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
In the hospital, Nanny Flowers embraces Kahu and Koro Apirana prays for forgiveness. Kahu asks if it’s time to wake up and explains that the whales told her to wait until both of her grandparents are present. She says that the ancient bull and old mother whales were arguing, too. “We don’t argue,” Nanny Flowers clarifies: “He argues and I win.”
Kahu’s comments about the whales further show how, for her, there’s no meaningful divide between humans and animals—the whales are people, just like her great-grandparents, and whales have as much to teach humans as humans do to whales. This shows what it means to see humans and nature as inherently linked, like in traditional Maori thought. Kahu’s comments also explicitly encourage readers to compare the whales’ relationship to Koro Apirana and Nanny Flowers’s. In both cases, patriarchal social structures give power to men, even when the women surrounding them are wiser and more capable of leading.
Themes
Kahu admits that she fell off the ancient whale and apologizes to Koro Apirana, saying that she knows she wouldn’t have fallen if she were a boy. But Koro Apirana embraces her and says she is the best grandchild ever. It doesn’t matter that she’s not a boy. She delightedly tells him that he’s the best grandfather ever, and he says he loves her. Then, the rest of the family returns to the hospital room.
Koro Apirana finally learns to love Kahu, but her apology for falling still demonstrates that she has internalized the sexism she learned from him—and may need some time to overcome it. Indeed, while the Apirana family might have overcome its internal conflicts, their work to save Maori culture and cultivate a new human attitude toward nature is only beginning.
Themes
Kahu shushes everyone and asks if they can hear the whales. The novel describes the ancient whale throwing Kahu off his back and the mother whale telling her that returning to and leading her people is her destiny. Kahu tells Koro Apirana that she has been “listening to [the whales] for ages now,” and the novel ends with the chant: “Hamui e, hui e, taiki e. / Let it be done.”
This concluding scene solves the novel’s last remaining mystery: what was Kahu doing when she stared at the ocean and made moaning noises? Here, the reader learns that she was talking to the whales. Notably, Koro Apirana identified the moment that humans forgot how to communicate with whales as the moment when humans severed their innate connection to nature, choosing money and power over “the original oneness of the world.” Thus, the meaning of Kahu’s special ability is clear: the Maori are returning to their roots and reviving their culture. Of course, this is all a metaphor for the Maori Renaissance, which had started to flourish when Ihimaera published this book—and continued to grow because of it.
Themes
