Tu, called Ku in Hawaii and Tumatauenga in Aotearoa (New Zealand), is the Polynesian god of war and, tellingly, of humanity itself, the two joined in a single deity. In the Maori account he is the child of the primal parents Rangi and Papa who alone proposes to kill their parents when the siblings debate how to escape the darkness of their embrace (the others favour only separation), and who afterward subdues the domains of his brothers, which is why human beings may eat the fish, birds and cultivated plants that are those brothers' descendants; the karakia said over food acknowledges Tu's conquest.
In Hawaii, Ku is one of the four great gods, with many forms including the fisherman's and the farmer's, but his best-known form is Kukailimoku, the snatcher of land, the feathered war-image carried by Kamehameha I in the campaigns that unified the Hawaiian islands around 1810. The human offerings once made at the luakini war-temples belonged to this form of Ku and to no other god, a fact of the old state religion, recorded here as history. Tu remains significant in living Maori and Hawaiian tradition as an ancestor and atua.