Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Whale Rider, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Humans and Nature
Maori Identity
Gender and Power
Familial Love
Summary
Analysis
At Jeff’s family’s coffee plantation, Jeff’s mother, Clara, is uncomfortable with Rawiri being Maori. Jeff’s father, Tom, works hard to manage his plantation, even though he can’t walk or see due to Parkinsons. Jeff does whatever his father can’t, and Rawiri helps wherever he’s told to. It’s difficult to grow anything at all in Papua New Guinea’s perilous tropical highlands. But Rawiri also learns how the Papua New Guinea government tries to unite hundreds of different tribes around a single national identity. This helps him understand what happened to Maori people, and how they can fight for their rights and identity in a mostly white country.
Papua New Guinea is a diverse, mostly indigenous country that has only recently won its independence from the British and Australia. It is also desperately poor, and Jeff and his family are white settlers who moved there to profit off the cheap land and labor. On their plantation, nothing seems to have changed at all since the colonial era. It’s clear why Rawiri finds this unsettling: he’s participating in the same kind of exploitation that has devastated his own people for more than a century. Yet if Papua New Guinea reminds him of home in some ways, it sharply contrasts with it in others. As Rawiri points out, native Papua New Guineans belong to hundreds of different ethnic groups, mostly still live in their traditional communities, and have full political rights. Meanwhile, indigenous New Zealanders are almost all Maori, but they have largely forgotten their language and traditions after a century of government policies that tried to eradicate them through assimilation.
Themes
Porourangi writes Rawiri letters to keep him up to date on the family. He writes that Koro Apirana is opening new schools and still looking for a boy who can replace Kahu as chief. In another, he reveals that Kahu, now six, is returning to live with the family in Whangara. (But Koro Apirana still doesn’t love her.) Later, he writes about the importance of revitalizing Maori culture and the wisdom that Koro Apirana imparts in his classes.
Porourangi’s letters show that life continues as usual in Whangara while Rawiri is gone, and they are also a foreshadowing device. They indicate that, when Rawiri inevitably returns, he will be closer to Kahu than ever before, but the chieftainship question still won’t be resolved. Readers might wonder whether all he has learned living abroad may help him solve his family’s conflicts.
Themes
After a year and a half at the plantation, Jeff and Rawiri go on a trip. Jeff says that Rawiri seems homesick. He does, especially because Jeff’s parents (Clara and Tom) are ostracizing him more and more for being Maori. Back on the plantation, Rawiri gets a letter from Porourangi, who reports that Ana is pregnant.
Papua New Guinea may show Rawiri how far the Maori must come politically and culturally, but meeting Jeff’s family shows him how lucky he was to grow up with his big, loving, traditional family in Whangara. Not only is Jeff’s family neither close nor warm to one another, but he also sees how difficult it would be to navigate white-dominated environments as a Maori man. On another note, Ana’s pregnancy means that Koro Apirana might have a new heir—if her child is a son.
Themes
Rawiri finally decides to go home after three things happen: first, he overhears family friends comparing him to a dog at a party. Second, Jeff hits and kills one of their native workers while driving one night. Rawiri gets out to check on the man, but Jeff, Clara, and Tom are more afraid than concerned, so they keep driving and leave Rawiri behind. And finally, Porourangi writes that his new child is also a daughter, and he includes a letter from seven-year-old Kahu, who says she misses Rawiri and is leading Maori cultural events at school. Rawiri flies home the next month. On the flight, he sees the outline of a whale in the clouds. The chapter ends with the chant, “Hui e, haumi e, taiki e. / Let it be done.”
The first two events remind Rawiri that, no matter how idyllic it may look on the surface, his new life in Papua New Guinea depends on violence, exploitation, and racism against native people like himself. Thus, his travels have given him a glimpse of both New Zealand’s past and its future: the oppression his people once suffered and the political power they could soon wield. He recognizes that, even if Jeff treats him as an equal and a friend to his face, Jeff also believes in a racial hierarchy that values their lives differently, and he is not interested in standing up to it. In other words, Jeff is emphatically not Rawiri’s family—which makes the prospect of returning to his real one all the more enticing. After all, Rawiri loves Kahu more than anyone else in the world, and his new niece’s birth means that the line of chiefly succession is still unclear.
Themes
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