The Maori Vision of Antarctica’s Future

Maori may have been first to reach Antarctica, in the seventh century. But the past matters less than what lies ahead, Indigenous scholars say.

The voyager Hui Te Rangiora, the story goes, had sailed his vessel south in the early seventh century in search of new lands when something alien appeared on the horizon. He saw enormous, barren summits jutting out of the sea and into the sky. He saw unfamiliar shapes in the waves: tresses waving at the surface, animals that dove to great depths and seas of pia, the Polynesian name for the white tuber called arrowroot. Hui Te Rangiora had sailed his vessel from the tropics to Antarctica. The ethnologist Stephenson Percy Smith reached this conclusion in 1899, when he wrote about this Polynesian narrative in a history of the Maori people, the early Polynesian settlers of New Zealand. Mr. Smith identified the bare rocks as icebergs, the wavy tresses as brown strands of bull kelp and the deep-diving animal as a sea lion or walrus. Perhaps the most convincing shred of evidence is the narrative’s term for the frozen ocean: Te tai-uka-a-pia, in which tai means sea, uka means ice, and a-pia means “in the manner of arrowroot.” When scraped, arrowroot flesh looks uncannily like snow. So from Hui Te Rangiora’s perspective, icebergs might have resembled mounds of powdered pia. “It’s fascinating to imagine what it must have been like to see those things, to try to make them familiar to us,” said Krushil Watene, a Maori expert on Indigenous philosophies at Massey University in Auckland. Dr. Watene is an author on two studies published recently, with Priscilla Wehi, a conservation biologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, that explore the historical and future links between Indigenous peoples and Antarctica.