The prophetic movements that came to be known as Rātana and Ringatū emerged in a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century context transformed by rapid cultural contact, land loss, warfare and new religious languages. European missionaries began sustained engagement with Māori from the 1810s; mission stations established by groups such as the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and Wesleyan societies introduced literacy in te reo Māori and scriptural texts. By the 1840 signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) Māori communities were already engaged in selective appropriation of Christian scripture and forms. That engagement operated alongside continuing devotion to traditional concepts such as whakapapa (genealogical connectedness), mana (authority or prestige), tapu and noa (sacred/ordinary distinctions) and atua (ancestral and elemental beings). The prophetic movements of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can best be understood as creative syntheses that responded to these social fractures by reinterpreting Christian narrative through Māori cosmological and political categories.
A central formative figure for Ringatū is Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (commonly dated c.1832–1893). Historical records indicate that Te Kooti was arrested during the New Zealand Wars and transported, with other prisoners, to the Chatham Islands (Wharekauri) in 1866; he escaped in 1868. Ringatū—often dated from 1868—arose in the immediate aftermath of that experience. Adherents hold that Te Kooti received revelations and a missionary charge while in confinement and during the period of flight that followed; the tradition teaches that these revelations directed him to proclaim the “law of Moses” and to orient Māori suffering within the biblical story of covenant and exile. Historical scholarship situates those revelations within a broader milieu of resistance and millenarian innovation that characterised Māori responses to colonial pressure in the 1860s and 1870s, including the Pai Mārire (Hauhau) movement and other prophetic leaders.
Ringatū’s early gatherings were concentrated along Te Tairāwhiti (the East Coast) and in parts of the Bay of Plenty. The movement’s name—ringatū, literally “upraised hand”—refers to a distinctive physical gesture used in worship. Ringatū services historically emphasised readings of the Hebrew Bible, especially the Law and the Psalms, delivered through Māori translations of Scripture, and included ritual recitation of psalms, karakia (prayers), and oratory shaped by hapū (subtribal) identities. Adherents teach that Te Kooti framed Māori dispossession as a covenantal drama, drawing parallels between the exile and return traditions of the Israelites and the historical fortunes of particular iwi. Over time Ringatū-affiliated whānau and hapū retained strong local attachment to marae-based prayer houses and to genealogical claims that linked present-day congregants to the movement’s foundational events.
Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana (often called T. W. Rātana, 1873–1939) is the pivotal founder of the Rātana movement. Rātana’s biographical narrative—preserved both in movement hagiography and in contemporary historical accounts—places his initial prophetic experience in the aftermath of the 1918 influenza pandemic and a serious personal illness, with 1918–1920 commonly cited as the formative period. According to adherents, Rātana received visions and a healing commission that sent him on itinerant campaigns of prayer, proclamation and pastoral care. He began touring widely across the central North Island—especially the Whanganui, Rangitīkei and Wairarapa districts—and later the lower North Island, attracting large crowds with services that combined charismatic healing, prayer meetings, hymn singing in te reo Māori, denunciations of social injustice and an insistence on Māori unity.
The organisational infrastructure that became Rātana Pā, a communal and ritual centre established on land beside the Whanganui River, developed during the 1920s. Rātana Pā incorporated meeting houses, burial grounds and venues for large gatherings; it became the focus for annual commemorations that marked milestones in the movement’s life. By the mid-1920s Rātana had consolidated both a religious community and a programme of social and political mobilisation. Adherents teach that Rātana’s mission combined spiritual restoration with a national programme for Māori welfare, land redress and unity; scholars note that Rātana’s rhetoric explicitly connected religious renewal to claims for treaty justice and parliamentary recognition.
Both movements drew upon the same broad set of source materials—Māori-language Bible translations (the first complete Māori Bible commonly cited was printed in 1868 by the British and Foreign Bible Society), hymnody translated into te reo Māori, and missionary-era catechisms and teaching practices—but they integrated these selectively. Ringatū placed heightened emphasis on Old Testament narratives and psalms, reading Māori history alongside the story of Israel. Rātana combined elements of mainstream Christian sacramentalism, charismatic healing practices (including laying on of hands and public prayer for the sick), and a prophetic critique of the colonial state. Rātana services incorporated waiata (spiritual songs), prayer, and ritual observances that adapted Anglican and nonconformist forms into a distinctly Māori idiom. Both traditions made extensive use of Māori translations of Scripture and retained sermons and oral accounts in te reo Māori as central components of transmission.
The emergence of these movements must be read alongside other Māori religious and political responses of the era. The Kīngitanga (Māori King Movement, inaugurated in the 1850s) and Parihaka’s organised nonviolent resistance under Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi (active in the 1870s–1880s) are parallel institutions of Māori sociopolitical assertion; these did not belong to the same ritual-religious family but they shared an overlapping geography of grievance and aspiration. The decades following the 1860s saw cycles of armed conflict, land confiscations (raupatu), and legal marginalisation, which contributed to the appeal of movements that offered both spiritual meaning and modes of collective action.
Scholars note a tension in the historiography between older anthropological accounts that framed these movements as examples of “irrational millenarianism” and later postcolonial and ethnohistorical scholarship that reads them as sophisticated politico-religious responses to dispossession, cultural dislocation and legal marginalisation. The movements themselves typically present their origin stories as direct revelations or callings; historians and social scientists therefore treat such testimonies as subjectively authoritative for adherents while analysing social causes, regional patterns of support and political consequences in secular terms.
Early institutional consolidation differed between the two movements. Ringatū remained more immediately associated with Te Kooti’s personal leadership and with clan- and hapū-based collectives concentrated in Tairāwhiti and neighbouring districts; its worship was often organised around local marae and whānau networks. Rātana, by contrast, developed a recognisably centralised community at Rātana Pā and a national organisational apparatus—prophetic roopu (teams), scheduled healing services, and a calendar of communal observances—that could be mobilised across regions. In the 1920s and 1930s Rātana leaders increasingly adopted an explicit electoral strategy, seeking influence within the four Māori seats established by Parliament in 1867 and pursuing alliances with Pākehā political parties as a means to press treaty claims and secure social welfare reforms. Historians commonly identify the mid-to-late 1930s as a turning point when Rātana activists began to combine religious authority with formal political negotiation.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also witnessed state responses that shaped both movements. Colonial policing and wartime measures, the social disruption of the 1918 influenza pandemic, and longer-term processes of economic marginalisation produced demographic and psychic ruptures. From the late nineteenth century onward, internal migration—particularly twentieth-century urbanisation—brought adherents of both movements into Auckland, Wellington, and other urban centres, where they established new congregations and adapted ritual life to urban settings. By the time of Rātana’s death in 1939 and Te Kooti’s earlier death in 1893, both movements had left durable institutional traces—prayer houses, distinct liturgical patterns, oral histories and genealogical claims linking present congregants to those first prophetic moments. These early decades established patterns of belief, ritual, political engagement and intergenerational transmission that continue, in various forms and regional expressions, to animate Rātana and Ringatū practice into the present day.