Tene Waitere

His mother was Ani Pape, the daughter of Te Rāhui, a Ngāti Tarāwhai leader.

As a young girl, she was captured by Ngāpuhi during an attack on Rotorua in 1823 and taken as a slave to Northland, where she was forced to marry a Waitere.

When Tene was a few years old an uncle brought him, his elder sister Mereana Waitere and their mother to Ruatō, on Lake Rotoiti.

Eramiha Neke Kapua, another carver, was Waitere's nephew, son of his sister Mereana.

Some of Waitere's carvings included Tiki-a-Tamamutu, Hinemihi, the Kearoa whakawae (door jam) and Rauru, and in the 1900s worked on the Whakarewarewa model village near Rotorua.