A hikoi walker wearing a red beret.
Photo: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone

Chelsea Reti, a teenager from Northland, marched with Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti from the start.

Every day she promised her mother that it would be her last and that she would return to Pawarenga. Eventually it became clear that 15-year-old Chelsea would go all the way to Wellington. That’s when his mother decided it was a good time to send him a red beret.

“When we choose to put something on our head where we know it will be visible, there is meaning behind that and there was meaning behind why I wore a red beret,” he said. she declared.

Chelsea (Te Rarawa, Ngātiwai, Te Aupōuri and Ngāti Kahu) wore it on the final day of the hikoi, when around 45,000 protesters marched to Parliament against the controversial Treaty Principles Bill.

She wasn’t the only one.

Chelsea Réti.
Photo: Whatanui Flavell/Haututū Creators

Countless other wāhine, mostly young, donned a red beret for the march. It is a pōtae (hat) steeped in history and symbolism for the Māori rights movement and other overseas freedom movements dating back decades.

Chelsea said her mother remembered the berets worn by Maori activists in the past. She was also inspired by Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, 22, who often wears berets on important occasions. Hana Te Hemara, Maipi-Clarke’s great-aunt wore a beret when she presented a petition in te reo Māori to Parliament in 1972.

Dr Bobby Luke Campbell, a fashion lecturer at Auckland University of Technology, says berets were first associated with freedom during the French Revolution in the late 17th century. The hat was adopted and modernized by the Black Panthers, an American civil rights group founded in the 1970s.

“They would use it as a kind of iconography,” Campbell said.

Members of the Polynesian Panthers.
Photo: John Miller

Campbell said the Polynesian Panthers popularized the beret as a symbol of freedom in New Zealand in the mid-1970s, spurred by protests against the Dawn Raids. Although hats are a Western symbol, they have been widely adopted and reinvented as a symbol for Māori.

On Tuesday, he saw many variations of the Wellington hikoi beret, including slanted berets and beret-style caps.

“The look was re-adopted and recontextualized to support the type of movement we have now.”

Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, Māori MP for Te Pāti.
Photo: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone

Te Koha O Te Moana Shortland, 17, also wore a red beret during the hīkoi. Part of its inspiration came from the 28th Māori Battalion who fought in World War II wearing berets. The bright red of Shortland’s beret mirrored that of the tino rangatiratanga flag.

“For Māori, red is a very important color as it generally represents blood or lineage, loss, history etc,” Shortland wrote to RNZ on Instagram.

Many Māori activists have adopted different styles of hats, Shortland noted, just as many kuia and kaumātua wear a range of striking pōtae to marae events. It’s hard to think of Dame Whina Cooper without her headscarf, for example, or Tame Iti and her bowler hat. Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi supports wearing a large cowboy hat, even in Parliament.

Te Koha O Te Moana Shortland.
Photo: provided

Hats are particularly important as the head is considered the most sacred part of the body among Māoridom, she adds.

“Māori have long worn head ornaments as a sign of honor, power and pride.”

The medium-edged model from fashion designer Adrienne Whitewood, wool hats with a plastic tiki and woven tāniko border are so popular that she “gets them by the thousands.”

Her stores in Rotorua and Wellington were packed when the hikoi arrived, and she says there’s a practical reason the hats are so popular with Māori.

“A lot of times when you’re at the marae, you’re often out and sitting outside, unsheltered.”