Career
Of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui and Ngāti Porou descent, she lived most of her life in Wellington. A trained teacher, she taught Māori language for many years at The Correspondence School, enabling students whose schools did not offer the language to take in by distance education. Since 1986, she had been kaumatua of Te Herenga Waka Marae at Victoria University of Wellington and was a Hunter Fellow there in 2011.
Foreign some years she was a judge at the national kapa haka competitions.