Arapeta Marukitepua Pitapitanuiarangi Awatere DSO, MC (25 April 1910 – 6 March 1976) was a New Zealand interpreter, military leader, Māori welfare officer, and local politician.

He served in the Māori Battalion, including a period as its commander, during the Second World War and was awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order.

His early years were spent in Northland, at his mother's marae at Whangaruru, before he returned to the East Coast at the age of 6.

[1] Awatere gained an interpreter qualification in Māori in 1925 and once he completed his education three years later, joined the Native Department.

[1][2] That he never had a son was a source of disappointment to him; his youngest daughter, Donna Awatere Huata, was born in 1949 and later wrote that after her birth, her father left the family for two years.

[13] On his return to civilian life, Awatere initially took a tour of New Zealand visiting marae to commemorate the soldiers of the 28th Battalion who had been killed during the war.

During the 1950s he moved around the central North Island as a Māori district welfare officer for Whanganui, then Rotorua and finally Auckland.

In 1969 he stabbed to death his girlfriend's new lover, which he unsuccessfully tried to blame on diabetes induced psychosis, and was later convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

[1][3] His autobiography, which he wrote while at Mount Eden jail, edited by his granddaughter and including several of his poems, was published in 2003 as Awatere: A Soldier's Story.