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Story: Meha, Stuart

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Meha, Stuart

1878–1963

Rangitāne and Ngāti Kahungunu; farmer, Mormon leader

This biography, written by Peter J. Lineham, was first published in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography in 1998. It was translated into te reo Māori by the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography team.

Stuart (Te Tūati) Meha was born at Wanstead, Hawke’s Bay, probably on 29 December 1878. His father, Arapata Meha, a prominent member of Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāti Ruatōtara of Rangitāne, was a successful sheepfarmer and landowner from Te Tapairu, near Waipāwa. His mother, Mere Te Hau, was of Ngāti Rākaipaaka. The family had a distinguished ancestry and before Stuart was born it was prophesied that he would save his ancestors: this was later seen as a prediction of the Mormon practice of baptism for the dead.

Missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints arrived in Wairarapa in 1883 and soon made an impact among Ngāti Kahungunu. Stuart’s parents were baptised into the church on 15 July 1885 within two weeks of hearing George S. Taylor and Edward Newby preach in southern Hawke’s Bay. Stuart was baptised when he was eight. Mormon missionary diaries record that early converts greatly enjoyed the church's teaching and despised the traditional churches, but retained many Māori customs and did not accept all the Mormon practices. This was the world in which Stuart Meha grew up.

After attending Te Aute College he assisted on his father’s small farm, eventually taking it over. Highly respected within his own tribe, he served as chairman of the Waipāwa marae committee and on various other Māori bodies including a committee that was set up to discuss the rating of Māori land. At 19 he married Meri Hineitūrama Tāpihana of Te Arawa at Dannevirke. They had at least three sons and a daughter. Meri died in July 1912, and at Waipāwa on 28 April 1914 Meha married Rosina Jane Edith Morris of Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki and Te Aitanga a Hauiti. The couple had three boys and a girl when Rosina died in July 1920. The following year, at Dannevirke on 5 October, Meha married Rosina’s sister, Ivory Tēpora Morris. They had four daughters and three sons; Ivory died in February 1937.

The Mormons had a strong following among Māori in southern Hawke’s Bay. In 1913 the area became the home of the church’s Māori Agricultural College, which was destroyed in the 1931 earthquake. Meha was secretary to the college’s board of education from 1913 to 1924, and assistant secretary in 1931. He served on the board from 1925 to 1929.

Meha was one of the few Māori to visit Salt Lake City before 1920: he attended the temple ordinances (baptism of the dead) there in 1913 along with five others. His temple sealing was of great importance to him and he later attained the office of high priest. From December 1916 he also had the unusual distinction, not normally permitted to Māori, of serving on a mission, which visited various villages. With his mentor and friend Wiremu Duncan, he was involved between 1917 and 1919 with the American missionary Matthew Cowley in revising the Māori translation of The book of Mormon and two other Mormon classics: Doctrine and covenants and The pearl of great price. In 1921, when a Mormon apostle visited New Zealand and attended the annual Easter hui, Meha translated his messages.

In the 1920s many Māori Mormons drifted out of the church to follow T. W. Rātana. Meha read the Rātana covenant to the 1929 Mormon hui, but the mission president rejected Rātana’s suggestion that the two churches join together. Meha remained loyal to his own church. He was first counsellor to Eriata Nōpera, the first Māori president of a Mormon district in New Zealand; Nopera was appointed president of the Hawke’s Bay district in 1928. In due course Meha succeeded to this position.

After 1928 the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New Zealand gradually passed into the hands of Māori at local level and Meha was a key associate of the American leaders of the church. He constantly worked to make a bridge between it and the Māori world. He loved Māori traditions and reinterpreted them in the light of his Mormon values. He visited many old tohunga to search out information about the ancestors and legends of his people. In 1932 he was appointed head of a mission genealogy committee set up to encourage Māori to explore their genealogy for use in temple ordinances: increasing numbers of Māori were visiting the Mormon temple in Laie, Hawaii, the temple nearest to New Zealand. Through his efforts, the names of thousands of his ancestors were placed in Mormon temples. This work was his major contribution to the church.

During the Second World War Meha became a close associate of Matthew Cowley, the mission president who cemented the Māori identity of the Mormon church. In the postwar years Meha was respected by Mormon Māori as a patriarch: when the site for the New Zealand temple was being chosen by the church president in 1955, he had the honoured role of giving voice to a prophecy that Hamilton would be the site. Yet he saw that American church leaders were undergoing a dramatic turnaround in policy: they were abandoning respect for Māori values. Soon after the arrival of a new president, Gordon Young, in 1948, most of the elderly Māori district presidents, including Meha, were dismissed. As an act of appeasement, Meha was recognised, along with three other rangatira within the church, as a special ‘Nephite’ missionary to travel among Māori Mormons, who warmly honoured him.

Stuart Meha died on 7 November 1963 in Waipukurau, survived by 10 children. A short, solidly built farmer with an air of great dignity, Meha was symbolised the time when the Mormon church in New Zealand was a Māori church.

How to cite this page:

Peter J. Lineham. 'Meha, Stuart', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1998. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4m50/meha-stuart (accessed 30 March 2024)