Evelyn Stokes
Encyclopedia
Dame Evelyn Mary Stokes, DNZM
(5 December 1936 – 15 August 2005) was a professor of geography
at the University of Waikato
in New Zealand
and a member of the New Zealand government's Waitangi Tribunal
. Throughout her life she worked for recognition of marginalised groups including women and Māori, and she published extensively on New Zealand historical geography
and on Māori land issues.
, New Zealand
, on 5 December 1936. She was educated at Tauranga Primary School and Tauranga College, where she was one of the first non-Māori to join the local kapa haka
group.
She then went to Canterbury University College
, earning a Masters degree with first class honours in geography in 1959. After earning this degree, she took a postgraduate teacher training course from Christchurch Teachers' College and taught briefly at Te Kuiti
high school, fulfilling the requirements of the post primary teachers' bursary that had funded her education.
Dinsdale was awarded a Fulbright Travel Grant
and a Smith-Mundt Grant from the United States government in 1960, freeing her to travel to Syracuse University
, where she received her Ph.D. in 1963 under the supervision of Donald Meinig
. While in America, she demonstrated long poi swinging
on television.
Soon after her return to New Zealand, in 1964, she married Brian Stokes, changing her name to Evelyn Stokes; they had two children, Donald and Philip. Although Evelyn and Brian Stokes later divorced, Dr. Stokes continued to use her married name professionally for the rest of her career.
Stokes was appointed to a lecturership with the Auckland University, and taught for a year for their Waikato branch before becoming a member of the geography department at Waikato University when that university was founded in 1964. At Waikato, she worked hard to promote Māori studies and to integrate local Māori communities into the university's activities, and she continued to serve as a faculty member for nearly 41 years, the longest tenure among the Waikato staff. In 1969 she was promoted to Senior Lecturer, and in 1975 to Reader. In the early 1970s, unusually for geography departments in New Zealand, the department at Waikato split into two, with physical geography moving to the Department of Earth Sciences; Stokes remained with the renamed Department of Human Geography and Environmental Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Johnson recalls her as “a wise but stroppy woman, someone who would have no truck with fools but who opened her heart, her mind and her home to those whose intellect and politics she respected,” and she was known as the “kuia” (a Māori word for a wise old woman) of the geography department.
Two major areas of Stokes' academic publication were on the history of the Tauranga area of New Zealand and of the Māori. She edited Te Raupatu o Tauranga Moana, a collection of written works related to the Tauranga area, her Masters thesis work was on settlements in the Tauranga area, and in 1980 she published a book on the history of Tauranga County which Bedford calls “the definitive history” of the area and for which she received the J. M. Sherrard “Major Award” in regional history. Māori resource use more generally was the subject of over 30 of her papers.
Another of Stokes' many interests was geography education at the secondary school level. She published a series of 20 papers aimed at the curricular needs for this level in both the New Zealand Journal of Geography and the New Zealand Geographer, and served from 1976 to 1987 as a member of New Zealand's National Geography Curriculum Committee.
An early experience that shaped Stokes' feminist
views was her service as a high school teacher, for which she was paid £100 less per year than men with equivalent levels of experience due to her gender.
With Anne Magee, Stokes helped establish gender studies and feminist studies at the University of Waikato in the late 1970s, and from an early date she pushed for feminist perspectives in geography. In 1987 Stokes and four colleagues published a “collective statement” on feminist geography in the New Zealand Geographer; Longhurst and Johnston provide a retrospective look at her work in this area.
Stokes also played an important part in building up the map collection of the University of Waikato: in 1964 she and Michael Selby transferred the New Zealand Geographic Society's collection to Waikato, she was the society's map librarian from 1966 to 1983, and she frequently added to the library with purchases from her travels abroad. Robson writes that “without her Waikato may never have had a Map Library or, at least, it would have been only a much poorer one,” and Bedford adds that “her passion for maps has kept a tradition of cartography very much alive for almost 40 years in Waikato's Geography Department.” Bedford also states that “her publications are renowned for the meticulous and innovative cartography,” and that her skills in this area were put to good use in her service on the editorial committee for the New Zealand Historical Atlas (1991–1997).
plant, a change from previous practices in which the land ownership was transferred to the government. She also worked closely with two other
Māori tribes, the Ngāti Tūwharetoa
and the Ngāti Haua, whose chief Wiremu Tamihana was the subject of a major biography published by Stokes.
For nearly 16 years, Stokes served as a member of the Waitangi Tribunal
, the New Zealand government commission that adjudicates Māori land claims with respect to the Treaty of Waitangi
. Stokes' research on the history of Tauranga County related closely to her work on an important tribunal case on the confiscation of land in the Tauranga area,
and her experience with the Ngāti Tahu and Ngāti Tūwharetoa helped guide her work with the Waitangi Tribunal on other cases involving geothermal resources. As part of the Waitangi Tribunal, Stokes worked on major reports on Pouakani, Muriwhenua, Te Maunga railways, Turangi township, Mohaka ki Ahuriri, Kaipara, and Hauraki, taking an important role in drafting the reports on these cases.
Stokes served as well for many years on the New Zealand Geographic Board
, the body charged with assigning official place names in New Zealand. During her tenure on the board, she helped guide it towards the restoration of indigenous names for places that had been renamed as part of the English colonisation of New Zealand.
“for services to tertiary education and Māori;” she was the last woman in New Zealand to be made a dame before that title was replaced by “distinguished companion” in 2001.
In 2001 the New Zealand Geographical Society honoured her with the Distinguished New Zealand Geographer Medal and with life membership in the society; she was the second academic to be so honoured. At that time, Garth Cant remarked that “no one within geography has made a more substantial and sustained contribution to the wholeness and wellbeing of this nation we call Aotearoa/New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s than Dame Evelyn Stokes.”
A special issue of New Zealand Geographer (volume 61, issue 2, August 2005) was devoted to “Evelyn Stokes and Geography at the University of Waikato.” Although the articles in it were written prior to Stokes' death, it was not published until soon after her death. On her death, Stokes was honoured with a tangi, a formal three-day Māori funeral ceremony, on Te Kohinga Mārama marai.
In 2006, the University of Waikato inaugurated a lecture series and doctoral scholarship in Stokes' memory. The first lecture in the series, by Malcolm McKinnon, president of the Professional Historians' Association of New Zealand / Aotearoa, was entitled “Mapping the Past: Evelyn Stokes and the History of Aotearoa.”
Stokes Peak, a mountain in the Kaimai Ranges
directly above the Kaimai Tunnel
near Tauranga, was named in her honour in 2010 by the New Zealand Geographic Board.
New Zealand Order of Merit
The New Zealand Order of Merit is an order established in 1996 "for those persons who in any field of endeavour, have rendered meritorious service to the Crown and nation or who have become distinguished by their eminence, talents, contributions or other merits."The order includes five...
(5 December 1936 – 15 August 2005) was a professor of geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
at the University of Waikato
University of Waikato
The University of Waikato is located in Hamilton and Tauranga, New Zealand, and was established in 1964. It has strengths across a broad range of subject areas, particularly its degrees in Computer Science and in Management...
in New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
and a member of the New Zealand government's Waitangi Tribunal
Waitangi Tribunal
The Waitangi Tribunal is a New Zealand permanent commission of inquiry established under the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975...
. Throughout her life she worked for recognition of marginalised groups including women and Māori, and she published extensively on New Zealand historical geography
Historical geography
Historical geography is the study of the human, physical, fictional, theoretical, and "real" geographies of the past. Historical geography studies a wide variety of issues and topics. A common theme is the study of the geographies of the past and how a place or region changes through time...
and on Māori land issues.
Biography
Evelyn Mary Dinsdale was born in TaurangaTauranga
Tauranga is the most populous city in the Bay of Plenty region, in the North Island of New Zealand.It was settled by Europeans in the early 19th century and was constituted as a city in 1963...
, New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
, on 5 December 1936. She was educated at Tauranga Primary School and Tauranga College, where she was one of the first non-Māori to join the local kapa haka
Kapa haka
The term Kapa haka is commonly known in Aotearoa as 'Maori Performing Arts' or the 'cultural dance' of Maori people...
group.
She then went to Canterbury University College
University of Canterbury
The University of Canterbury , New Zealand's second-oldest university, operates its main campus in the suburb of Ilam in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand...
, earning a Masters degree with first class honours in geography in 1959. After earning this degree, she took a postgraduate teacher training course from Christchurch Teachers' College and taught briefly at Te Kuiti
Te Kuiti
Te Kuiti is a small town in the south of the Waikato region of the North Island of New Zealand. It lies at the junction of State Highways 3 and 30 and on the North Island Main Trunk Railway, 80 km south of Hamilton....
high school, fulfilling the requirements of the post primary teachers' bursary that had funded her education.
Dinsdale was awarded a Fulbright Travel Grant
Fulbright Program
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...
and a Smith-Mundt Grant from the United States government in 1960, freeing her to travel to Syracuse University
Syracuse University
Syracuse University is a private research university located in Syracuse, New York, United States. Its roots can be traced back to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1832, which also later founded Genesee College...
, where she received her Ph.D. in 1963 under the supervision of Donald Meinig
D. W. Meinig
Donald William Meinig is an American geographer. He is the Maxwell Research Professor Emeritus of Geography at Syracuse University....
. While in America, she demonstrated long poi swinging
Poi (juggling)
Poi refers to both a style of performance art and the equipment used for engaging in poi performance. As a performance art, poi involves swinging tethered weights through a variety of rhythmical and geometric patterns. Poi artists may also sing or dance while swinging their poi...
on television.
Soon after her return to New Zealand, in 1964, she married Brian Stokes, changing her name to Evelyn Stokes; they had two children, Donald and Philip. Although Evelyn and Brian Stokes later divorced, Dr. Stokes continued to use her married name professionally for the rest of her career.
Stokes was appointed to a lecturership with the Auckland University, and taught for a year for their Waikato branch before becoming a member of the geography department at Waikato University when that university was founded in 1964. At Waikato, she worked hard to promote Māori studies and to integrate local Māori communities into the university's activities, and she continued to serve as a faculty member for nearly 41 years, the longest tenure among the Waikato staff. In 1969 she was promoted to Senior Lecturer, and in 1975 to Reader. In the early 1970s, unusually for geography departments in New Zealand, the department at Waikato split into two, with physical geography moving to the Department of Earth Sciences; Stokes remained with the renamed Department of Human Geography and Environmental Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Johnson recalls her as “a wise but stroppy woman, someone who would have no truck with fools but who opened her heart, her mind and her home to those whose intellect and politics she respected,” and she was known as the “kuia” (a Māori word for a wise old woman) of the geography department.
Academic work
Stokes was founding editor of the New Zealand Journal of Geography, which she formed from what was previously a pamphlet, the New Zealand Geographical Society Record, and for 10 years she served as its editor.Two major areas of Stokes' academic publication were on the history of the Tauranga area of New Zealand and of the Māori. She edited Te Raupatu o Tauranga Moana, a collection of written works related to the Tauranga area, her Masters thesis work was on settlements in the Tauranga area, and in 1980 she published a book on the history of Tauranga County which Bedford calls “the definitive history” of the area and for which she received the J. M. Sherrard “Major Award” in regional history. Māori resource use more generally was the subject of over 30 of her papers.
Another of Stokes' many interests was geography education at the secondary school level. She published a series of 20 papers aimed at the curricular needs for this level in both the New Zealand Journal of Geography and the New Zealand Geographer, and served from 1976 to 1987 as a member of New Zealand's National Geography Curriculum Committee.
An early experience that shaped Stokes' feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
views was her service as a high school teacher, for which she was paid £100 less per year than men with equivalent levels of experience due to her gender.
With Anne Magee, Stokes helped establish gender studies and feminist studies at the University of Waikato in the late 1970s, and from an early date she pushed for feminist perspectives in geography. In 1987 Stokes and four colleagues published a “collective statement” on feminist geography in the New Zealand Geographer; Longhurst and Johnston provide a retrospective look at her work in this area.
Stokes also played an important part in building up the map collection of the University of Waikato: in 1964 she and Michael Selby transferred the New Zealand Geographic Society's collection to Waikato, she was the society's map librarian from 1966 to 1983, and she frequently added to the library with purchases from her travels abroad. Robson writes that “without her Waikato may never have had a Map Library or, at least, it would have been only a much poorer one,” and Bedford adds that “her passion for maps has kept a tradition of cartography very much alive for almost 40 years in Waikato's Geography Department.” Bedford also states that “her publications are renowned for the meticulous and innovative cartography,” and that her skills in this area were put to good use in her service on the editorial committee for the New Zealand Historical Atlas (1991–1997).
Public service
In Stokes' capacity as a member of the Ngāti Tahu Tribal Trust (on which she served from 1980 to 1991) she helped negotiate a major lease of Māori land for the Ohaaki geothermal powerGeothermal power
Geothermal energy is thermal energy generated and stored in the Earth. Thermal energy is the energy that determines the temperature of matter. Earth's geothermal energy originates from the original formation of the planet and from radioactive decay of minerals...
plant, a change from previous practices in which the land ownership was transferred to the government. She also worked closely with two other
Māori tribes, the Ngāti Tūwharetoa
Ngati Tuwharetoa
Ngāti Tūwharetoa is an iwi descended from Ngātoro-i-rangi, the priest who navigated the Arawa canoe to New Zealand. The Tūwharetoa region extends from Te Awa o te Atua at Matata across the central plateau of the North Island to the lands around Mount Tongariro and Lake Taupo.The iwi is identified...
and the Ngāti Haua, whose chief Wiremu Tamihana was the subject of a major biography published by Stokes.
For nearly 16 years, Stokes served as a member of the Waitangi Tribunal
Waitangi Tribunal
The Waitangi Tribunal is a New Zealand permanent commission of inquiry established under the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975...
, the New Zealand government commission that adjudicates Māori land claims with respect to the Treaty of Waitangi
Treaty of Waitangi
The Treaty of Waitangi is a treaty first signed on 6 February 1840 by representatives of the British Crown and various Māori chiefs from the North Island of New Zealand....
. Stokes' research on the history of Tauranga County related closely to her work on an important tribunal case on the confiscation of land in the Tauranga area,
and her experience with the Ngāti Tahu and Ngāti Tūwharetoa helped guide her work with the Waitangi Tribunal on other cases involving geothermal resources. As part of the Waitangi Tribunal, Stokes worked on major reports on Pouakani, Muriwhenua, Te Maunga railways, Turangi township, Mohaka ki Ahuriri, Kaipara, and Hauraki, taking an important role in drafting the reports on these cases.
Stokes served as well for many years on the New Zealand Geographic Board
New Zealand Geographic Board
The New Zealand Geographic Board is constituted under the New Zealand Geographic Board Act 2008, formerly under the New Zealand Geographic Board Act 1946. Although an independent institution, it is responsible to the Minister for Land Information...
, the body charged with assigning official place names in New Zealand. During her tenure on the board, she helped guide it towards the restoration of indigenous names for places that had been renamed as part of the English colonisation of New Zealand.
Awards and honours
In 1990, the University of Waikato awarded Stokes a personal chair “in recognition of her outstanding contribution to research and teaching.” In the same year she was also awarded the New Zealand Commemoration Medal. In 1999, the New Zealand government made her Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of MeritNew Zealand Order of Merit
The New Zealand Order of Merit is an order established in 1996 "for those persons who in any field of endeavour, have rendered meritorious service to the Crown and nation or who have become distinguished by their eminence, talents, contributions or other merits."The order includes five...
“for services to tertiary education and Māori;” she was the last woman in New Zealand to be made a dame before that title was replaced by “distinguished companion” in 2001.
In 2001 the New Zealand Geographical Society honoured her with the Distinguished New Zealand Geographer Medal and with life membership in the society; she was the second academic to be so honoured. At that time, Garth Cant remarked that “no one within geography has made a more substantial and sustained contribution to the wholeness and wellbeing of this nation we call Aotearoa/New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s than Dame Evelyn Stokes.”
A special issue of New Zealand Geographer (volume 61, issue 2, August 2005) was devoted to “Evelyn Stokes and Geography at the University of Waikato.” Although the articles in it were written prior to Stokes' death, it was not published until soon after her death. On her death, Stokes was honoured with a tangi, a formal three-day Māori funeral ceremony, on Te Kohinga Mārama marai.
In 2006, the University of Waikato inaugurated a lecture series and doctoral scholarship in Stokes' memory. The first lecture in the series, by Malcolm McKinnon, president of the Professional Historians' Association of New Zealand / Aotearoa, was entitled “Mapping the Past: Evelyn Stokes and the History of Aotearoa.”
Stokes Peak, a mountain in the Kaimai Ranges
Kaimai Ranges
The Kaimai Range is a mountain range in the North Island of New Zealand. It is part of a series of ranges, with the Coromandel Range to the north and the Mamaku Ranges to the south. The Kaimai Range separates the Waikato in the west from the Bay of Plenty in the east.The highest point of the range...
directly above the Kaimai Tunnel
Kaimai Tunnel
The Kaimai Tunnel is a railway tunnel through the Kaimai Range in the North Island of New Zealand. Since it was opened in 1978, it has held the title of longest tunnel in New Zealand, assuming this distinction from the previous title holder, the Rimutaka Tunnel...
near Tauranga, was named in her honour in 2010 by the New Zealand Geographic Board.