Evelyn Stokes

Dame Evelyn Mary Stokes (née Dinsdale; 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.

Biography Evelyn Mary Dinsdale was born in Tauranga, 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 master's 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 PhD 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. 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 University of Auckland, 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. 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. 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.

Stokes also played an important part in building up the map collection of the University of Waikato: Robson She also worked closely with two other Māori tribes, the Ngāti Tūwharetoa and the Ngāti Hauā, whose chief Wiremu Tamihana was the subject of a major biography published by Stokes.

Awards and honours In 1990, the University of Waikato awarded Stokes a personal chair "in recognition of her outstanding contribution to research and teaching". She was the last woman in New Zealand to be made a Dame before that title was replaced by "Distinguished Companion" in 2001, until damehoods were reintroduced in 2009. she was the second academic to be so honoured. On her death, Stokes was honoured with a tangi, a formal three-day Māori funeral ceremony, on Te Kohinga Mārama marae.

In 2017, Stokes was selected as one of the Royal Society Te Apārangi's "150 women in 150 words", celebrating the contributions of women to knowledge in New Zealand.

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