Te aitanga a Punga

Punga does not get a long, dramatic origin story of his own the way some of the atua (gods / spiritual beings) do. He is a son of Tangaroa, part of the great lineage of the sea, and his significance in the whakapapa comes less from what he himself did and more from who came after him and what happened to that family.

His sons were Ikatere and Tū-te-wehiwehi, and through them Punga became the ancestor of an enormous range of creatures that people, across a great many cultures and not just this one, tend to react to with a flinch before they look properly — sharks and rays with their strange flattened or serrated shapes, the many kinds of ngārara (reptiles / creeping things), lizards and geckos moving low and quick, and the insects and other crawling, scuttling things that turn up in the corner of a room and make people jump before they have even worked out what they are looking at.

There is a phrase still used today — te aitanga a Punga, the descendants of Punga — as a way of describing anything unusual or unlovely to look at. It gets used with real humour more often than genuine insult, the kind of line a nana might say about a peculiar-looking fish someone's caught, or an ugly little creature found under a rock. But sitting underneath that humour is something worth taking seriously: this is a whakapapa that made room, right from the start, for the odd, the strange, the things other traditions might simply call ugly and leave out of the story altogether.

Think about what a purely aesthetic worldview would have done with a shark, a wētā (large flightless insect), a stick insect, a moray eel. It would very likely have left them unaccounted for, treated as accidents or afterthoughts, background noise to the more obviously admirable parts of creation like the graceful bird or the towering tree. This whakapapa does not do that. It gives the strange-looking creatures of the world a named ancestor, a father, a place in the family tree as legitimate as anyone else's. Punga is not embarrassed by his descendants, and the kōrero is not embarrassed by him.

There is a real dignity offered here, and it is worth drawing out explicitly. Every living thing, in this way of understanding the world, has whakapapa — has ancestry, has relatives, has a right to be accounted for rather than dismissed. Being strange to human eyes does not exclude a creature from that web of relationship. It simply means its branch of the family looks different from the branches either side of it.

The other major event tied to Punga's name is the storm Tāwhirimātea sent down on his brothers after the separation of Ranginui and Papatūānuku. When that storm reached the sea, Punga's own family broke apart under the pressure of it — his sons Ikatere and Tū-te-wehiwehi could not agree on where safety lay, and the wider family of sharks, rays, lizards and insects has been divided between sea and land ever since. That scattering, and the argument that caused it, belongs properly to Ikatere and Tū-te-wehiwehi's own stories. But it is worth noting here that Punga's family was not spared the general upheaval simply because they were already considered strange or lesser. The storm did not sort creatures by how admired they were. It hit everyone, and everyone had to make hard choices about where to go.

So what do you do with Punga, practically, day to day? Mostly it comes down to a small adjustment in instinct. The next time a wētā turns up in your house, or a gecko is somewhere you did not expect one, or you pull something strange and spiny up on a line, notice the flinch happening in your own body — that is normal, that is human — and then notice what you do after the flinch. This whakapapa's answer is: carry it outside rather than killing it, put it back gently rather than discarding it, and if you feel like naming what you are doing, you can say you are returning one of Punga's family to where it belongs. It costs nothing, and it is a small, repeatable way of extending the dignity this pūrākau already extends to the overlooked creatures of the world.