This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A tohunga is trained rather than simply appointed, apprenticed for years under a senior tohunga to learn karakia, genealogy and the specific craft the role required, whether that craft was healing, navigation, carving, tattooing or the priestly conduct of ritual. The word covers all of these because Maori tradition does not separate technical skill from spiritual authority the way some traditions do; carving a meeting house correctly and conducting a rite correctly draw on the same kind of trained access to tapu, the sacred restriction that governs what may be touched, said or done. Ranking existed within the role, from the tohunga ahurewa, custodians of the most sacred rites and genealogies, down through more specialized and locally scoped forms such as the tohunga kiato. A person could hold the title through a chiefly or priestly family line, through demonstrated skill, or through both, and different iwi and hapu recognized their own tohunga rather than deferring to any single national authority, a pattern the pan-Polynesian spread of the cognate role, kahuna in Hawaii, tahu'a in Tahiti, repeats at a wider scale: each island group developed the same kind of expert-priest independently within a shared ancestral framework rather than importing a single office from elsewhere.