Bruce Biggs

Bruce Grandison Biggs CBE (4 September 1921 – 18 October 2000) was an influential figure in the academic field of Māori studies in New Zealand. The first academic appointed (1950) to teach the Māori language at a New Zealand university, he taught and trained a whole generation of Māori academics.

Born in Auckland of Ngāti Maniapoto descent, Biggs attended New Lynn Primary School and Mt Albert Grammar School — the contemporary of Rob Muldoon and of lifelong friend the future historian Keith Sinclair. He qualified as a teacher at Auckland Teachers College and served during World War II in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in Fiji, where he became fluent in Fijian and collected word lists, grammar notes and folklore. After the war he married Joy Te Ruai Hetet and they had four children. They taught in Te Kao and Wairongomai, near Ruatoria. During these rural postings Biggs began to learn the Māori language.

In 1950 he won appointment to the first position in a New Zealand university dedicated to the teaching of the Māori language. The idea for this position came from Ralph Piddington, then head of the Anthropology Department at the University of Auckland. From 1951 to 1955 Biggs taught Stage 1 Māori language while completing his BA studies in education and anthropology. Proposals to advance Māori language study above Stage I level initially received much condemnation from academics in other disciplines: they expressed (unfounded) concerns about the lack of a sufficient body of written material on which to base a syllabus. After completing his MA, Biggs took leave to study structural linguistics at Bloomington, Indiana, where in 1957 he completed a PhD thesis entitled The Structure of New Zealand Maaori.

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