What does tikanga mean? Examples and kawa

What does tikanga mean? In te reo Māori, tikanga ‘correct procedure, custom’ means the right way of doing things: Te Aka Māori Dictionary defines it as “the customary system of values and practices that have developed over time and are deeply embedded in the social context”. The word is built on tika ‘to be right, correct, just’, and the statement of tikanga given to the Supreme Court in 2020 puts it simply: tikanga Māori is “the right Māori way of doing things”. It covers values as well as rules, and everyday manners as well as ceremony. This guide sets out what the word means, everyday examples of tikanga that published sources actually state, how tikanga differs from kawa ‘marae protocol’, the words that go with it, and the place of tikanga in New Zealand law.

Updated 23 October 2026 · 10 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

Tikanga meaning: what Te Aka says

Te Aka Māori Dictionary gives four senses of tikanga, all nouns:

Sense	Te Aka’s meaning	Example in use
1	correct procedure, custom, habit, lore, method, manner, rule, way, code, meaning, plan, practice, convention, protocol	Māori custom; the customs of the marae; a code of conduct
2	correct, right	a right someone has, in Te Aka’s parliamentary example
3	reason, purpose, motive	Te Aka’s 1861 example: peacemaking was the reason for the trip
4	meaning, method, technique	He aha te tikanga o tēnā kupu? ‘What does that word mean?’

So the same word that names Māori custom is also the ordinary word for “meaning”. That is the sense a learner meets first, and the course uses it in exactly this way: He aha te tikanga? ‘What does it mean?’ Two everyday idioms in Te Aka are built on it too:

Māori	Meaning (Te Aka)
Ko te tikanga kei te kāinga ia. ‘He’s supposed to be at home.’	(ko) te tikanga: supposedly, strictly speaking, by rights, it’s supposed to be like this
Kei a koe te tikanga. ‘It’s up to you.’	kei a [koe] te tikanga: it’s up to [you], it’s [your] decision
tikanga tuku iho	customary law, tradition, lore, custom
tikanga o te marae	marae custom; Te Aka gives kawa as a synonym

Tika + -nga: where the word comes from

The Law Commission’s 2001 study paper Māori Custom and Values in New Zealand Law explains that tikanga “derives from the adjective ‘tika’ meaning ‘right (or correct) and just (or fair)’”, and that adding the suffix -nga makes it a noun: “way(s) of doing and thinking held by Māori to be just and correct, the right Māori ways”. Te Aka’s entry for tika gives the same family of meanings: correct, true, upright, right, just, fair, accurate, appropriate, lawful, proper, valid. In the course you will hear it on its own: He tika tāu. ‘You’re right.’

The paper also gathers how Māori scholars and judges have described tikanga:

Bishop Manuhuia Bennett: it indicates “the obligation to do things in the ‘right’ way”.
Chief Judge Joseph Williams: “essentially the Māori way of doing things – from the very mundane to the most sacred or important fields of human endeavour”.
Professor Hirini Moko Mead: procedures “established by precedents through time”, “held to be ritually correct”, and “tools of thought and understanding” that help people tell right from wrong.
Dame Joan Metge: tikanga “encompasses both ways of doing things and the underlying values, that is, practices and principles”.

The Commission adds that tikanga runs along a spectrum, “with values at one end and rules at the other”. Some tikanga deal firmly with serious wrongs; others are simply what is courteous or advisable, with no penalty for breaking them.

Examples of tikanga in everyday life

Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, says of the customs of tapu and noa around food that they “vary between tribes and are not always observed, and the best practice is to follow the guidance of the host people”; for any marae, its advice is to ask the local people what they expect. With that said, these are tikanga that Te Ara itself states, with the reason where Te Ara gives one. Where it gives none, the table says so rather than supplying one.

Example	Where	The reason, as the source gives it
Do not eat, drink or smoke inside an urupā (cemetery), and wash your hands with water as you leave	The urupā	An urupā is “one of the most tapu places in all of Māori society”; eating, drinking and smoking are noa ‘free from tapu, ordinary’, and washing reduces the tapu “to the safe state of noa” (Te Ara).
Wash your hands after greeting the bereaved family and farewelling the dead	At a tangihanga	Te Ara lists it without a separate reason.
Take your shoes off before going into the meeting house	The wharenui	Te Ara lists it without a reason.
Do not eat or drink in the meeting house, step over people, or sit on pillows	The wharenui	Te Ara lists them without reasons.
Wait for the karakia (grace) before eating; let the elders go first	The wharekai ‘dining hall’	Te Ara lists them without reasons.
Do not pass food over a person’s head, and do not sit on tables	The wharekai	Te Ara lists them without reasons beside them. Elsewhere it records that “food is noa” and that the head was traditionally “the most tapu part of the body”.
Give a koha ‘gift, contribution’ to your hosts	A pōwhiri	A way for guests “to show their appreciation and respond with equal generosity” (Te Ara).
Bury a baby’s whenua ‘placenta’ on land closely associated with a parent	After a birth	To symbolise “fertility and the continuity of life”; Te Ara notes that non-Māori practise it too.
Keep out of an area, or stop fishing there, while a rāhui ‘temporary ritual prohibition’ is in place	Land, sea, rivers	Te Aka: a rāhui separates people from tapu things, or conserves a resource, until it is lifted.

Most of these belong to the marae, and each is explained in context elsewhere: the welcome in pōwhiri explained, the buildings and what to do in each in the parts of a marae, the urupā and the unveiling in hura kōhatu, and why the head is the target of the worst Māori curses in Māori swear words.

Two examples from the Supreme Court record

The statement of tikanga written for the Supreme Court in 2020 by Sir Hirini Moko Mead and Sir Pou Temara gives two examples of tikanga that the wider public now follows. One is introducing yourself in formal settings by naming the groups you belong to and the places you are connected with, which is a pepeha. The other is the rāhui: in late 2017 Te Kawerau ā Maki laid a rāhui over the Waitākere forest against kauri dieback, and after the Whakaari (White Island) eruption of 9 December 2019, iwi including Ngāti Awa placed a rāhui on the sea. The statement says both were widely respected, in part because people understood the principles behind them.

Tikanga and kawa: what is the difference?

In short, tikanga is the whole system of right ways of doing things, and kawa is the protocol of a particular marae. Te Ara’s marae etiquette puts the two side by side: “All marae have their own kawa (protocols) and tikanga (rules).”

	Tikanga	Kawa
What it covers	Values and practices across the whole of life, “from the very mundane to the most sacred” (Chief Judge Williams, quoted by the Law Commission)	“The protocols that operate on the marae” (Te Ara); in Te Aka, the customs of the marae and wharenui, particularly pōwhiri, speeches and mihimihi
Who sets it	The principles are common to Māori; how they are practised “can vary between different iwi, hapū and whānau” (Statement of Tikanga)	“Laid down by the local whānau, hapū, or iwi associated with the marae” (Te Ara)
A typical example	Washing your hands as you leave an urupā	The order of speeches: hosts first, then visitors (pāeke), or the two sides alternating (tauutuutu), depending on the marae (Te Ara)
Where the word comes from	tika ‘right, correct’ + -nga (Law Commission)	A ceremony to lift the tapu from a new meeting house or canoe; Te Aka calls the marae-protocol sense “a modern extension of the word”
The same spelling also means	meaning; reason, purpose; a right	bitter, sour: a separate word in Te Aka

The opening ceremony behind the word is still performed. Te Ara explains that when a new meeting house or canoe is opened, a ceremony called tā i te kawa lifts the tapu and dedicates it, and that the literal meaning is to hit with a branch of the kawakawa tree. Te Aka records that the use of kawa for marae protocol came later.

The line between the two is not a hard one. Te Aka lists kawa among the synonyms of tikanga, and gives tikanga as a synonym of kawa in its marae-protocol sense. What the sources agree on is the advice: Te Ara’s is to ask the local people what they expect. How kawa changes from marae to marae during a welcome is set out in pōwhiri explained.

Two more words: ture and ritenga

Māori	Meaning (Te Aka)	How it differs from tikanga
ture	law, rule, statute, act (of parliament), commandment	A loanword. Joan Metge, quoted by the Law Commission, traces it to the Hebrew Torah: first the missionaries’ religious law, then the laws of the Governor and Parliament.
ritenga ‘custom, customary practice’	likeness, custom, customary practice, habit, practice; the normal way of doing things	From rite ‘alike’: the repetition of like actions. The Law Commission notes it is sometimes used as a synonym for tikanga.

The values behind tikanga

Tikanga is not a list of rules to memorise so much as values put into practice. The Law Commission names five central values that underpin tikanga Māori: whanaungatanga, mana, tapu, utu and kaitiakitanga, and adds that each tribal group has its own variation of each. The statement of tikanga given to the Supreme Court lists a few more, saying they are intertwined and “cannot be defined in isolation or translated by a simple English word”:

Māori	Te Aka’s meaning, in brief
tapu	sacred, prohibited, restricted, set apart, under atua protection
noa	free from the extensions of tapu, ordinary, unrestricted
mana	prestige, authority, power, status, spiritual power
utu	reciprocity, the keeping of balance in relationships; also payment and revenge
ea	be satisfied, settled (of an account or score), avenged
manaakitanga	hospitality, kindness, generosity, support
whanaungatanga	relationship, kinship, sense of family connection
whakapapa	genealogy, lineage, descent
kaitiakitanga	guardianship, stewardship

What each of these means in depth, and why none has a one-word English equivalent, is the subject of Māori words with no English equivalent, so it is not repeated here. The link to the examples above is direct: Te Aka’s own example sentence for noa is about sprinkling water on the hands and head after leaving a cemetery “so that she/he is freed from tapu”, and lifting tapu has its own verb, whakanoa ‘to remove tapu’.

Tikanga in New Zealand law

In 2022 the Supreme Court set out the place of tikanga in New Zealand law. The case, Ellis v R, was an appeal by a man who died before it could be heard, and the first question was whether the appeal could continue. The parties convened a wānanga ‘forum, seminar’ of tikanga experts at Te Herenga Waka Marae in Wellington in December 2019, and the statement it produced began:

Me whakauru ngā mātāpono o te tikanga Māori ki roto i ngā ture o te whenua.
Tikanga Māori is the first law of Aotearoa.
Tikanga Māori principles are part of the common law of Aotearoa. — Ngā Whakataunga a ngā Mātanga Tikanga, quoted in Ellis v R [2022] NZSC 114 at [85]

The first line, word for word with Te Aka: me whakauru ‘should include, incorporate’ ngā mātāpono ‘the principles’ o te tikanga Māori ‘of tikanga Māori’ ki roto i ngā ture o te whenua ‘into the laws of the land’. The reasons the Court gave on 7 October 2022 agreed on some points and divided on others:

Point	What the judges held
Tikanga in the common law	All five judges: tikanga has been and will continue to be recognised in the development of the common law where it is relevant, is part of New Zealand law through statutes and regulations, and may be relevant to discretions and the work of public bodies.
The first law	Three judges (Winkelmann CJ, Glazebrook and Williams JJ) accepted that tikanga was the first law of Aotearoa New Zealand and continues to shape and regulate the lives of Māori.
The old colonial tests	The same three held that the colonial tests for recognising custom no longer apply; the relationship will develop case by case.
Saying more	O’Regan and Arnold JJ did not think the case a suitable one for general pronouncements beyond the points all five agreed on.

Statutes use the word too. The Resource Management Act 1991 defines tikanga Maori as “Maori customary values and practices”, and defines kaitiakitanga as guardianship exercised “in accordance with tikanga Maori”. The Education and Training Act 2020 names, among the purposes of the schooling system, “reflecting and integrating te reo Māori, tikanga Māori, mātauranga Māori, and te ao Māori”. Where tikanga is the foundation of a whole school, see kōhanga reo and kura kaupapa.

Tikanga at work

Many workplaces now follow some tikanga. Te Ara notes that the pōwhiri has been used to welcome new employees, and many meetings open with a karakia: see karakia for meetings and Māori words at work. The word also names codes of conduct, which is Te Aka’s sense of “code”: the Teaching Council’s Code of Professional Responsibility is called Ngā Tikanga Matatika, from matatika ‘ethics’. What the standards ask of teachers is in te reo for teachers.

Going further

Tikanga, tika, tapu and noa are all words in our own free te reo Māori course, where every example is voiced by Papa Reo’s native-speaker voice. For the history of the word Māori itself, see what does Māori mean.