Te Aitanga a Hauiti and Paikea: Whale People in the Modern Whaling Era (original) (raw)

In Aotearoa New Zealand, whales are revered by Māori in whakapapa (ties of kinship and affinity) and through carvings, songs, and oratory. Māori relationships with whales span deep ancestral time to the present, and the commercial whaling era is a mere blip in thislongue durée. Here, we introduce a whale-riding ancestor called Paikea and his instantiation as a late nineteenth-century tekoteko (gable figure) now in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. We describe the relation-ship between Paikea and a gift made to him by his descendants from the tribal group Te Aitanga a Hauiti, of Ūawa on the east coast of the North Island, as an example of what it means to be whale people in the “modern whaling” period.