The Kīngitanga, or Māori King Movement, is a political and cultural institution founded in 1858 to unite the independent tribes of Aotearoa New Zealand under a single monarch and to halt the loss of Māori land to British settlers. Centred on the Tainui people of the Waikato, it crowned Pōtatau Te Wherowhero as its first king, survived a colonial invasion and mass land confiscation in the 1860s, and endures today as a living movement based at Tūrangawaewae marae, where Ngā wai hono i te pō was crowned as its eighth monarch in 2024.
Māori society had no kings. For roughly five centuries after the first canoes reached Aotearoa, power ran through many chiefs, each answering to their own people. Then, as settler hunger for land threatened to swallow the country tribe by tribe, Māori leaders did something their history had never seen: they chose one king to stand above the tribes, hoping that unity could do what scattered resistance could not. The Crown answered the new king with an army. It invaded the Waikato, defeated his forces, and seized more than a million acres of his people's land. Yet the kingship it set out to destroy is still here.