Te āwhā a Tāwhirimātea

When Tāwhirimātea came down in fury after the separation of his parents, he did not come down for one brother alone. He came for all of them who had taken part in prising Ranginui and Papatūānuku apart, and for those who had sheltered the ones responsible. Tangaroa, holder of the sea and Punga's own father, was one of his principal targets, and the storm that fell on the ocean was violent enough to break apart entire family lines that had, until that point, lived together without needing to choose a side.

Punga's descendants were caught directly in this. His sons Ikatere and Tū-te-wehiwehi, cousins and companions up until that point, found themselves facing the same terrifying wind and churning water and having completely different instincts about what to do next. There was, in the tellings that carry the detail furthest, an argument between them about where safety actually lay — the open water, moving with the very force that was attacking them, or the land, running from the sea altogether and finding cover.

Neither brother could persuade the other. Ikatere took his people and went deeper into the sea, and in time his descendants became every fish that swims in it. Tū-te-wehiwehi took his people the other way, fleeing inland, seeking shelter under the branches and root systems of Tāne's forest, and in time his descendants became the reptiles — the lizards, the geckos, the tuatara (ancient reptile of Aotearoa) that still favour a warm rock and a quiet corner.

What is striking about this moment, considered from Punga's position as the father watching it happen, is that there was no right answer available to give his sons. Both choices were reasonable responses to an overwhelming, genuinely dangerous situation. One brother trusted that going further into the source of the danger, into deep water, offered a kind of safety through familiarity with the sea itself. The other trusted that putting distance between his family and the water entirely, and finding solid shelter, was the wiser path. Both turned out to be survivable choices — both lines of descendants are still here — but the two decisions permanently split a single family into two very different ways of living in the world.

This is worth pausing on because it is not really a story about who chose correctly. It is a story about how a shared crisis, arriving suddenly and with real force, can reveal that people who have lived together comfortably actually hold quite different instincts about what safety looks like, and that sometimes there is no way to reconcile those instincts in the moment. Ikatere and Tū-te-wehiwehi did not fall out over something petty. They fell out because the storm forced an immediate decision, and neither brother's judgement was foolish, and yet the decisions pointed in opposite directions.

Punga himself is not given long speeches of grief in the tellings, but it is not hard to imagine what a father watching his sons split apart under Tāwhirimātea's storm, never to be fully reunited, might have felt. And the consequences of that split did not stay confined to one storm and one generation. It is said that Tangaroa never fully forgave the descendants who fled to land, seeing it as a kind of desertion in the middle of the fight, and that this is part of why the sea can still be read as eating away at the shoreline even now — an old grievance still being worked out, wave by wave, long after the original storm passed.

There is something in this worth carrying into ordinary family life, well beyond the specifics of fish and lizards. Crises do not create disagreements out of nothing. They tend to reveal disagreements about safety, about risk, about what matters most, that were already sitting quietly inside a family the whole time, waiting for pressure to bring them to the surface. When that happens to people you love, it is worth remembering Punga's sons: two people can each be acting out of real fear and real care, arrive at completely opposite decisions, and both still be right enough to survive it. The hard part, the part this whakapapa is honest about, is that surviving it does not always mean staying together afterwards.