Thinkers Timeline

Linda Tuhiwai Smith is a Māori scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is one of the most important Indigenous thinkers on research and education in the world today. She was born in 1950 in Whakatāne, a town on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island. Her family belongs to two Māori iwi (tribes): Ngāti Awa on her father's side and Ngāti Porou on her mother's side. Her father, Sir Hirini Moko Mead, is himself a famous Māori scholar and anthropologist. As a teenager, she lived in the United States while her father completed his PhD. It was the late 1960s, a time of huge social change: the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, American Indian activism. These years shaped her political awareness. Back in New Zealand in the 1970s, she joined Ngā Tamatoa, a young Māori activist group that campaigned for te reo Māori (the Māori language) in schools. She became an educator and a scholar. She worked for many years at the University of Waikato, where she held senior leadership roles. She is now a distinguished professor at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, a Māori university. Her 1999 book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples made her internationally famous. It has been translated into five languages and cited hundreds of thousands of times. In 2023 she won the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand's highest scholarly honour. In 2016 she was appointed to the Waitangi Tribunal, which hears Māori claims against the New Zealand government. She is still active today.