Haami Piripi: just following instructions

Te Rarawa leader Haami Piripi, who was yesterday named an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, says he has simply been following the instructions of his elders.

The chairman of Te Runanga o Te Rarawa and former head of the Maori Language Commission led his people to a Treaty of Waitangi settlement signed at Kaitaia's Te Ahu Centre in 2012.

Mr Piripi said he was once regarded as a radical, so was surprised to receive an honour, but suspected his efforts in helping to get Te Ahu off the ground was part of it. He had brought Maori together behind the combined council and cultural centre, and Te Rarawa owns some of the land it was built on.

The honour, however, was an acknowledgment of his elders.

"What I'm doing now is something that's been planned for me right from a child. My elders invested in me many years ago; they instilled the language in me, and a knowledge of history and culture," he said.

"They saw something in me, and said, 'You're going on a mission.' I'm still on that mission. All I'm doing is implementing their instructions."

Mr Piripi, who lives at Ahipara, said his main focus was on building prosperity, just as it had been for his ancestor when he travelled to Sydney in 1818 to learn the ways of the monetary economy and trade, and nation-building.

"As Maori alone we can't do it. As fragmented New Zealand communities we can't do it. We have to collaborate," he said.

He also serves on an education forum working to raise achievement standards, Te Papa's repatriation advisory panel and the National Broadband Working Group. His iwi is working on its own project, a joint venture with a Chinese firm, to install a broadband 'backbone' in the Far North.

Mr Piripi was the first Maori employee of the Treaty of Waitangi Policy Unit (predecessor of the Office of Treaty Settlements), served as Treaty claims manager in the Department of Conservation, and held a senior post in the Department of Corrections.