Kupe Extended Biography
KupeExtended BiographyYou may wish to share this biography with students, or just to read it for your own information.Europeans traveling across their imperial worlds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were obsessed with their ethnographic habit of collecting histories and stories from the people they encountered, and translating them into their own language. In several parts of Polynesia, Europeans recorded being told about Kupe “the navigator,” an adventurer, leader, and skilled sailor. According to the stories, Kupe sailed from Hawaiki to Aotearoa, the islands of New Zealand, perhaps settling them for the first time and helping to establish the Māori people in this region.According to many of these narratives, Kupe’s people were having trouble back in Hawaiki, where the fish were disappearing. Kupe discovered that they were being driven away by an octopus that belonged to Kupe’s rival, Muturangi. Kupe chased the octopus so far that he eventually reached Aotearoa. Europeans treated these stories as either myth or history. In fact, some dismissed the stories of Kupe as entirely mythological. There is no written evidence of a man named Kupe, only oral tradition. The location of Hawaiki is unclear, but seems mythical. Within Aotearoa, different people claim to live in the area Kupe ended up. Some Māori iwi (communities) claim, for example, that Kupe arrived and settled at Wairarapa on the North Island, while others claim he continued on to the Arahura River on the South Island.European treatments of this story as history were even more problematic. They tended to try to fit the story into their own ways of understanding the past, attaching made-up estimated dates and precise routes that aren’t really meaningful to the Māori.So how should we understand these stories? How do the Māori tend to understand them?The Kupe stories are messages from the past that are meant to be meaningful for the present. In the first place, they help the Māori commemorate the difficult task their ancestors took on of navigating the world’s largest ocean, and the skill it took to make these journeys.Equally important, these stories are about establishing a sense of belonging. First, they help people understand their place in the specific region in which they live. In some cases, elements of the landscape are seen as physical memorials of people’s claims to belong in the land. For example, large boulders (such as those at Moeraki) are often described as cargo from Kupe’s waka (canoe).These stories also connect people in each location to each other. They give each iwi (community) a sense of belonging to a wider community and diaspora who are all connected to heroic figures like Kupe.So, the Kupe story connects people to their past, to their land, and to each other. As a result, the story of Kupe is about maintaining a usable past, one that is meaningful and useful—just like this course!
Kupe - Extended Biography2Sources: Kaamira, Himiona. “Kupe.” Translated by Bruce Biggs. Journal of the Polynesian Society 66 (1957), 219–235.Schafer, William J. Mapping the Godzone: A Primer on New Zealand Literature and Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998.