She took her own team of labourers, including fiancé Clarke Gayford and ministers, swapped her sandals for gumboots and trailed off into the caves with lantern bearers looking for all the world like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves heading into the mines.
Ardern has spent the past two days flanked by Labour's Maori caucus: a reminder of the mandate she was given during the election.
Tomorrow, Ardern will front up at Te Whare Runanga on the Treaty grounds for the day of reckoning she has set for herself.
She first stood there in 2018, the first woman to speak from that platform. It was her first year as Prime Minister, and the pregnant Ardern told Maori – and Ngāpuhi – that she hoped to be able to tell her daughter that she had earned the right to speak there. She told them to hold her to account.
On Thursday the judgement can be meted out – and the last week has seen a roll-out of announcements aimed at ensuring she passes muster.
Yesterday's announcement was to insert New Zealand history into the school curriculum.
It was timed to coincide with the Prime Minister's visit to one of the very places history was made: Ruapekapeka Pā.
Ardern, Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy and the British High Commissioner, Laura Clarke, were among those who spoke at the unveiling of a stone to mark the graves of 12 British troops who were killed in a battled in January 1846.
There were overtones in the words spoken by Ruapekapeka Trust chairman Pita Tipene at that Ruapekapeka ceremony of the inscription in stone at Gallipoli: Ataturks' famous words to the mothers of the Anzac dead: "your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well."
They were words and a ceremony of history starting to reconcile: Laura Clarke spoke of the British gratitude that the deaths of the men were being so marked.
But it was notable that there was no similar monument for the Maori who died in that war, estimated at about 20. Ardern walked up to the pā itself after the ceremony, her first visit there. She told Tipene she would ensure the government worked on the best way to mark those deaths.
Earlier in the week, the Government also announced it would move to prevent councils' decisions to set up Maori wards from being thwarted by a local referendum.
Then came $170m investment fund for Ngāpuhi, aimed at protecting and building an asset base while the iwi tries to sort out the issues hampering its Treaty settlement negotiations.
Ardern will make a further announcement during her address tomorrow.
But those already made are not without controversy. The Maori wards decision and history in schools consultation paper have already sparked criticism from some quarters.
Perhaps the greatest thing Ardern has shown Maori this week is not any of the individual announcements: but that she is willing to push ahead with things that might alienate some of the very voters that gave her that absolute majority.
