Atua Wahine and Mana Wahine
My middle name, Rangipikitia, is the name of a tīpuna wahine, my great-grandmother and I feel her presence with me every day. As a child, I was brought up in a Pākehā world with no concept of anything beyond the physical and material. My dad is Māori, and my māmā is Pākehā and as a Māori and Pākehā family, we were isolated in the Pākehā and Christian community of Tawa twenty minutes out of Wellington.
My nanny, my dad’s mum, passed away before my first birthday, the youngest of her generation. My dad has six sisters, my aunties and they lived in Auckland, so I didn’t grow up with them around. Neither of my parents were religious and I didn’t know anything about the existence of tīpuna beyond death, except perhaps for the confusing nightmares I had as a child when old-looking Māori people would visit. While writing a university research project on a piece of whenua that had been owned by my great-great-grandmother, I was visited by her in a dream.
When Hinetītama finds out that Tāne Mahuta is her father and the father of her children, she chooses to leave him and prepare a place for their children in te ūkaipō. It is then she makes the decision to become Hinenuitepō. So, she recites a karakia to stop Tāne from following her and descends to te Pō. Through this karakia she demonstrates her power and the agency she holds in decision making over her life.
The ancestral narratives I grew up with were the Ranginui and Papatūānuku creation story, and stories of Māui. I remember reading these at school, sitting on the worn cushions in the reading corner. In many ways, I did not relate to the mythological figure of Māui. He was mischievous, and I was not. He was the pōtiki; I am the mātāmua. He was strong; I am small of build. He seemed to be loud, confident and larger than life and I could be quiet, sometimes introverted. However, perhaps the most significant difference was that Māui was a man.
There are three ruahine in the Māui narratives: Mahuika as fire, Murirangawhenua as the bones of the land and Hinenuitepō as the never-ending cycles of life and death. All three represent important aspects of Māori life that Māui has to learn about.
He is not just given this knowledge – he has to earn it.
The atua wāhine have often been presented as two-dimensional, bit-parts to male focused storytelling. These accounts only skim the surface of the depth of mātauranga that is available. Though I saw the strength of wahine Māori in my aunties and the communities around me, I was unable to find the narratives that I longed for: the ones that could provide insight and guidance to me as a young woman who was unsure of her role in our society. A gaping hole for me, were the stories of our atua wāhine.
It is generally agreed that in pre-colonial Māori cosmology, the atua wāhine and atua tāne both held an essential role in the natural order. In some narratives, this ancestral lineage can be traced through whakapapa to Papatūānuku and Ranginui. The lineage of Māori women begins with the creation of Hineahuone from Papatūānuku by Tāne Mahuta and her daughter Hinetītama is the mātāmua of the line of human beings; the tuākana of Māori women. These pūrākau provide evidence to support the powerful position alongside the atua tāne that the atua wāhine held before colonisation.
Whakapapa clearly shows the transference of divinity through the matrilineal line; from Hineahuone to Hinetītama, to her daughter Hinerauwhārangi and her daughter Hinemoana. Moko Mead considers Hinemoana to be the critical ancestor from which many oceanic lifeforms were born, including cockles, eels, lamprey, mullet, sea urchins, snapper, gurnard, groper, kingfish, moko, kahawai, tarakihi and the octopus.
Māori women’s mātauranga, specifically knowledge pertaining to the atua wāhine and aspects of the whare tangata, has been marginalised. After analysis of the interviewing, recording and writing processes of the early Pākehā male ethnographers, Dr Aroha Yates-Smith concluded that Māori women were generally ignored.
In his writings, Ranginui Walker discusses the powerful symbology of mythology. He describes mythology as the mirror-image of a culture, containing myth-messages. Pūrākau are neither fables, nor fireside stories; they are constructs deliberately employed by tīpuna and it may not be just the narratives themselves that are powerful but also the characters within them. The atua and their larger-than-life models for human behaviour.
Hineteiwaiwa was the prototype for Māori women. Our roles in society can be found in connection with her as the daughter of Tāne and Hinetītama and her actions as a woman. Within her name Hineteiwaiwa can be found references to wai (water) and wā (time/space), providing perhaps further evidence of an affinity between the Hine element and water.
Yates-Smith considered the ethnographic writings to contain strong evidence of a Eurocentric and Judaeo-Christian bias. This meant that sometimes negative qualities were accorded to the atua wāhine, not as a reflection of the beliefs of Māori prior to colonisation, but as a projection of the beliefs of the ethnographers themselves. These interpretations have continued to influence modern society’s attitude in general towards atua such as Hinenuitepō and by association, Māori women.
Religious historian Elaine Pagels argues that ideas concerning sexuality, moral freedom, and human value took definitive form as interpretations of the Genesis creation stories. These have, and continue to, affect Western culture and everyone in it, ever since.
Mahuika and the attributes of her persona, suggest a connection to ahikā, illustrated by her personification as the atua of fire. Takirirangi Smith considers pre-colonial Māori women to have been responsible for the maintaining of ahikā in their role as protectors of tribal whakapapa through the whare tangata.
It should not be hard to fathom the real mana that wāhine Māori scholars, Yates-Smith, Ani Mikaere and Ngahuia Murphy assert the atua wāhine held prior to colonisation. Female deities have occurred in many ancient societies, including European ones. Archeological findings across Europe have unearthed substantive evidence suggesting that between 7000 B.C. and 3000 B.C., the neolithic religion encompassed a cyclical nature of life including birth, death, growth, nurturing and regeneration, with a similar emphasis on female power to that of atua wāhine.
Murirangawhenua is a repository of knowledge and this includes whakapapa knowledge. When she shares this with Māui, he uses it to shape the physical world, not unlike any mokopuna who is taught by their elders and in adulthood, becomes a leader of their communities.
The large number of Old European figurines unearthed make it impossible to tabulate them accurately, but it is estimated they may number more than one hundred thousand, according to late archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbultas. Some of these artifacts take the shape of deities, priestesses, vulva, naked and pregnant women and a further three thousand figurines date back to 40,000 B.C. This suggests parts of Europe had a prepatriarchal belief system, not dissimilar to that of pre-colonial Māori cosmology.
The fear of women’s spirituality or power in Europe around the time of Captain Cook (1728-1779) is likely to have influenced the exclusion of atua wāhine in early ethnographic writings. In the context of women’s rights, from 1450 A.D. to 1750 A.D., thousands were executed across Europe for the crime of witchcraft. According to historian Brian Levack, and based on trial records from the time, it is not unreasonable to estimate that over a period of 300 years, 110,000 people across Europe were prosecuted and 60,000 executed for the crime of witchcraft, the vast majority of these women.
Māui’s mischievous actions and Mahuika’s retribution result in the seed of fire being placed into the trees. Fire is now available forevermore, a positive result to what could have been seen as a negative exchange.
Fire is like that; what can be seen as destructive is an important aspect of the natural life cycle of a forest and even assists some plants with the releasing of their seeds.
The persecution of “witches” is only one manifestation of the belief held in European society at the time: that women are inferior. It is not a radical leap to suggest entrenched misogyny affected the recording of pre-colonial Māori narratives. It seems likely the settlers will have wanted to maintain the social stratification of women. The exclusion of the atua wāhine from written accounts – female role models, with their attributes of strength, knowledge and wisdom – helped to achieve that end.
Written accounts of Māori cosmology by European settlers were undoubtedly biased in how they portrayed atua wāhine, but their exclusion is also of concern. In her lectures on the atua wāhine, Yates-Smith found that before attending her teachings, wāhine Māori had mostly only heard the pūrākau about the atua tāne; and that this new knowledge empowered those who participated.
From these pūrākau, the characteristics of Hineteiwaiwa can be unearthed: her strength, determination, endurance through childbirth, her ability to trick, her resourcefulness, talent for entertaining, the strength of her haka and her knowledge of powerful karakia.
According to Ani Mikaere, the removal of the female element from creation narratives has had devastating consequences across whānau, hapū and iwi, particularly for those that identify with the Māori feminine. Atua narratives provide insight into whānau relations and narratives that exclude the atua wāhine are by definition excluding one half of Māori society.
It is the birthright of wāhine Māori to know the mātauranga pertaining to their physical and spiritual bodies. It is their birthright to know the atua wāhine and the narratives through which these are expressed. It is the birthright of wāhine Māori to have absolute access to mana wahine, to know of their own power. For many, access to this has been denied through the misinterpretation, mistranslation and re-writing of pūrākau that have altered the fabric of Māori society. Wāhine Māori, have borne the brunt of gender discrimination and the ideas that women should or should not do certain things that are not based on pre-colonial tikanga have had a negative impact on Māori women for centuries.
The karakia of Hineteiwaiwa are used for childbirth, to lull other people to sleep and change the time-space reality of her world. As the atua of raranga and her ability to create karakia, it is posited that in the context of today, she could also be the atua of writing, the layering of narratives, viewpoints and stories.
This does not refer to tikanga that are in place to empower women, to protect them, such as the men sitting in front of women on the pae during pōwhiri. I am talking about tikanga that take the mana of wāhine Māori and those that identify with the feminine, that remove their agency within their worlds and communities. The discrediting and removal of the atua wāhine from the collective knowledge has created a dearth of archetypal role models.
The way forward is for young wahine Māori to stand with the kuia. To have the support of our kuia in asserting the ways of the atua wāhine, through mana wahine. To reclaim matrilineal knowledge transfer through the tikanga of tuakana/teina. To reinvigorate the traditional practices of wāhine in relation to the place of power for Māori women, the Whare Tangata. To reconnect with their mana atua and the atua wāhine as role models, archetypes and guides that are the birthright of all wāhine Māori.
Hinenuitepō is the protecting mother of the souls that took that journey, the great mother who awaits us in the next world. She is the archetypal grandmother, mother, maternal figure who receives her descendants as a force of unconditional love.
Both the rangatahi wāhine and the rangatira wāhine will be necessary. Most importantly, wāhine Māori, tāne Māori and those of all gender identifications should stand together as the combined expression of mana wahine and mana tāne. All are essential for creation, all are complementary and all are reflected in the pre-colonial narratives of Māori.
Hineteiwaiwa’s attributes as a performer suggest she could represent mana wahine forms of creativity, such as kapahaka, raranga, writing and other art forms. Her successful leadership of the women provides a role model for community leaders. The stories of Hineteiwaiwa in their deep fullness provide a powerful role model. They are exciting stories and could easily sit on bookshelves, next to the Māui narratives.
Because of colonisation, they do not.
