- She was awarded the M.B.E. (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1953 Queen's Honours List; awarded the C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1973 Queen's Honours List; awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1980 Queen's Honours List; and awarded the Member of the Order of New Zealand in the 1991 Queen's Honours List for her services to New Zealand.
- She was the Founding president of Maori Women's Welfare League from 1951 to 1957 and New Zealand President of Maori Land Rights from 1975 to 1994.
- She had a son and a daughter from her first marriage to Richard Gilbert. She had two sons and two daughters from her second marriage to William Cooper.
- She was born the mud floor of a cook house in the Hokianga region of New Zealand's far north that remains one of the country's poorest today.
- She achieved nationwide fame seven decades later, in her 80th year when, crippled with arthritis, she led 5,000 people on a 700-mile march from her Northland home to Parliament in Wellington, to highlight the fact that Europeans had seized all but 2.5 million acres of New Zealand's 66 million acres of land in 135 years of British colonization.
- She was employed over the years as a gum digger, teacher, shopkeeper, cattle and pig breeder and a leader of Maori land development in the Hokianga.
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