In every generation, there arises the quintessential chief of the Maori people. A male first-born child who is said to claim its descent from Paikea, the whale rider who was originally from Hawaii. This is the pretence upon which Witi Ihimaera builds his novel around, upon which this film is based.
The film starts itself off with feelings of death. Death of a mother and child, death of a relationship between father and son, death of a male lineage. It is here that a little girl named Paikea emerges from the sorrow surrounding the family, and from here on little Pai does everything within her power in order to be part of her tribe and accepted by her grandfather.
The entire film revolves itself around the relationship between Koro and Pai, this grandfather and grand-daughter duo seem to have a close affiliation with one another in the beginning of the movie, but as it progress we see that Koro has not lost his yearning for a strong male to follow in his footsteps, and soon begins the quest to find a suitable heir amongst the young boys in the Maori village.
But at each trial, it appears that the only one to prevail is little Pai. She can fight, recite the chants of her people, and was able to claim back the tooth of a whale that none of the other boys had managed to do before.
And yet with these triumphs, the only one unable to see Pai's potential is Koro himself, he still trusts that a first-born male would succeed himself in becoming the next chief of the Maori people. And it isn't until the beach is littered with the bodies of humpback whales who seem to want to die along the coast, and he sees Paikea riding a whale like the Paikea of legend, that Koro changes his mind about little Pai becoming the next leader of his people.
Patriarchy
A social structure where males are considered to have dominion over females, has stemmed its way from evolutionary psychology (Walby, 1990). In patriarchies, males are considered to have a monopoly on power while females are expected to submit to the same power.
While this may have made more logical sense in the days of our cave-dwelling ancestors where brawn superseded any other skills we may have had during that time, this is hardly the case in our current century. This is the foundation on which Social Darwinism theory is based off of. Dickens (2000) expounded rather boldly on the topic saying that, the biological differences in both sexes are what has contributed to the differences in how society treats either gender, and although many disagree to it, the treatment of males and females has been designed to have males come out as the superior gender.
Today most of the world has given females the same human rights as males, the right to education, to drive, to enter a male-dominated vocation, and to vote. But one thing seems to have remained constant since the time of cavemen to today, is that males make better leaders than their female counterparts. No evidence has yet to prove if leadership qualities are based on a biological pre-disposition, and it is only lately that we are understanding the role of the matriarch in the family is as vital than that of the patriarch.
In the film, it is almost shameful to see how the other members of the Maori tribe blindly follow their leader without any thought of why it is compulsory for their leader to be male. They allow Koro to act in the manner that he does and no one stands up to question the legitimacy of their leader or his decisions. It is for that reason that I had really enjoyed the character of Nanny Flowers; wife to Koro and grandmother to Pai, she seems to not only hold her own during the course of the film, but to also aid her family in pushing the boundaries of their backward ways.
It is no surprise that after years of blindly agreeing to follow male leaders simply on the fact that they were born as males, many theories have come to disprove patriarchy and social darwinism for a more egalitarian view of the sexes. Bloodworth (1990) had done just that in her debunking of patriarchism for the idealism of feminine authority. Her work stated that society needed to not just work on the idea of equal opportunities, but also a change of mindset of females being considered somehow inferior to males due to nothing more than biology. In as much as society is progressing to not consider race or religion as measures in determining one's merit, so must we do the same when taking gender into consideration.
That is not to say that females are entitled to have anything more than a male would, females should have to prove their worth at being as good as or even better than males at any particular field. Paikea never thought that she was entitled to become the chief simply because she was born into a particular family, in fact she made she that she worked harder and succeeded in whatever tasks she was made to accomplish. She never saw herself as anything of less worth simply because she was born female instead of male, she only saw that being chief meant looking out for the welfare of her people and took joy in keeping the customs and traditions of her tribe.
References:
Bloodworth, S. (1990). The poverty of patriarchy theory. Socialist Review, 2, 5-33.
Dickens, P. (2000). Social Darwinism: Linking evolutionary thought to social theory. Open University Press.
Walby, S. (1990). Theorizing patriarchy.
