Witi Ihimaera - The Whale Rider

Kahu giggled. She paused. Then her eyes brimmed with tears. In a small voice she said, ‘I fell off.’

‘What?’

‘I fell off the whale. If I was a boy I would have held on tight. I’m sorry, Paka, I’m not a boy.’

The old man cradled Kahu in his arms, partly because of emotion and partly because he didn’t want those big ears out there to hear their big chief crying.

‘You’re the best grandchild in the whole wide world,’ he said. ‘Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Really, Paka?’ Kahu gasped. She hugged him tightly and pressed her face against him. ‘Oh thank you, Paka. You’re the best grandad in the whole wide world.’

‘I love you,’ Koro Apirana said.

‘Me too,’ Nanny Flowers added.

‘And don’t forget about us,’ said the rest of the iwi as they crowded into the room.

Suddenly, in the joyous melee, Kahu raised a finger to her lips: Sssshh .

The ancient bull whale breached the surface, leaping high into the moonlit sky. The sacred sign, the tattoo, was agleam like liquid silver. The bull whale flexed his muscles, releasing Kahu, and she felt herself tumbling along his back, tumbling, tumbling, tumbling. All around her the whales were leaping, and the air was filled with diamond spray .

‘Can’t you hear them?’ Kahu asked. Interlock .

She fell into the sea. The thunder of the whales departing was loud in her ears. She opened her eyes and looked downward. Through the foaming water she could see huge tail fins waving farewell, ‘Child, farewell.’

Then from the backwash of Time came the voice of the old mother whale. ‘Child, your people await you. Return to the Kingdom of Tane and fulfil your destiny.’ And suddenly the sea was drenched again with a glorious echoing music from the dark shapes sounding .

Kahu looked at Koro Apirana, her eyes shining.

‘Oh Paka , can’t you hear them? I’ve been listening to them for ages now. Oh Paka , and the whales are still singing,’ she said.

Haumi e, hui e, taiki e .

Let it be done.

For this newest edition of The Whale Rider , I pay tribute to the ancestor who started it all: the original whale rider. The whale rider is memorialised by a gable structure which rides atop the meeting house, Whitireia, in Whangara, a small Maori settlement near Gisborne; the meeting house was carved under the supervision of the great master carver Pine Taiapa and opened in 1939. When I was a very young boy and first saw the sculpture and heard the story of the whale rider’s epic voyage from Hawaiki (Sir Apirana Ngata pinpointed Hawaiki as the group of islands clustered around Bora Bora, notably Raiatea, in French Polynesia) my imagination was immediately captured.

The whale rider faces eastward across the sea in the direction of the place where the sun rises every morning. He is well known and claimed throughout Polynesia; he is a Pacific version of Ulysses and, like that Greek hero, he has become the stuff of legends. According to early twentieth century informant Wiremu Potae, who told it to William Colenso, his name was Kahutia Te Rangi and he was the firstborn son of Uenuku, one of the chiefs of Hawaiki. He had a brother, Ruatapu, who was jealous of him and wanted to kill him. He planned to do this by taking Kahutia Te Rangi and sons from other royal houses of Hawaiki out in a seagoing waka, and scuttling it. However, when the canoe began to sink, a huge whale came up from the bottom of the ocean to save Kahutia Te Rangi. It came in response to his chant, his karakia, today known as the Paikea chant, asking for assistance from the gods so that he might prevail.

The whale lifted Kahutia Te Rangi up and carried him to safety, swimming many days and nights. But it did not head back to Hawaiki. Instead, it carried Kahutia Te Rangi southward; perhaps it was on its migratory journey around the great Southern Ocean, heading for the rich krill feeding grounds at the bottom of the world. Sometimes the seas and skies were calm. At other times there were fierce storms, mountainous waves, heavy rain and dark skies split by thunder and jagged lightning. But Kahutia Te Rangi continued his karakia, and early one morning as the star Poututerangi (Altair) appeared over a far distant mountain arising from the sea (this was Mount Hikurangi, 1756 metres high, the first place on the earth’s surface to greet the sun every morning), he realised that the whale had brought him to a land only rumoured about in Hawaiki; a fabled, bounteous country of great beauty and richness called Aotearoa (New Zealand).

Kahutia Te Rangi made landfall at Ahuahu (Mercury Island), which is off the Coromandel Peninsula. There he took the name of Paikea to honour the whale that had brought him to Aotearoa, and in remembrance of his epic voyage. Other settlers were already living in Aotearoa and, in time, Paikea married a woman from Ahuahu, whose name was Parawhenuamea. Travelling south-east, he also married Te Manawatina at Whakatane and Huturangi at Waiapu. With his wives he fathered many children. He settled in Whangara with Huturangi, who was the daughter of Whironui at Koutuamoa Point.

From Paikea great chiefs descended, including Porourangi; and it was from Porourangi that my mother’s tribe, Ngati Porou, takes its name. Porourangi’s brother, Tahu, moved to the South Island and is regarded by many as their founding ancestor. As for me, I have always been very proud to be a member of Ngati Porou and to be able to trace my genealogy back to Paikea. He is what we call the tahuhu, the ridgepole, of Te Tairawhiti, the migrant voyager and originating ancestor of the tribe of the Eastern Tides, also binding other tribes of the East Coast, Hawke’s Bay and the South Island together by blood ancestry.

This is one of the many versions of the whale rider story. Another version describes Kahutia Te Rangi as not only a royal son of Hawaiki but also a man who, by mystical powers, could transform himself into a taniwha, a tipua, a whale even — operating fluidly between his human form and his ocean form. And why should we not believe this? After all, Hawaiki was a paradisiacal land, a Polynesian Eden half real, half unreal, where man walked with the gods and communed with beasts, birds, forests and all animate and inanimate things. In this version, the murderous Ruatapu pursued Kahutia Te Rangi to Aotearoa; it must have been a thrilling sea chase. Ruatapu summoned up a series of five tidal waves and sent them ahead of him, but Kahutia Te Rangi managed to get ashore and change back into his human form before they were able to swamp him. The waves then recoiled, returning to their source, where they overwhelmed he who had sent them — and so Ruatapu went to his watery grave. The local people say that if you come to Whangara in September you can still see these tidal waves breaking on the shore.

There are many variants to the story. Some say that Kahutia Te Rangi and Paikea were two different people; and the narrative concerning Paikea and his brother, Ruatapu, is still disputed. Leo Fowler, for instance, wrote in Te Mana o Turanga (1944) that there was another brother, Ira Kaiputahi; and he gives further information about the canoe that was scuttled: it was called Tutepewakarangi and it was a war canoe on its ceremonial first voyage. Fowler explains that the reason Kahutia Te Rangi changed his name was that Paikea is also the name given by Maori to a proper species of whale that is very long with a sharpish, V-shaped head, a pike-nose and a white underbelly fluted longitudinally. And the reason Kahutia Te Rangi was able to call on a whale to rescue him, or even to change into a whale, was because his genealogy connected him to beasts of the sea — to the porpoise and Portuguese man-of-war and, in particular, to large whales, including pike-nosed whales.