Eels

by James Prosek

  Stella was just winding down her years as a student at Waikato University and lived, for the time being, near the campus. She shared a flat with her sister, Wikitoria (Wiki), and their best friend, Kare, a law student. There was a general feeling of excitement among the young women because Stella and Wiki had just completed and handed in their master’s theses.

  “Did you know,” Wiki said when I first walked into their place, “this is literally the first day of sunshine we’ve had in weeks?”

  “Yes,” added Kare, “we’ve had terrible flooding, some of the worst in a lifetime. Entire houses have slipped into rivers. Hillsides have collapsed, they’re so saturated with moisture, burying roads and sheep and trees.”

  Stella pointed out that the excess water from the storms, a disaster and annoyance to humans, was an opportunity for eels to escape from inland ponds they’ve occupied for decades, making a break for the sea, to the spawning grounds.

  “I didn’t always like eels,” Stella said, cicadas humming loudly in the rimu trees outside. “When my father brought them home I wouldn’t go near them. I thought they were the most hideous fish ever! I came to love them, but only after spending time with them. They’re so cool!” Stella was half sitting, half lying on the couch, backlit by the sun. She and Kare were twenty-four years old and Wiki was two years younger.

  “Cool, are they?” Kare said, laughing. “I always thought they were a little strange.”

  “A lot of people we’re going to visit,” Stella said, “when I rang them up I told them I wanted to bring an American by who is doing research on eels in Maori culture, the first thing they said was, ‘Why does he want to know about eels?’ They were a bit suspicious. I told them you had gone all over the world studying eels—then, you know, they started to get it.”

  “But why would they be suspicious?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s like this,” Stella said. “They’ve got a lifetime of experience which traditionally they shared only with members of their hapu, or subtribe. Why should they share their knowledge with someone who walks in off the street? They’re distrustful of science.”

  “I’m not a scientist,” I protested.

  “It’s not your profession directly, but you operate in part with a Western science mind. They see things differently. To give you an example, I went to this eel conference in Christchurch, where all the leading eel experts in New Zealand gathered. Don Jellyman, probably the most famous ichthyologist in New Zealand—he’s at NIWA [National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research]—was delivering a paper on their attempts to track large migrant eels from the river mouth to their spawning grounds with tags. He explained that the ten satellite pop-up tags attached to ten large female eels had provided very little clear data about where the spawning area was located.* When Don sat down, Kelly Davis, whom we will see on this trip, got up to represent the Maori point of view. He addressed Don directly, in front of everyone. ‘Our ancestors have known for thousands of years that the glass eels come up the river in spring, and the adults migrate out in the fall. Why do you need to know where they go? What good will it do the fish to find the house where they breed? ‘ Of course, there was very little Don could say.”

  Not a moment seemed to go by that Stella did not remind me that we would be meeting with the most knowledgeable people on eels in all New Zealand. “Well, as a pakeha [foreigner or white person], you wouldn’t ordinarily get to see this side of Maori culture,” she said to me as we went out to get some lunch.

  Over a meat pie and soda, Stella picked up on what Kelly Davis had said at the eel conference. “Why do we have to understand everything that isn’t understandable?” she said. “Everyone wants to unlock everything. I’m conflicted because I’m Maori. I don’t want to know where the eels go, yet I’ve studied their movements in the rivers.”

  The paper that Stella had just finished and handed in for her master’s degree, titled “Arrival Patterns and Environmental Cues Associated with the Upstream Migration of Glass Eels into the Tukituki River, Hawke’s Bay,” was a valuable contribution to the literature of eel biology. And yet the graphs and charts, the seeming absoluteness of the scientific effort, seemed somehow disingenuous to her.

  When we returned to Stella’s flat, we settled again in the living room. I looked at a few photos in frames on the mantel before sitting down. Wiki, who was reading, folded her book and put it on her lap.

  “That’s our father, Robert August,” she said, pointing to a photo of a Maori man superimposed over a picture of a misty beach. “His nickname was Falla. He died in a fishing accident.”

  Both girls had inherited their father’s Polynesian features—dark skin and eyes, black hair. Stella later took out an album and showed me a photo of her father hoisting a huge eel speared through the head. He held the end of the spear like a vaulting pole. The eel had its body wrapped around the handle like the snake on the rod of Asclepius, the common symbol of modern medicine.

  The subject of conversation drifted to different subjects as the afternoon drew long shadows on the ground, and we cracked a few Tui beers. Talk flowed to things intended to prepare me for what I might see and hear.

  The first element of my education was the taniwha (pronounced “tanifa”).*

  “A taniwha,” Wiki said, “is something that makes itself known at certain times to certain people. Sometimes to warn them of danger, like a guardian. Friends of mine who live on a farm not far from here, at one time or other, have seen this creature with cow legs, half human, crossing their land.”

  Stella pointed out that the taniwha can assume many shapes, but more often than not it takes the form of a giant eel.**

  “If you harm a taniwha,” Stella said, “if you spear or capture an eel that is a taniwha, it will cry like a baby or bark like a dog, or change colors. Something about it will seem strange. It will indicate that it is not like the others. If you kill a taniwha eel, you have a makutu, a curse, put on you. You start going crazy, like you’re possessed. Then you’ve broken tapu—something sacred or off-limits.”*

  “Spirits usually come out at night,” Wiki said, elaborating on the idea of a curse. “Young women are taught not to cut their hair or fingernails after dark, or a spirit can take them and you could be given a makutu. There are things like this that our father taught us to do, but we never questioned why. We didn’t know they were Maori rituals.”

  The sisters’ Maori learning was strong in areas such as fishing and gathering seafood, but less so in female matters, as their mother was English. At their father’s funeral, a family member grieved separately from the rest of the group. Wiki learned it was because the woman was pregnant, and that pregnant or menstruating women were not allowed inside the cemetery—it was tapu, forbidden. She wondered how many tapu she had broken without knowing it, and how many concerned friends and family had politely looked the other way.

  This revelation is outlined in detail in Wiki’s own largely autobiographical master’s thesis, “The Maori Female: Her Body, Spirituality, Sacredness, and Mana, a Space Within Spaces.” It is less scientific and more cultural than her sister’s thesis on eels.

  A central argument of Wiki’s paper is that British colonization upset a balance between Maori men and women and compromised the mana, or integrity, of Maori women.

  “Balance,” Wiki writes, “is an important part of the holistic worldview Maori hold.” To the Maori, nature and culture are one and the same.

  The Maori worldview acknowledges the interconnectedness of all living things. The colonials—whom the Maori called pakeha, meaning “touch of a different breath”—tended to dismantle nature, categorize and classify it. In their lust to find order in nature, to name and possess it, they for the most part ignored the nuances of Maori culture, and ultimately were successful in their mission, whether conscious or subconscious, to subvert it. Partly because of New Zealand’s distance from England and the fierceness of the Maori warriors, the British were never able to physically conquer the Mao
ri. But they succeeded in breaking them culturally and spiritually.

  In 1840, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. The treaty was written in Maori and English, and its tenets are vague at best. Maori rights to land and water are contested to this day in New Zealand—the wounds of colonization are still wide open. I could feel the tension in the room with Stella and Wiki, trying to find their own balance between needing to know their Maori father’s past and acknowledging that their mother was English, between science and customary beliefs. And though I had met them only hours before, I could already see that the Maori side of them was winning.

  “At the end of the trip we’ll be staying with DJ at Double Crossing,” Stella said. “That’ll be a good time to sit down and make sure we both know where we’re coming from.” She paused, then said, “About what you’re going to write.”

  Were there things that could not be written about, I wondered, because they were sacred, or because they were incapable of being explained?

  We had a second Tui beer as Wiki prepared a chicken dinner for us. It was now dark outside and a cool breeze passed through the house. I was tired and disoriented from travel. We talked about music, and things twentysomethings talk about. But then an article in that day’s paper brought the conversation around to the taniwha again.

  According to Stella, the Mercer-Longswamp “taniwha site” controversy had been in the news a lot of late. It had started two years before when the New Zealand government began to improve the expressway from Auckland to Hamilton. At the village of Meremere there had always been a curve in the road to avoid a swamp—an oxbow of the Waikato River. Transit New Zealand wanted to take the curve out of the road and put the highway straight through. Working in the swamp one day, a member of the road crew lifted up a giant white eel in the bucket of the bulldozer. Many of the construction workers were Maori, and when they saw the big eel, they fled the site.

  Since the incident, the government and Transit New Zealand seemed reluctant to legally acknowledge the presence of a mythological creature. Transit New Zealand wanted to straighten the highway across the swamp because they claimed the curve in the road had caused many accidents. The local Maori hapu, or subtribe, Ngati Naho, countered that many more tragic accidents had occurred at the spot since construction began, because the taniwha had been disturbed and was angry.

  Not all Maori agreed. A local kaumatua, or elder, Tui Adams, whose grandson had died in a car accident at the site, was quoted in the Dominion Post as saying that he didn’t believe the giant eel was responsible for the tragedies: “I don’t subscribe to the idea that these taniwha come out and cause problems because a road’s going through. Taniwha are actually guardians, they have always been more helpful than non-helpful.”

  Some thought the controversy had more to do with raising the profile of the Maori fight for customary rights against the mostly white government. The giant eel, long-lived, resilient, and rearing its head, had become a kind of symbol of a cultural revival.

  A resolution was imminent, the article in that day’s paper said. Rima Herbert, a spokesperson for the Ngati Naho, made a public statement after discussions with Transit New Zealand. “This is a significant cultural site for us,” he said, “and we have got Transit to agree to a modification to their design, which preserves most of the site. We have asked Transit to ensure that when critical works are taking place, a member of our hapu is given the opportunity to be present to ensure that our cultural values are protected.”

  On their website, Transit New Zealand’s regional projects manager, Chris Allen, did not formally acknowledge that a taniwha existed in the swamp, but explained the need for preservation of the site in environmental terms. “While a lot of the area we are working in is swamp, this section over about 30 meters appears to be a spring which may be significant for a large stand of kahikatea trees, which need to be protected.”

  As I wiped my plate with a bit of bread at Stella and Wiki’s kitchen table, crinkling the newspaper and reading quotes aloud, I was, frankly, in a state of disbelief. When in America would a highway project be halted because of a god eel? I confessed to the sisters that this was my first exposure to Maori culture, that I was starting fresh, and I sensed an awakening in myself.

  I told Stella and Wiki that my only previous knowledge of Maori traditions was from a 1929 book by Elsdon Best called Fishing Methods and Devices of the Maori. Born in 1856 in Tawa Flats, New Zealand, Best, the son of British immigrants, is often referred to as New Zealand’s “foremost ethnographer of Maori society.” I had found the book, a good two-thirds of which was devoted to eel fishing, to be rich and informative. But the very mention of the name drew contempt from Stella.

  “Elsdon Best,” Stella said—in her Kiwi accent it sounded more like beast. “He’s not looked on that favorably by Maori. He may have recorded some valuable information about fishing nets and weirs and artifacts and things, but for the most part he wasn’t very sympathetic to the Maori way of life.”

  That night in my sleeping bag on the floor of Stella’s room, buzzed and jet-lagged, I remembered my first trip to New Zealand seven years earlier—a trout-fishing trip with my best friend after graduating from college. We caught many large brown trout, hiked in the mountains, and camped under brilliant stars. We nearly drove a rental car off a ravine into a river, and in general had a great adventure. Yet for me the trip had been disappointing. After a month of bumming around the North and South Islands, I left New Zealand without ever really feeling any connection to the place. The people we met in bars were transient Kiwis of European origin, or seasonal Brits shearing sheep. If we came across Maori, they were off in a corner, tightlipped. I couldn’t remember having a conversation with a single one. This trip, I felt, drifting off to sleep, would be different.

  The first written account of a taniwha is most likely the one recorded by Captain Cook on his 1777 voyage to the South Seas. While anchored in Queen Charlotte Sound off the South Island of New Zealand, Cook wrote the following about statements by a local Maori: “We had another piece of intelligence from him, more correctly given, though not confirmed by our own observations, that there are snakes and lizards there of an enormous size. He said, they sometimes seize and devour men.”

  Maori would not have known a lizard of the size Cook related, and would never have seen a snake, as there are no native snakes in New Zealand. What he described, “eight feet in length, and big round as a man’s body,” was most likely a longfin eel.

  Taniwha or not, the longfin eel is an impressive creature. Like other members of New Zealand’s distinct fauna—the now extinct moa birds (killed off by the first Polynesian settlers for food), more than twelve feet tall; the native kakapo (the world’s largest parrot, now endangered); and the largest living insect, a kind of cricket called a weta—the longfin eel has a tendency toward gigantism. Capable of growing to over eighty pounds and living more than a hundred years, it is the largest and longest-lived freshwater eel species in the world.*

  The longfin has been a consistent and available food source for Maori as long as they have been on the islands, and for that reason, along with its impressive stature, it has garnered awe and respect, inspiring a good share of stories.**

  For all his apparent shortcomings, Elsdon Best devoted hundreds of pages of his books to the Maori’s long association with the eel. Through his work we are led to believe that the eel is among the most important creatures in Maori culture, outshining the shark, the whale, and the kiwi bird put together. By sheer mass and availability of protein, the eel was at certain times of year the Maoris’ most important source of food. Best recorded more than three hundred local Maori words for the freshwater eel in its different life stages.

  I was yet to see my first New Zealand longfin eel, but Stella assured me that this would soon change. As my guide, she felt that it was important I experience the subjects of our adventure before we started hearing stories about them.

  About ninety miles southwest of Hamilton, in a coast
al village called Kawhia, an elderly British woman was feeding eels in a small spring-fed stream in her backyard. Such feeding areas were relatively common in New Zealand but were normally kept quiet to avoid poaching of the valuable eel meat.

  Traditionally, Maori had sacred eel ponds, where the eels would be fed daily. Sometimes the eels were brought to these ponds and kept there, with no access to the sea, where they would live, some Maori say, for hundreds of years. But most of the time eels were kept in the pool of a creek or river and could come and go as they pleased. Often they stayed for a long time, perhaps because of free meals or the love that was imparted by the people around them. But the eels’ ultimate goal was to store up energy to get to the spawning grounds. No one had yet found the spawning place of the New Zealand longfin eel, though scientists suspected that they migrated to the north and spawned near Tonga over the Kermadec Trench.

  “The eel’s life is about travel,” Stella said to me as she drove. “The only reason they stay in the stream is to store food for their long journey.” The longfin eel travels from the sea to the headwaters of rivers and streams, spending an average of thirty years in freshwater before returning to the sea to spawn.*

  “The eels’ movement is universal in Maori culture,” Stella said. “As the eels move, they leave the path of life behind them.”

  We exited the main highway and drove through rugged farmland to the coast. Intermittent lush green stands of native bush—ponga (tree ferns) and tall grasses—held on to the slopes of steep ravines, land that could not be farmed. Stella pulled the car off at a convenience store, and I followed her to a back shelf, where she grabbed a few cans of dog food. “For the eels,” she said.

  “How big are these eels?” I asked Stella as she brought the cans to the counter. “I mean, are they really as long as a person?”