MAUI POMARE and TE ORA O TE MAORI by J. F. Cody Perhaps it was not entirely by chance that Maui Naera Pomare was the first of his race to qualify in medicine—the family name originated through an ancestor who had the unusual pre-pakeha experience of catching a cold and spending a night in coughing. (Po, night; Mare, cough.) He was born at Pahu Pa, near Urenui, in 1876. His boyhood was passed partly in Taranaki and partly in the Chatham Islands; on his father's death he was sent to board at Christchurch Boys' High School, and later to Te Aute. When he was included in Massey's first Cabinet he was the first Old Boy of Christchurch Boys' High School to attain Ministerial rank. It was at Te Aute, and in his thirteenth year, that Pomare helped to lay the foundations of a movement which became the Young Maori Party of the early nineteen-hundreds, and which did so much towards the elevation of Maori social life. At that time pupils of Te Aute did not go home for the winter holidays, so, spurred on by John Thornton, headmaster of the College—a man who preached that the regeneration of the dwindling Maori race could come only through its own exertions—three school-boys set out to convert their own elders. The leader was Rewiti Kohere, of the East Cape; with him Timutimu Tawhai, of the Bay of Plenty; and Maui Pomare, of Taranaki, packed their swags and set out to tell the people that unless they changed their ways of living they must die out and disappear as a race. Their reception was a mixture of incredulity, anger and indifference, for they knew little of the deep-rooted conservatism of the Maori character, and their elders declined to be judged and directed by schoolboys. Nevertheless, they initiated a movement which became first the Association for the Amelioration of the Conditions of the Maori Race, later the Te Aute Students'. Association, and finally the Young Maori Party. While he was still a student at Te Aute, an acquaintance with some people of the Seventh-day Adventist persuasion led to the suggestion that he should enter the Adventist Missionary College in Michigan, U.S.A., and train in medicine. So we find Maui Pomare becoming for a time probably the only Maori on the American continent. The Battle Creek ‘Moon’, reporting a meeting of the missionary society, wrote: ‘After the usual devotional exercises and a song by the college quartette, the speaker of the evening, Mr Maui Pomare, a young chief of the Te Atiawa tribe of Maoris (pronounced Mowrys) of New Zealand, was introduced and gave a very interesting and instructive talk concerning his people, their religion, manners and customs. Mr Pomare is a sturdily built, sunny-faced young man, a pleasing speaker, bubbling all over with good nature; a lineal descendant of those gentlemen who, in times past, were said to have had an extreme fondness for the missionaries—stewed, fried or toasted.’ Commenting later on the reporter's flippant allusion, Pomare showed the mixture of diplomacy and humour for which he became so well known, by admitting the partial truth of the statement, and ending: ‘But you need not be afraid of me—I am a vegetarian!’ After completing the prescribed course of studies at Battle Creek, Pomare went on to the American Medical Missionary College at Chicago, from whence he graduated M.D. in 1899, returning to New Zealand in 1900. He returned at an auspicious moment. The Seddon Government, perturbed at the continuing decline in the Maori population, had passed the Public Health and Maori Councils Act, by virtue of which a Native Health Officer was