Te utu a Tūmatauenga

There is a thread that runs through this whakapapa connecting Tū-te-wehiwehi's choice to flee inland during Tāwhirimātea's storm to a much larger pattern about who stood their ground during that terrible time and who did not — and it circles back, eventually, to Tūmatauenga, the brother who did stand.

When Tāwhirimātea came down on his siblings in his grief and fury, most of them ran or hid in some way. Tāne's forests were flattened. Tangaroa's family split apart, with one branch — Tū-te-wehiwehi's — fleeing the water for the land. Rongo and Haumia, the cultivated and wild foods, hid inside their own mother's body and have had to be dug for ever since. Only Tūmatauenga planted himself and took the full force of the storm without running, and it is that single act of standing firm that this whakapapa credits as the moment humans become who we are said to be — the descendants of the one brother who did not flee.

Tū-te-wehiwehi's people, sheltering in the forest under Tāne's cover, were part of that wider pattern of hiding rather than standing. This is not told as a condemnation exactly — fleeing a storm you cannot survive is not cowardice, it is sense — but it sits in clear contrast to what Tūmatauenga did, and that contrast has consequences that ripple forward.

Tūmatauenga is, in this whakapapa, the atua (gods / spiritual beings) most associated with human effort, conflict, and the hard, direct confrontation of difficulty rather than avoidance of it. Where his siblings ran or hid, he stood, and in some tellings he went on afterward to assert his dominance more directly over the very brothers and their descendants who had hidden from the storm rather than facing it — netting Tangaroa's fish, snaring Tāne's birds, digging up Rongo and Haumia's crops. The pattern is consistent: the one who stood ends up, generation after generation, being the one who has some kind of claim or reckoning with those who fled or hid.

This is one of the layers underneath why ngārara — the reptiles descended from Tū-te-wehiwehi — carry such a heavy and particular tapu in tikanga today. They are treated as creatures with a serious, watchful presence rather than ordinary background wildlife, and part of what sits inside that seriousness is this old inheritance: descended from a line that survived by hiding rather than standing, now permanently associated with caution, secrecy, and being encountered unexpectedly rather than sought out. A gecko appearing suddenly, or a tuatara (ancient reptile of Aotearoa) found somewhere significant, carries a kind of weight that a more ordinary creature would not — as though something is still watching from the position of having once needed to hide, still alert in a way the descendants of the one who stood his ground never quite needed to be.

None of this is offered as a verdict that hiding was wrong and standing was right. Whakapapa across this whole storm sequence resists that kind of tidy moral. Tū-te-wehiwehi's choice kept his family alive, the same as Ikatere's choice kept his family alive in the water, the same as hiding kept Rongo and Haumia's descendants fed underground ever since. Tūmatauenga's willingness to stand and fight produced its own consequences too — a heritage of conflict and effort that human beings have carried ever since, for better and for worse.

What is worth carrying from this into how ngārara (reptiles / creeping things) are treated even now is simply the respect the tapu asks for. If you find a tuatara or a lizard in a place that feels significant, the tikanga answer is not to pick it up, examine it, photograph it up close, or treat it as a curiosity. It is to notice it, acknowledge that it may be there doing a kind of quiet, watchful work its ancestors have done since a storm forced them into hiding long ago, and to leave the place, and the creature, undisturbed. That small act of restraint is a form of respect owed to a lineage that survived not by standing and fighting, the way Tūmatauenga's descendants did, but by staying still, staying hidden, and enduring — which, this whakapapa quietly insists, is its own kind of courage too.