Abstract
Mamae of Mangaia was a nineteenth-century pastor of the London Missionary Society, and a tribal historian whose significant collection of oral traditions forms the foundations of present day knowledge of pre-Christian Mangaian society, as disseminated through the scholarship of the missionary-ethnographer, William Wyatt Gill, and Māori anthropologist, Te Rangihīroa (Peter Buck). Amongst Mamae's many literary works is a collection of letters that forms the basis of this paper. Letters bring us closer to a writer's personality and to their experience of a particular social and cultural world. Mamae's letters relate incidents from his early life prior to Christianity and his service as a pastor, community leader and spokesperson, tribal historian and planter. By also drawing on other contemporary sources a more complete portrait can be painted of Mamae as a leader and scholar who helped sustain the ancestral knowledge underpinning Mangaia's society as it faced the challenges of the colonial era.