Culture warrior

Activist and scholar Ngahuia te Awek6otuku achieved several firsts in society but had to fight many battles to get there.

This is a strange memoir. It's a contradiction: honest but often frustratingly oblique; explicit in some places and coy in others; its people and places and times evoked in depth but its narrative also, at times, on breathless fast-forward. One of the book's strengths is its visceral scenes, but when these take place 50 years ago, the level of detail - and dialogue - makes this read more like fiction than a memoir. In other words, it is not wholly satisfying or successful as life-writing. And yet this is an important book: vital to write, vital to publish and vital to read. Ngahuia te Awekōtuku has lived a life of many contradictions, warring impulses and interests, changing names and identities and allegiances.

It's a life of collusion and controversy, rejection and leadership. This century, she has been a respected Māori scholar, an expert on tā moko, winning awards and major grants; she is now an emeritus professor. In Hine Toa we have the 20th-century prequel, helping us understand how unique and immense this achievement has been: she is the first Māori woman to be given the emeritus title at a New Zealand university. In 1981, she was the first Māori woman to be awarded a PhD in New Zealand. The first ever, she notes, was Ngāpare Hopa, who received her PhD from Oxford University just two years earlier.