THE CHANGE AGENT
For Lisa Tumahai, the enforced silence was unbearable. As a 25-year-old in the early 1990s, she would drive over the main divide to the West Coast Te Tai Poutini to accompany her father, Tahana Tauwhare, to the monthly council meeting of Ngāti Waewae, one of the smallest hapū of Ngāi Tahu. First in the RSA hall in Hokitika, then in a small building at the Arahura pā, on the ocean side of the main highway, she sat quietly but attentively as senior whānau representatives discussed the hapū’s affairs. Her father, as the elder in their family, was the only one who could speak on their behalf.
But it was hard for Tumahai, the fifth of six children, a former bartender taking part-time business classes, to hold her tongue. “There were things I could see were not right,” she recalls. “People were wanting change but just didn’t know how to go about it.” She saw decisions being made to fund major assets without a clear mandate. “My dad didn’t have the skills to understand the financials so I would try and support him,” she says. But after each meeting she’d badger him. “‘Why didn’t you say this? Why can’t I speak?’”
Two years later, her father passed his speaking rights on to his determined daughter. “I was young, an upstart,” she says.
Now 55, Tumahai looks back on her early political experience from the vantage point of a spare meeting room in Te Whare o Te Waipounamu, a large, arced concrete and glass building on the corporate edge of inner-city Christchurch. It has been Ngāi Tahu’s headquarters since 2015 (its former base was red-stickered after the 2011 earthquake). In 2017, Tumahai became the first woman to be elected kaiwhakahaere, or chair, of the country’s wealthiest iwi, representing just over 70,000 members, a land area covering 80 per cent of Te Waipounamu, 18 regional rūnanga and $1.8 billion of assets.
The trip from the Hokitika RSA hall to the boardroom of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu — or TRONT as the tribal council is known — has been far from easy. In 2003, as a mother of three in her 30s, Tumahai was appointed Ngāti Waewae’s representative on the TRONT board. It
