Mereana Pitman MNZM - Long campaign recognised

Mereana Pitman campaigning, in search of Maori Party candidacy at the 2008 General Election. Photo/File

The citation announcing Wairoa-born Mereana Pitman being made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Maori and family violence prevention says she's been a prominent campaigner on Maori issues for 25 years.

It's an understatement, for as an activist she's been around a long time, at least since the Springbok Tour protests of 1981, when she was at the core of protest organisation and appalled that the team would be welcome to New Zealand on a marae.

"We were horrified that the first welcome they would receive was from a marae, from our people, and from the people we were related to, so it was a matter of great shame to us," she would say many years later.

It was 36 years after that tour that she would confront race-related issues in New Zealand, as a keynote speaker at a Social Movements, Resistance and Social Change conference, saying: "I can't change the way white privilege works, but I can change the way our children respond to that."

Unable to be contacted by Hawke's Bay Today preceding today's announcement, Pitman is known as a humble, practical, unrelenting and respected battler for her people and the causes, including an active family violence prevention role that does date back about 25 years.

She was at the forefront of developing DOVE Hawke's Bay, for which she became a trainer and facilitator in 1998. She contributed to the development of violence prevention framework Mauri Ora, in her role as a member of the ministerial task force on family violence, she became national Maori chairperson of Women's Refuge, and she has been a co-ordinator of Ngati Kahungunu's Violence Free Iwi Strategy.

She has also authored and co-authored papers and publications addressing family violence and parenting from a kaupapa Maori research perspective and spoken publicly about issues affecting Maori children and youth.

She was one of three who sought Maori Party candidacy at the 2008 General Election, a nod which went to former Wairoa Mayor Derek Fox, who was unsuccessful in the eventual bid for a seat in Parliament.