Activist, wahine toa, nanny: Dame Whina Cooper's message more important than ever
Friday, 17 June 2022
It’s the smaller details Irene Cooper remembers most about her grandmother.
She remembers playing knucklebones at her feet, half-listening as she talked to Robert Muldoon or Kiri Te Kanawa.
She remembers how her grandmother’s voice would sound then – commanding and fiery – and how she taught her to play card games. She also remembers her particular way of eating fruit.
“She loved sliced oranges and would sprinkle glucose on them; she had a bit of a sweet tooth.”
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Cooper’s grandmother was Dame Whina Cooper, the Te Rarawa leader who dedicated her life to fighting for Māori land rights. Her work earned her both a swag of royal honours and the title of Te Whaea o te Motu, or Mother of the Nation, but to her granddaughter, she was just ‘Nanny’.
On Thursday afternoon, Cooper is speaking from the airport before jetting off to the Sydney Film Festival where a film about Whina’s life is debuting. Cooper had a big part in its making, and says her nanny’s story is particularly relevant right now.
“It’s the right moment, the worlds looking for guidance and things that are going to bring some understanding and teaching. Her message does that.”
Cooper (Te Rarawa, Nga Puhi) is an executive producer for Whina, the film, and says it’s been a strange though satisfying experience watching her nanny’s long life play out on screen. One of her roles was schooling the three actors that play her nanny at different ages on her mannerisms and character; it was tough on one of them in particular.
“Rena Owen did a wonderful as my older grandmother. She had to fill some big shoes because as a family we remember our grandmother in her older age; Rena had to climb some mountains there.”
The end result is one Cooper and her whānau are proud of; she thinks her grandmother would feel the same.
“She’d be full of pride, and she’d want people, Pākehā and Māori, to understand and see what her message was in the day.
“What was that message? That we need to work together and come together to shape Aotearoa.”
Whina Cooper was born Hōhepine (Josephine) Te Wake at Te Karaka on 9 December 1895. Her father was Heremia Te Wake, a leader of the Te Rawara hapū Ngāti Manawa and Te Kaitutae, and her mother was Kare Pauro Kawatihi, of Te Rarawa and Taranaki descent.
Whina received Māori and religious education from her father and started school at about seven, initially walking the six miles there and back. In 1907, she went to St Joseph’s Māori Girls’ College in Napier.
In 1911 Whina refused to enter an arranged marriage with the widowed leader of Ngāti Tūwharetoa, choosing to work in the local co-operative store instead.
Two years later she was appointed trainee teacher at the Pawarenga Native School at Whāngāpē Harbour, where she was one of three staff – and the only Māori. She resigned in 1914 and the following year started work as a housekeeper at the Catholic presbytery in Rāwene.
While the film delves into the extraordinary events that followed and charts her rise as a leader and visionary, it was the groundbreaking 1975 land march that Whina is perhaps best known for.
In 1975, Whina was asked to lead Te Rōpū Matakite o Aotearoa, formed by a coalition of groups to fight further alienation of Māori from their land.
She did, and at 80 led Te Matakite, a hikoi from Te Hāpua in the far north to Wellington that covered more than 1054 kilometres; “not one more acre” was their catch-cry.
The march culminated with Whina leading about 5,000 people into Parliament grounds on October 13. There, she presented a memorial of rights from 200 Māori elders and a petition supporting the objectives of the march signed by 60,000 people to then-prime minister Bill Rowling.
A biography by historian Michael King describes the effect Whina’s leadership had on the country.
“For the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who witnessed the march on the roads or on television, its most inspiring feature was the wizened woman who headed it with such panache and articulated its objectives in a cracked but firm voice.”
Whina’s voice, the one her granddaughter remembers, resounded throughout New Zealand both for the rest of her life and beyond it.
She presided over Waitangi Day commemorations and conferences of the Māori Women’s Welfare League and in 1990 opened the Auckland Commonwealth Games, reminding her audience “the Treaty was signed so that we could all live as one nation in Aotearoa”.
When Whina died aged 98 in 1994, thousands of people attended her tangihanga and more than a million watched the live television coverage. Six years later a statue was unveiled on Whina’s Panguru marae, depicting the famous photo of her leading the land march, holding the hand of her small mokopuna Irene.
“That photo has been a big journey for me - it speaks so many words without having any words,” says the younger Cooper. “It's a blessing, and I'm very grateful that she gave me this.”
Nearly 50 years after that photo was taken, Cooper says Whina should be remembered as a wahine toa; a champion of te ao Māori and a woman ahead of her time who came up against religious and gendered beliefs and conquered them.
She was all of those things, but she was also human. Irene Cooper says one of the standout storylines in the film is that of Whina’s love affair with William Cooper, who ultimately became her second husband.
“She was a perfectly imperfect person who graciously walked through those times. She just had all these mountains she conquered as she went through life.”
Now is the perfect time for people in Aotearoa and abroad to watch the film, Cooper says, because while the milestone events of Whina’s life happened years ago, her method of demanding change is more relevant than ever.
“She was all about peaceful marching and making her statements in a peaceful way. There’s a lot to learn from that today for a lot of people.”
Her grandmother’s voice that she remembers so well still has much to say, and Cooper believes her most famous quote is something we all need to remember right now:
“Take care of our children. Take care of what they hear, take care of what they see, take care of what they feel. For how the children grow, so will the shape of Aotearoa.”
Whina opens in NZ cinemas on June 23.