Māori Eels New Zealand's Māori defend an extraordinary creature -- and themselves
Thu 1 Jul 2010: Māori Eels New Zealand's Māori defend an extraordinary creature -- and themselvesBY JAMES PROSEK
Published in the July/August 2010 issue of Orion magazine
A fascinating read about our “Tuna”, the connection with “Taniwha”, and to ‘te Iwi Māori’. James Prosek an American, collects oral accounts and witnesses real life situations from the Tangata Whenua, who still have a tangible relationship with the ‘tuna’.
Below are a few excerpts:
“Stella had taken off her flip-flops and was walking barefoot across the grass. She spread one of the cans of dog food near the edge of a pool. With a stick, she pushed some of the meat chunks toward the water. A single big eel came to the rim of the concrete ledge to investigate. It sniffed a few times, then tilted its head and body, propelled itself over the ledge onto the grass, and began taking pieces of the dog food in the side of its mouth. A few smaller eels followed, and soon the grass was wet from eel slime. They had no trouble coming completely out of the water to take the food.”
“I could see their features clearly: wide mouths, broad lips, and nostrils like tubular horns. These eels were big, but the biggest eels in the pool barely approached the ledge, hanging back in the darker depths of the pool. Once in a while I caught a glimpse of a real monster exposing its head and the front part of its body from the thick mats of watercress, but never its whole body. Stella squatted on the grass, her long black hair nearly touching the ground, letting the eels glide up between her bare feet, touching one and then another on the top of the head, petting them.” (pg, 4).
“The vision of Stella by the spring with the eels compounded my awe of seeing such a large fish feeding out of water. It breathed life into what were otherwise beautiful but, to me, lifeless stories recorded in fragments by colonial ethnographers. Seeing the eels and Stella together, I instantly understood that what I had been getting from books was a very small part of a deep and old relationship. Reading a Polynesian myth and expecting to understand its impact was like trying to know the glow of a flowering plant after it had been uprooted, dried, and pressed.” (pg, 4).
“When the Europeans came, they introduced the trout,” said D.J. “Then what happened is, the trout ate all the small native fish, the kokopu and the bullies. They thought to themselves, "Right, we own it now, we’re kings of the pool ". And then, from out of the depths, from the darkness, came the cultural factor, the old Tuna—the giant eel. "He’s an old fish, and he’s absolutely relentless, and he relentlessly stalks the trout.” D.J. paused. “The eel is morehu, the survivor. I think they’ll be there till dot. Till the end of the world as we know it.” (pg, 13)
To read the whole article click here
