Māori and whales: an enduring relationship

A volume from the WhaleLIBRARY

Māori and whales: an enduring relationship

Māori traditions describe whales as guides, guardians and powerful beings associated with ancestral journeys. Whales also provided food, oil, teeth and bone. Knowledge and names differ between iwi, so a single account should not be presented as universal. Te Ara describes the broad category te whānau puha, animals that expel air, and records how whale imagery appears in carvings, language, place names and oral histories.

Māori as participants and leaders in whaling

Māori involvement in commercial whaling was not limited to supplying food or working under European captains. NZHistory records Māori joining whaling ships, travelling overseas and becoming boat steerers, headsmen and station operators. Te Ara also describes substantial Māori participation in shore crews.

The same trade created difficult relationships. It connected coastal communities to Sydney and other ports, but also involved alcohol, weapons, unequal treatment and profound effects on Māori society. A full history needs to include both Māori agency and the costs of the industry, without reducing people to a single role.

The regional Kāpiti evidence must be read specifically. A national proportion of Māori whalers does not prove the exact ethnic composition of a particular Kāpiti boat crew. Where individual names or roles survive in station accounts, they deserve to be recorded and connected to their own histories.

Before and beyond the commercial hunt

Whales occupy a much longer Māori history than the brief period of commercial shore whaling. Traditions involving ancestral journeys and whales, the naming of species in te reo Māori, and the use of stranded-whale resources all predate the nineteenth-century oil trade. The commercial fishery created additional relationships involving work, provisioning and exchange; it did not replace the earlier cultural significance of whales. These strands should be read together without treating one iwi’s tradition as a universal account for every rohe.

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