A New Zealand news program, Te Karere, has released a new segment featuring over 200 LDS missionaries from the New Zealand Hamilton Mission learning a new haka.
Created especially for their mission, the idea was first inspired by a Tahitian missionary. President Charles Rudd, mission president, explained in the segment, “We had some former missionaries that had completed their missions that live in New Zealand that had asked if they could come down and say farewell. So they came down and they actually performed a farewell haka and after that experience one of the missionaries going home…said to me President, why don’t we have a mission haka?”
The group of missionaries included both elders and sisters and multiple nationalities. They had help from Herweini Jones, a prominent teacher and figure in the Maori culture. You can watch the entire segment above. You can also watch a version of it performed by two missionaries in the mission by Elder Egbert and Elder Timu below.
