Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi

The story

"Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi", or "Tūtira Mai", is a Māori folk song (waiata) of New Zealand, written in the late 1950s by Canon Wiremu Te Tau Huata, a military chaplain to the 28th Māori Battalion, while he was part of an Ecumenical Movement. He made it up while driving with his children from Wairoa in Hawke's Bay to Napier, past Lake Tūtira: he would sing the words and the children would repeat them, learning the song on the way.

The waiata spread as Huata sang it in churches and Bible classes. By the 1960s New Zealand's Ministry of Education had taken it up and was publishing it for use in schools, without Huata's consent and without crediting him as its author, and its place in schoolbooks made it widely known. After some fifty years of use in schools, his daughter revealed that some of its words had been published incorrectly, and there is still some uncertainty about its exact words, as with many older folk songs.

It is sung as a song of unity, often at times when New Zealanders want to stand together and support each other; after the Christchurch mosque shootings it was used to show support for the New Zealand Muslim community. On 28 May 2020 a performance by members of the navy, army and air force bands, in a musical partnership between the New Zealand and United States armed forces, was published on YouTube, with the permission of Huata's whānau (family).

In 2017 the New Zealand Rugby Union, in a campaign led by the police constable and former All Black Glen Osborne, urged All Blacks fans to adopt the song as a rallying chant to out-sing the supporters of the British and Irish Lions during their tour of New Zealand. The fans received the idea poorly, the Lions supporters took the song over with their own team's name in the chorus, and a New Zealand sports writer criticised the union for trying to manufacture an atmosphere with a song he thought unsuitable for it. On 12 November 2022, at Eden Park in Auckland, Ruby Tui of the Black Ferns led the crowd in the song to celebrate the team's 34–31 World Cup final win over England.

What it says

A song calling people to stand together as one. Its mood is warm, communal and uplifting.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.