The fish of Maui

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34130, 17 April 1976, Page 12

The fish of Maui

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The first of three articles on Maori culture contributed by ROGER DUFF on behalf of the Canterbury Museum.

1 .ast year’s landprotest march from Northland to Wellington was a dramatic way of drawing attention to the continuing loss of Maori ancestral land. observers were those who could counter-charge that the pakeha had merely done to the Maori what the iatter had done to the Morion — dispossessed them of their land When Mrs Whina Cooper led her people from the “tail of the fish" in Northland to its “head” (mua-upoko) in Wellington they were treading the 700-mile backbone of the “fish of Main.” This name commemorates Maui the cul-ture-hero and demi-god who fished up islands in distant seas far back in the Polynesian dawn and doubtless never saw our great islands.

In North Island Maori traditions the most widely accepted human discoverer was Kupe the navigator dated, according to familv trees, at 950 A.D. His search for islands over the ever-receding horizen is dramatised by the fable that he was in endless pursuit of the giant octOpus of Muturangi. a name which translates as “the end of the horizon”. Kupe in his canoe Mata-Horua was accompanied by his brother-in-law Ngahue in the canoe Tawhiri-Rangi. Finally the monster was brought to bay near Cook Strait, its 30ft tentacles severed by the downward blow (arapaoa) of Kupe’s sacred adze. These were indeed marvellous times. Kupe was able to cut through the land to let the sea in and leave Arapaoa and the South Island standing apart.

It is generally agreed that Kupe gave the name

Aotearoa to the North Island. Most of his explorations were to the north, as commemorated by 27 place names scattered from Tory channel to Hokianga. Hokianga itself means “returning place”, from which Kupe is claimed to have sailed back to Hawaiki — never to return. It is difficult to believe that Kupe would abandon the vast and varied richness of New Zealand — even in this period when Hawaiki lacked the one tropical plant which was later to prove so successful here, the kumara or sweet potato. At this point we must refer to the main source of the Kupe legends, the learned tohunga, Te Matorohanga, of Wairarapa, who in the 1860 s began to recount his tribal traditions to be written down by his partEuropean disciple, Te Whata Horo (H. T. Jury). Infortunately this body of traditions was not pub-<

lished until ’ 1913, and well after the old narrator’s death. At this time the scribe was influenced by pakehainspired beliefs of the time. The first was that the seven canoes of the migration of four centuries later were guided by the sailing directions handed down from Kupe. It was therefore necessary to make him return to Hawaiki for the purpose.

The more serious distortion was possibly inspired by the two great European scholars of the day, Elsdon Best, of the Dominion Museum, and S. Percy Smith, editor of the “Journal of the Polynesian Society.” This second distortion, in brief, was that after Kupe and all his party returned to Hawaiki the land was settled by a tribe of inferior nonPolynesian aborigines known variously as Maruiwi and Mouriuri — a name too readily confused with Moriori.