The Māori

Aotearoa, from about 1300 CE

Where rongoā Māori begins

Rongoā Māori is the healing system of the tangata whenua, the people of the land. Its ancestors crossed the largest ocean on earth in double-hulled canoes out of eastern Polynesia, arriving between about 1250 and 1300 CE.

The settlers carried a Pacific medical inheritance and met a flora almost wholly new to them. Kawakawa was among the few familiar species, named after related plants used for healing elsewhere in the Pacific. Everything else had to be learned by experiment.

None of it was written down. Rongoā passed by voice, by karakia, and by long apprenticeship, so its deep past cannot be dated the way a manuscript can. Healing is not a separate trade either. It sits inside tikanga, the right way of doing things, alongside whakapapa, ritual, and land.

Mauri, tapu and noa

What a tohunga reads before treating

Rongoā treats a state, and te reo Māori names that state mauri. Te Aka Māori Dictionary defines mauri as the life principle and vital essence, the essential quality and vitality of a being or entity.

The language grades it. Mauri moe is unconscious and mauri ora is awake. Mauri rere is panic-stricken. Mauri tau is composed and unruffled, and Te Aka glosses it as the absence of panic. One named quantity runs from alarm to settled composure, with a right place to sit.

Around mauri runs the order of tapu and noa. Tapu means restricted and set apart. Noa, in the Waitangi Tribunal's phrase, denotes a state of relaxed access. A breach of tapu is expected to show in the body. The tradition therefore sorts illness into mate atua, with no apparent cause, and mate tangata, with a plain physical one.

That sorting is a diagnostic decision taken before treatment begins. It asks whether the disturbance sits in the person's tissue or in the person's obligations, and the two answers lead to different treatments.

Tohunga

Who holds the knowledge

Tohunga means expert. Māori society trained tohunga in carving, in voyaging and in healing. The healers are called tohunga rongoā.

Training ran through the whare wānanga, the houses of higher learning. The office carried authority that depended on the community staying well, and the Tribunal notes that a tohunga addressed the root cause and the symptoms at the same time.

Much of the art is tapu. It is held by its own keepers and taught to a chosen few, and its detail does not belong in a public account. Published accounts describe a tohunga rongoā who reads whole persons, weighing tissue, conduct, whānau and history together, and who is expected to say which of those is driving the rest.

Mirimiri and romiromi

The hands-on work inside rongoā

Rongoā carries two named kinds of touch, and the language separates them by pressure. Te Aka defines romiromi as pressing firmly with the hands, squeezing and massaging. It defines mirimiri as rubbing, soothing, smoothing and stroking.

The Waitangi Tribunal, drawing on Mason Durie, records mirimiri as a form of massage used to relieve sore joints and limbs. It names romiromi as the work of the fingers and takahi as the work of the feet.

The distinction is clinical. Different tissue, different depth, and a different instrument, each chosen against what the practitioner has already read in the person. Rongoā practitioners themselves describe the bodywork as inseparable from wairua and karakia, and a 2025 study in the ANZ Journal of Surgery records the same view from practitioners working alongside surgeons.

ACC, the national accident compensation authority, lists mirimiri as bodywork among the rongoā techniques it funds, which makes manual therapy inside rongoā a publicly funded practice in New Zealand today.

Rākau rongoā

The plant medicine and how it is prepared

More than 200 plants were used medicinally, and Te Ara records four with the longest lists of uses: harakeke, kawakawa, rātā and koromiko.

Preparation is specified rather than general. Harakeke leaf or root was pulped, heated, and laid on boils, while the hard part of the leaf became a splint and muka fiber closed a bad cut. Kawakawa leaf and bark treated cuts, wounds and stomach pains, and a kawakawa poultice went on a toothache.

Kawakawa also lined the umuroa, a vapour bath in which fire-heated stones were doused with water and covered with a thick bed of leaves. Koromiko leaves were bruised into a poultice for ulcers. Mānuka bark was boiled and the liquid drunk for dysentery, and mānuka branches splinted broken limbs.

These plants are still in use. Te Ara lists kūmarahou, kawakawa, mānuka, kōwhai and harakeke among the remedies healers reach for today, and records the use of plant-based medicine as close to universal among them.

Gathering answers to tapu, because the plant carries its own mauri. The Waitangi Tribunal is explicit that rākau rongoā are not considered effective on their own. It records the tohunga Paul Mareikura telling a researcher that karakia is the most important medicine, and that without it nothing else matters.

1907

When Māori healing became a criminal offence

The New Zealand Parliament outlawed tohunga practice in 1907. The Tohunga Suppression Act was presented by the Māori MP James Carroll and supported by all four Māori members of Parliament.

The Act arrived after a population collapse. Introduced disease killed Māori in numbers the Waitangi Tribunal reports at up to 30 per cent of the population between first European contact and the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Māui Pōmare, the Māori health officer, pressed for legislation in his 1904 annual report.

Section 2 set the penalty at a fine of up to twenty-five pounds, or imprisonment of up to six months for a first offence and twelve months for a second or later one. No prosecution could begin without the consent of the Native Minister.

1910 to 1962

What the Act did, and what it failed to do

Nine people were convicted under the Act, all between March 1910 and February 1919. Raeburn Lange found that number in the archives and David Williams reached it independently in evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal. Both allow that other convictions may be untraced.

Māmari Stephens argues in the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review that the statute's primary intent was to reassert certainty and political dominance at a time when both were seen to be lacking. Rua Kēnana, the Tūhoe prophet held up in Parliament as the example to be suppressed, was never convicted under it.

The law did its work by threat. Rongoā went underground, the identities of tohunga were kept quiet, and training carried on out of sight for two generations. Section 44 of the Māori Welfare Act 1962 repealed it, fifty-five years after passage.

Practitioners working today learned from people who learned during the ban. That unbroken line is the reason rongoā is a living practice rather than a reconstruction.

Te whare tapa whā, 1984

Durie's four-walled house of health

Mason Durie set out te whare tapa whā in 1984 and published its account in Social Science and Medicine in 1985. The model is his, built on Māori foundations, and it is now taught across Aotearoa as a model of hauora, health and vigour.

It pictures wellbeing as a wharenui, a meeting house standing on the land. Taha tinana is physical wellbeing. Taha hinengaro is mind and feeling. Taha wairua is the spiritual wall. Taha whānau is family and belonging. Connection with the whenua, the land, forms the foundation.

No wall outranks the others. A house missing a wall falls down. Durie's 1985 paper names the four as cornerstones recognized by Māori elders at traditional gatherings, which places the authorship of the idea with the community and its formulation with him.

The Unified Model of Tone reaches the same architecture from the other end. The regulated nervous system carries the physical, the emotional and the relational at once, which is why care aimed at a single wall fails to hold. Durie stated that in 1984, in the shape of a building.

Rongoā today

The practice the state now pays for

Rongoā Māori is practiced across Aotearoa and paid for out of public money. Ngā Ringa Whakahaere o te Iwi Māori was established in 1992 to represent traditional healers and to set standards for safe practice.

The Ministry of Health published Standards for Traditional Māori Healing in June 1999, developed with Ngā Ringa Whakahaere and the Health Funding Authority. A national rongoā development plan, Taonga Tuku Iho, followed in 2006. In 2011 the Waitangi Tribunal found rongoā to be a taonga the Crown must actively protect, a year after New Zealand endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

ACC has funded rongoā Māori since 2020 and classes it as social rehabilitation rather than treatment, because rongoā practitioners are not treatment providers under the Accident Compensation Act. It funds up to $125 plus GST per session under the service code MTH10. In a 2019 ACC field survey, 80 per cent of Māori respondents said it mattered to them that their health provider offer rongoā services.

Māori researchers are now documenting the practice on its own terms. A 2022 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health interviewed 49 rongoā practitioners and patients across Aotearoa. Its central finding was that when the land is well, the people are well.

Common questions

Frequently asked