08/22/2026
Before the British arrived, the Māori had a word for it. They had a word because they needed one. Same-s*x relationships weren't a scandal in pre-colonial Aotearoa. They were part of life.
The word was takatāpui. Missionary William Williams defined it in his 1844 Dictionary of the Maori Language as "an intimate companion of the same s*x." Williams was trying to document the language. He ended up documenting the culture, too.
Takatāpui appear in traditional waiata, in chants, in carvings. The evidence was everywhere. Scholar Elizabeth Kerekere, who spent five years researching her doctoral thesis on the subject, put it plainly: before colonization, takatāpui were simply "part of the whānau."
You can see it in one of New Zealand's oldest love stories. In chief Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikāheke's telling of the tale of Hinemoa and Tūtānekai, when Tūtānekai marries Hinemoa, he mourns the loss of his intimate relationship with a man named Tiki, his hoa takatāpui. The story wasn't considered shocking. It was just the story.
Then the missionaries came.
The earliest European colonists in New Zealand were Christians, and they brought their theology with them. Same-s*x relationships became sinful by decree. Pre-colonial Māori carvings depicting s*xual diversity were destroyed or mutilated. Some were shipped to European museums as curiosities. The colonial project didn't just take land. It took language, rewrote culture, and tried to erase the people who didn't fit the new moral order.
The British didn't stop at theology. When New Zealand became a British colony in 1840, British law came with it, making same-s*x acts a capital offense. The Criminal Code Act of 1893 went further, outlawing all s*xual activity between men, with penalties including imprisonment, hard labor, and flogging. Men convicted of so**my faced a minimum of 10 years. That law stayed on the books, in various forms, until 1986.
The erasure went beyond the law. Translators in the late 1800s went back through traditional songs and quietly changed the words. A lament for a young man named Papaka Te Naeroa originally described him as "a youth who was s*xual with that woman, with that man." Someone replaced the word "aitia," meaning s*xual, with "awhitia," meaning hugged or embraced. The edited version made it into the official published collection of traditional songs. The original meaning nearly disappeared with it.
Nearly. Scholars like Kerekere and Emeritus Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku spent decades recovering what colonization tried to bury. The word takatāpui itself survived, and in the early 21st century, Māori LGBTQ communities reclaimed it. It now encompasses gay, le***an, bis*xual, transgender, and inters*x Māori identities, connecting contemporary q***r Māori to a tradition that existed long before anyone told them it was wrong.
The British spent 150 years insisting that same-s*x relationships were foreign to Māori culture. They had to destroy a lot of evidence to try to make that argument stick. It didn't.
