Hākuturi

What it is

The hākuturi are beings of Māori myth who keep watch over the forest. Their charge is to protect the bush and to repay any act that stains it, and the tales treat them as active wardens rather than symbols. Those who write about them describe their shape in bird terms: they are thought of as birds, or as creatures very close to birds. In the stories they act with purpose, standing trees upright again after a wrong and speaking rebuke to woodcutters who ignored the forest's rites. They sit inside the wider Māori world of spirits tied to Tāne and to the sacredness of land and growth.

Where it comes from

The tale that fixes their character belongs to the Māori figure Rātā. Rātā felled a tree without first performing the chants and rites the forest requires, and the hākuturi punished the slight by standing the trunk upright again. When he showed sorrow for the fault, they brought the tree down themselves and worked it into a canoe overnight. The beings reach print through collectors of tradition: John White's late-nineteenth-century history preserves a Ngāti Kahungunu telling that names them under other titles, Edward Tregear's 1891 comparative dictionary comments on those names, and Margaret Orbell's 1998 encyclopedia sets out their guardianship and parentage.

Peoples and places

The hākuturi belong to the Māori of New Zealand, whose traditions carry them. The one tribal grouping the printed sources name is Ngāti Kahungunu, whose version John White set down in his multi-volume history of the 1880s and 1890s. Beyond that telling, the accounts gathered by Tregear and by Orbell treat the beings as part of Māori myth at large, without tying them to a particular region.

What people believe

Behind them stands a view of the forest as sacred ground. In this tradition, felling a tree calls for set words and observances, and wood taken without them counts as an injury that must be answered. The hākuturi are held to give that answer, undoing the wrong until respect is shown, then letting the timber go, as the Rātā tale has them do. One source sets them among the offspring of Tāne, the deity who rules the forest and is named as the ancestor of birds, which fits their birdlike form.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Knowledge of the hākuturi reaches print through compilers of Māori tradition. Margaret Orbell's 1998 encyclopedia hedges the bird reading, noting that the beings appear to have been seen in that way, and places them as children of Tāne. Edward Tregear, working in 1891, reasons from a single name in the Ngāti Kahungunu telling to a possible tie with the Ponaturi, and words the link as a supposition. John White's history supplies the names that Tregear builds on. The hedged phrasing in both writers shows how much rests on a few recorded tellings.

Compare and confuse

The nearest kin named for them is the Ponaturi. That link rests on one word in the Ngāti Kahungunu telling, which Tregear judged to point toward that other group of beings; he offers it as a suggestion rather than a settled fact. Their birdlike shape also places them beside the birds themselves, as fellow offspring of Tāne.

Questions people ask about Hākuturi

Good reading and sources

• Hākuturi on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data