The great Māori urban migration

Before the Second World War most Māori lived in the countryside, mainly within their own tribal districts. Te Ara puts the rural share at over 80%, and at 83% in 1936; NZHistory says about 75%. A trickle of people had moved to the cities from the 1920s, but the economic depression of the 1930s largely checked it. During the war young Māori who were not eligible for military service were 'manpowered' into industries supporting the war effort, and many came to the cities to work in munitions and other factories (see Māori War Effort Organisation). In Te Ara's words, this began 'a visible movement of Māori to the larger provincial centres'.

The movement grew after the war. New Zealand was prosperous and towns and cities needed workers, while rural growth had slowed and family farmlets were too few to support a rapidly growing Māori population. Te Ara describes it as a deliberate migration in search of 'the Big Three': work, money and pleasure. At first most migrants were unmarried young people looking for a more 'modern' life, and by the 1960s families were moving in significant numbers. In 1945, 26% of Māori lived in towns and cities. The figure was 35% by 1956, 62% in 1966 and nearly 80% by 1986, and many rural villages were left depopulated. Te Ara notes that the migration has been described as the most rapid movement of any population. After the Hunn Report, which recommended the integration of Māori into New Zealand society, the 'relocation' of rural Māori families to the cities became official policy, with help to find housing and work. Jack Hunn presented the report to the government in August 1960, and it was released in 1961.

Most of the first arrivals were poorly educated and took unskilled work in clothing factories, on the wharves, in freezing works, in transport and in city works, jobs that were vulnerable in hard times. Others went into teaching or government departments. Through the 1940s and 1950s the main difficulty was housing. In Auckland many migrants had to live in the then run-down inner suburbs of Freemans Bay, Ponsonby and Herne Bay, and hostels such as Waipapa in Auckland, Te Rāhui in Hamilton and Rēhua in Christchurch were set up. The Department of Māori Affairs followed a policy of 'pepper potting', scattering individual Māori families among Pākehā neighbours; Te Ara's entry on the Māori language says the aim was to encourage them to adopt Pākehā ideals, culture and language. As numbers grew, families were given state houses in large estates such as Te Atatū, Ōtara and Māngere in Auckland and Porirua and Wainuiomata in Wellington, which grew into Māori communities. At first many Pākehā wanted to discourage the migration, believing that city life was not for Māori.

With no extended family to fall back on, many young migrants faced unemployment and loneliness, and some ended up on the streets and in gangs. Their children grew up separated from their marae, the centre of Māori community life, and many could not speak the language. English was the language of work, school and leisure in the cities, and by the 1980s, NZHistory says, fewer than 20% of Māori knew enough te reo Māori (the Māori language) to be regarded as native speakers. Migrants formed new groups for support, including Māori clubs, welfare committees, wardens and branches of the Māori Women's Welfare League, whose first conference opened at the Ngāti Pōneke Young Māori Club in Wellington on 25 September 1951. In the early years state houses and community halls served as temporary marae, and from the 1960s urban marae were built, many of them pan-tribal, such as Hoani Waititi marae in West Auckland, opened in 1980.

By the 1970s the urban generation was producing leaders of a new Māori protest movement. The Auckland-based group Ngā Tamatoa sought the teaching of Māori in schools and more than symbolic acknowledgement of the Treaty of Waitangi, and in 1972 it joined two other groups to petition Parliament to promote the language (see The Māori language petition). Te Whānau o Waipareira Trust in West Auckland, founded in 1984, was one of several urban Māori authorities working in education, health and social services. In 1994 the trust made a claim to the Waitangi Tribunal for recognition as a legitimate representative of urban Māori, and later law changes let it take over welfare work from government agencies. In 2013, 84% of Māori lived in urban areas, a quarter of them in the Auckland region, and one in six people of Māori descent did not know their tribal affiliation.