05-05-2025
Posthumous degree for Maori princess, first indigenous woman at Oxford
The University of Oxford is to award a posthumous degree to a Maori princess who is believed to be the first indigenous woman to enrol there.
Makereti Papakura, born Margaret Pattison Staples-Browne in New Zealand in 1873, studied at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Society of Home Students, now St Anne's College, in 1927, where she read anthropology.
Her research considered the customs of her Te Arawa tribe from a female and indigenous perspective.
She never graduated: in April 1930, three weeks before she was due to present her thesis, she died unexpectedly.
With permission of Makereti's family, her dissertation was edited and later published posthumously by her friend and fellow Oxford anthropologist, TK Penniman, under the title The Old-Time Maori.
The research
