Mohi Tūrei

Mohi Tūrei (c.1829–1914) was a notable New Zealand tribal leader, minister of religion, orator, and composer of haka. Of Māori descent, he identified with the Ngāti Porou iwi.

He was the only child of Te Omanga Tūrei of Ngāti Hokupu hapū and Makere Tangikuku of Te Aitanga‐a‐Mate hapū. Both as a child and as a young man, Mohi Tūrei grew up in a community that had accepted Christianity, and given it a Māori character. While Turei embraced Christianity, he acquired an understanding of old Maori religion and traditional learning from Pita Kapiti, a tohunga, at Te Tapere-Nui-ā-Whatonga. He is said to have made a deliberate intellectual choice between the two religions; nevertheless, he acquired from Pita Kapiti the depth of traditional learning for which he was respected in later years. There were, too, those who said that in his Christian ministry he used the arts he had learned from the tohunga. In September 1864, after four years study at Waerenga-a-hika, he was ordained deacon. He had attended the first synod of the diocese of Waiapu in 1861 as a lay synodsman; at the fourth synod in 1865, he was one of eight Māori and six Pākehā clergy present.

In the mid 1860s Mohi Tūrei married Meri Āwhina-a-te-rangi. They had four children – Wiremu Mātenga, Mere Te Rina, Ērena Hēni and Poihipi. It is not known when Meri died, nor when Mohi Tūrei married his second wife, Kararaina Korimete (Caroline Goldsmith), a school teacher. They were to have five children, Te Parāone, Teki, Ngārangi, Peta and Te Paaka.

He was an accomplished carver including working on the Hinerupe meeting house (Wharenui) at Te Araroa, and the interior carvings of Ohinewaiapu Marae.

Mohi Tūrei became the first vicar of Waiapu in 1904, and supervised the building of the second St John's Church there; the first, a raupō building, had been burned by Hauhau followers in 1865. By this time he was suffering from paralysis, which kept him in his bed for his last 13 years. He was said to be in his mid 80s when he died on 2 March 1914.