Maui

Maui is the most widely shared figure in Polynesian tradition, told of from Hawaii in the north to Aotearoa in the southwest to the Tuamotus in the east, and the core of his story is remarkably stable across distances of thousands of miles of open ocean. That stability is itself evidence, since it means the cycle was already formed before the great voyaging dispersals that peopled the eastern Pacific.

He is the youngest, and usually irregular in some way: born prematurely, wrapped in his mother's hair and thrown into the sea, raised by sea spirits, and returning to a family that does not recognise him. His brothers exclude him from the canoe and he stows away. The three great deeds follow from that character. He fishes up land, hiding in the canoe until they are far out, then producing a hook made from his grandmother's jawbone and hauling up a fish that becomes an island; Te Ika-a-Maui, the fish of Maui, is the Maori name for the North Island of New Zealand. He captures the sun, which crosses the sky too fast for work to be finished, by plaiting ropes from his sister's hair, snaring it at the pit where it rises and beating it until it agrees to go more slowly. And he takes fire, going down to the fire-keeper Mahuika and asking for a burning fingernail, then extinguishing it and returning until she has none left and, enraged, sets the world alight, so that he must call the rain; the last sparks lodge in certain trees, which is why fire can be drawn from wood.

The Maori account of his death completes the pattern. He goes to reverse mortality by passing through the body of Hine-nui-te-po, the great woman of night, and out again. He warns the birds not to laugh. A fantail cannot hold it in, she wakes, and he is crushed. He is the only one who tried, and because he failed, people die.

Maui's best known appearance to a global audience in the twenty-first century came through Disney's 2016 animated film Moana, which drew on the Maui cycle, though it compressed and altered the traditional deeds and character considerably, and depicted him as a large, tattooed demigod voiced by the actor Dwayne Johnson. The film's release prompted genuine and widely reported debate within and beyond Pacific Islander communities: some welcomed the unprecedented mainstream visibility for Polynesian mythology and voice talent, including Pacific Islander actors and cultural consultants involved in the production, while others raised serious concerns about the film's alterations to sacred and culturally significant material, its commercial simplification of a figure with deep religious meaning across many distinct island traditions, and specific choices such as Maui's exaggerated body size, which some Polynesian commentators read as reinforcing stereotypes.

A Halloween costume based on the film's version of Maui, which included a bodysuit patterned with Polynesian-style tattoo designs and dark skin, was withdrawn by Disney in 2016 after sustained public criticism that it amounted to a form of digital brownface, a controversy widely covered in entertainment and cultural news at the time. The episode illustrates a recurring tension across living traditions generally: a figure of deep religious and cultural meaning to Pacific peoples reaching an enormous new audience through commercial media, with real benefits of visibility set against real risks of flattening or misrepresenting material that communities across the Pacific continue to regard as their own sacred and cultural inheritance rather than open source material.

The same name, with much the same character attached to it, is told from Aotearoa to Hawaii and out to Tonga, Tahiti and the Tuamotus, across a spread of ocean that took a thousand years to settle. That distribution is one of the plainest pieces of evidence for a common Polynesian inheritance, and it is used as such.

What travels is not a fixed text. In Aotearoa, Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga fishes up the island and dies attempting to pass backwards through the body of Hine-nui-te-po, and with his failure death becomes permanent for everyone after him. In Hawaii, as Martha Beckwith's survey of Hawaiian mythology sets out, the fishing and the snaring of the sun are fixed to particular named places and the death narrative is largely absent. His standing shifts with the telling as well: in some island traditions he is a being of exceptional power reckoned within the human line rather than an atua receiving cult, and in others he stands a good deal closer to a god than to a man.

Most of what reached English came through two collections. George Grey published his Maori material in 1855, taken from named narrators, and it was that book which carried the figure into English language reading. Beckwith's survey did the same work later for the Hawaiian traditions.

Reading these as versions of one story to be reconstructed misses the point, and reading them as a single pan-Polynesian myth flattens traditions that belong to particular islands and particular lineages. Each account is the property of the people who tell it.