kapuakore (‘Cloudless’) cared for Photo: S. P. Andrew Sir Peter Buck (1949)

him until his early teens. She lived to be 102 years old and she was, he recalled, ‘more tattooed than any woman I have ever seen or heard of among my people.’ Discussing his mixed blood Peter has said, ‘I would not change for a total of either.’ And again, ‘To my despondent fellow halfcaste I can truly say that any success I might have achieved has been largely due to may good fortune in being a mongrel.’ It would take a man with terrific pride in his ancestry and race to say that. Peter was never more sincere than in these utterances, and in them can be found the key which so often turned his thoughts toward the future of the Maori race. He expressed his feelings plainly more than once during his visit to New Zealand, thus: ‘It is impossible for us to maintain our isolation as a pure Maori people. The process of mixing has been going on for generations and it will continue. We cannot make any law about it, and it is not desirable to make a law about it. ‘We must have freedom. They talk of freedom of thought, the freedom of worship. In this country there is the freedom to mate with those you live. And under these conditions this process of mixing … is a law which has come about out of a human law and I think it is one which will bring about a greater unity and fellow feeling and cooperation between the two races in this country.’ Peter saw in the fusion of Maori and European blood the rising of future generations in which there would be no difference between Maori and Pakeha. ‘We are all New Zealanders,’ he said, ‘and should go forward together … I see in the future the development of a fine race of New Zealanders composed of Pakeha and Maori.’