New Companion: Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr

Hoturoa paddles waka, sails waka, and teaches waka. He is one of the few holders of mātauranga whakatere waka here in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Hoturoa has built a national profile and gained international recognition as a passionate communicator for ocean voyaging.

Hoturoa is named after the famed Tainui waka captain and is the captain of the ocean-going waka Haunui. He has been sailing around the Pacific for more than thirty-five years.

Haunui was originally given the name Va’atele and made for American Samoa. Its maiden voyage was from American Samoa to Samoa in 2009, but when a tsunami hit the island, the waka was damaged and left. When Hoturoa took responsibility of the waka through his Te Toki Voyaging Trust, the waka was renamed ‘Haunui’.

Hoturoa is a native Māori speaker and spent the first six years of his life with the Tūhoe people in Rūātoki.

Until he was 6 years old, Hoturoa and his family lived with the Tūhoe people in Rūātoki, where he was immersed in te reo Māori. After finishing college in Auckland, he studied for a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Auckland, and a Master’s at the University of Waikato. His Master’s thesis investigated how the waka is a symbol of mana in the twenty-first century.

Hoturoa has been a lecturer of mātauranga Māori, drawing on his expertise on waka hourua at the University of Waikato and Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. He lectured at Waikato for almost 20 years.

He has authored publications on his experiences as a master navigator and co-authored the ground-breaking wayfinding leadership development courses for businesses, iwi and communuity groups.

More recently, he has specialised in education and leadership programmes that use waka as a platform for learning and development, including working with former youth offenders to help them change their lives through waka education.

In knowing the importance of passing on this mātauranga to the next generation, Hoturoa has built initiatives aimed at training young Māori as current and future leaders in the preservation of ocean-voyaging knowledge. In establishing the Te Hau Kōmaru National Waka Hourua Charitable Trust and the Te Toki Voyaging Trust, he has attracted both Māori and non-Māori stakeholders to support his waka educational programmes.

Adding to his kite, Hoturoa runs national waka ama (outrigger canoes) and waka hourua festivals.

Hoturoa co-chaired the Tuia 250 commemoration of the first Cook voyage to Aotearoa. The Tuia 250 commemoration, in 2019, marked the first meetings between Māori and Pākehā during the arrival of HMS Endeavour in 1769. It also celebrated more than 1,000 years of Pacific voyaging, migration, and settlement of Aotearoa.

Hoturoa’s vision, leadership and mana were crucial to the success of Tuia 250, particularly during controversy about the framing of the commemoration.

This work was cited as part of the reasoning for him being made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2020, awarded for “services to Māori and heritage commemoration”.