The Whale Rider Study Guide

Witi Ihimaera was born and raised in the town of Waituhi, on the northeastern coast of the North Island of New Zealand, and he belongs to the iwi (nation or tribe) of Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki. Most of his writing is set in this native region, including The Whale Rider, which mostly takes place in and around Whangara (about 50 kilometers from Waituhi). As a teenager, Ihimaera realized that all the books he could find either ignored or looked down on Maori people. So, he decided he would become a writer and create the books that were never available to him. After three years of university in Auckland, he moved home and spent a few years working as a journalist and postman. In just a few years in the early 1970s, he finished his degree in Wellington, got married, and published his first four books (two novels, a story collection, and a pamphlet on Maori issues). He spent the next decade collecting and publishing others’ work rather than writing his own. By day, he worked as a diplomat for the New Zealand government in Australia and the United States. In fact, he wrote The Whale Rider in three weeks in New York City. But he returned to New Zealand in 1989, started teaching literature at the University of Auckland, and resumed publishing books. His work took a more personal tone in the mid-1990s, a period when he also came out as gay and spent some time on a fellowship in Menton, France. In the last few decades, beyond receiving a wide variety of literary awards and honors, he has continued writing prolifically and serving as one of the most important Maori voices in public life.

The Whale Rider is set in the mid-1980s, about a decade into the political movement now known as the Maori Renaissance. The Maori originally migrated to Aotearoa (New Zealand) from a homeland elsewhere in the Pacific (traditionally called Hawaiki), likely around the year 1300. Europeans came to the islands in the early 1800s, provoking conflict but also creating opportunities for trade and cultural exchange. They annexed New Zealand into the British Empire while recognizing some of Maori people’s rights in the Treaty of Waitangi—only for a British court to declare it invalid in 1877, and the government to resume invading and stealing Maori land. Meanwhile, European diseases had killed as much as half of the Maori population. The Maori language was illegal and had all but disappeared in public life, and even many Maori leaders thought that the remaining Maori minority would just assimilate into the dominant white culture. But after decades of political organization and population growth, students and activists in Auckland launched a movement to save Maori culture from assimilation in the 1970s. They won important legal and symbolic victories, including by protecting Maori land rights and popularizing the idea of New Zealand as a bicultural nation (English and Maori). They also built language nests, Maori-language preschools designed to raise a new generation of children in the language. In The Whale Rider, Koro Apirana is active in this political movement and particularly in these schools. Another important aspect of the Maori Renaissance was a new wave of Maori art, literature, and scholarship that encouraged Maori people to reconsider their history and identity—including Witi Ihimaera’s works, most notably The Whale Rider.

Witi Ihimaera has published several dozen books, including not only novels and story collections but also nonfiction, memoirs, anthologies, and even opera libretti. After The Whale Rider, some of his best-known works are his first story collection, Pounamu Pounamu; the world’s first major anthology of Maori fiction, Into the World of Light; and the autobiographical novel Nights in the Gardens of Spain, which deals with Ihimaera’s coming out as gay later in life, after marrying a woman and having two daughters. Readers of The Whale Rider may also be interested in Ihimaera’s his more recent works on traditional Maori legend, Navigating the Stars: Maori Creation Myths and the anthology Pūrākau: Maori Myths Retold by Maori Writers. New Zealand’s most famous writer is arguably Katherine Mansfield, whose short fiction Witi Ihimaera reinterpreted in his controversial story collection Dear Miss Mansfield. Patricia Grace’s early short story collection Waiariki and Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People are two classic works of Maori literature. More recent prominent Maori novels include Tina Makereti’s The Imaginary Lives Of James Pōneke and Becky Manawatu’s Auē. Finally, readers interested in Maori culture and history may be interested in Ranginui Walker’s history Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End and Hirini Moko Mead’s modern treatise on Maori tradition, Tikanga Maori: Living by Maori Values.