Māui's Grandmother's Jawbone: The First Fishhook

Muriranga-whenua lives at the edge of things.

Her settlement is at the margin of the forest and the coastal land, which is where many powerful figures in the Māori tradition live: at boundaries, at the edges where two worlds meet. She is very old. She is very powerful. She carries the jawbone of a great ancestor in her left hand — the bone that has been in the family longer than anyone can trace, the bone that holds within it the accumulated power of the line.

Māui goes to her. He has been hearing about this bone since he returned to his family — whispered references, careful silences when he asks too directly. He goes to find out for himself.

He arrives at her settlement and she knows him before he announces himself. She is his grandmother; she has some version of the knowledge grandmothers have about the children they will never see but somehow recognize. She looks at the young man in front of her and she sees what he is — the child who was born premature and thrown into the sea in his mother’s topknot, who survived, who came back already different from his brothers, already more.

She asks what he wants.

He asks for the jawbone.

She takes it from her side and gives it to him. Not reluctantly — the tradition is clear that the giving is willing, is even eager, as if the bone has been waiting for the correct person to ask for it and Māui is that person. She hands it to him. He takes it. He turns it in his hands.

It looks, from the outside, like a jawbone — the curved form of the lower jaw, the teeth still in their sockets, the bone yellowed and polished from years of handling. But it is also more than a jawbone. The accumulated mana of the ancestors it came from has made it something different — a tool that can do what tools made from ordinary materials cannot do, an instrument that obeys the intention of the person wielding it more completely than any ordinary adze or hook.

He tests it. He uses it as an adze against a tree and the adze cuts deeper and smoother than any stone adze he has used. He uses it as a fishing hook — strips the barb from the jawbone’s curve, baits it with his own blood, drops it into the ocean — and it catches what no other hook would catch, finding the fish beneath the fish, reaching the depth where the impossible things live.

The jawbone is the instrument of everything that follows. He uses it to beat the sun into compliance. He uses it to build the tools for fishing up the North Island from the ocean floor. He uses it on Mahuika when she throws her last flame at him and he needs to survive her anger. He uses it every time a task exceeds what ordinary tools can accomplish.

Muriranga-whenua watches from her settlement at the edge of the forest. She knows what she gave. She knows what it will be used for. The jawbone from her face is now in the world in a new form — not the wisdom of the elder stored in the body’s bone but the active power of the culture-hero’s tool, reshaping the world.

The giving was the important act. The rest is what follows from a grandmother’s recognition that the right person finally came to ask.