Suppressed by Law, 1907 to 1962

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Tohunga Suppression Act, passed by the New Zealand Parliament in 1907, made it a criminal offence for anyone claiming supernatural or spiritual power over the welfare of others to advise or treat a person suffering illness. Written and enforced as a public health measure against fraudulent healers, the Act functioned in practice as a direct legal attack on the tohunga institution itself, since sickness and spiritual authority were treated as connected in exactly the way the Act now criminalized. Enforcement fell unevenly and did not end tohunga practice outright, but it pushed transmission underground for the better part of six decades and interrupted the open teaching of karakia and healing knowledge between generations; the Act stood until its repeal in 1962. Loss from that interruption is not fully recoverable, and modern scholarship treats some of what earlier ethnographers recorded as incomplete or filtered through observers who did not hold the knowledge themselves. Contemporary Maori communities have continued and, since repeal, more openly revived tohunga roles, including a renewed attention to women who held the role historically and were often left out of the written record kept by outside observers during the suppression years. This record states the role and the Act's history; it does not set out karakia or any restricted ceremonial content the tradition itself holds as closed.