Ngati Tumatauenga: A Standing Army Under Tu's Name

Tu's standing as actively venerated in a living tradition reaches an institution few other atua in this pass can claim. Ngati Tumatauenga, tribe of the god of war, is the official Maori name of the New Zealand Army today, granted in 1994 with the blessing of the reigning Maori Queen, Te Atairangikaahu, and of the iwi surrounding the Army's Waiouru base, Ngati Tuwharetoa, Ngati Kahungunu, Ngati Maniapoto and Ngati Tuhoe. The grant conferred on the Army a status of iwidom, treating the institution itself as a tribe standing under Tu's own name rather than merely invoking him as a decorative patron. The honor answers directly to the character already recorded of Tu, the brother who alone argued to kill Ranginui and Papatuanuku outright and who afterward subdued his siblings' domains by force. A modern national army bearing his name and holding formal iwi status under a living paramount chief is not a historical memorial to that character but a continuing institutional claim on it, distinguishing Tu's standing sharply from the more genealogical or seasonal forms his brothers carry: his is the one embodied, today, in a standing organization that still trains and still serves under his name.