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INDIGENIZING GIRL POWER
The Whale Rider, decolonization, and the
project of remembering
Marnina Gonick
This article considers the intersection of girlhood, agency, and indigenousness through a reading of
the internationally renowned film Whale Rider. I suggest that Whale Rider presents a double
project that resymbolizes girlhood as it also produces a “decolonizing of the screen.” On the one
hand the film resonates with what emerged in the 1990s as the assertion of “girl power” and
the notion of a new, active, powerful and agentic femininity. On the other hand, the film mobilizes
a re-articulation of these discourses of “new femininities” by “indigenizing the image” of
the empowered girl.
KEYWORDS girls; indigenous; New Zealand film; agency; new femininities
Introduction
The opening scenes of Whale Rider, director Niki Caro’s second feature film, make its
mythic dimensions clear: whales move through the deep; a woman dies in childbirth; twins
are born, but only the female survives; a father and son argue bitterly. The Maori
community into which the baby girl Pai is born claims descent from Paikea, a legendary
ancestor who found the land that was to become New Zealand, traveling on the back of the
whale. A first born son is awaited to assume tribal leadership. Pai herself provides this
background context of her birth and the founding story of her community through voice-
over. Set in present times, the film launches a project of remembering, revealing the living
legacy of the colonial past, along with the community’s continued connections to tradition,
the land and sea. However, if the film invokes the mythic storytelling elements of a disputed
birthright, ancient tradition, memory, and heroism, the girl as storyteller also suggests a
disruption and re-signifying of these mythic dimensions. In drawing on the magical stories
of childhood to tell its tale of Pai and her whale riding ancestor, the film suggests that it
might be read as a gender fable (Butler 1990, p. ix). But what kind of gender fable is it?
In this paper, I explore this question by reading Whale Rider as a double project that
both resymbolizes girlhood as it also produces what Mita (1992) calls a “decolonizing of the
screen.” That is, with its narrative focus on Pai’s struggle to win her grandfather’s
recognition that she is the leader he is looking for, the film draws the girl and girlhood at a
Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, 2010
ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/10/030305-319
q2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2010.493648
crossroads of discourses and meanings. On the one hand it might be seen as resonating
with what emerged in the 1990s as the assertion of “girl power” and the notion of a new,
active, powerful and agentic femininity. On the other hand, the film mobilizes a re-
articulation of these discourses of “new femininities” by “indigenizing the image” (Mita
1992) of the empowered girl. Thus, I am suggesting that, like many fables, Whale Rider tells a
subversive story that also contains a moral lesson. In bringing together the elements of this
double project, the film sets the narrative stage for new fantastical possibilities. I want to
investigate how the discourses of indigenousness, agency, and femininity in the film work
together to produce this effect. I ask, what are the overlapping and differing ways in which
the question of identity, girlhood, nation, and agency are represented in the film? How are
these related to discourses about young girls found in other forms of popular culture,
indigenous activism, and feminism? How do the relationships between girlhood and
indigenousness depicted in the film participate in and/or disrupt notions of girlhood in the
context of globalization? How does the girl figure in the representation of the contestation
between the seemingly irreconcilable elements of tradition and transition? How is the film
implicated in the production of new forms of female subjectivity and agency?
Decolonizing the Screen
In outlining the task of decolonizing the screen, Mita (1992) focuses on the
requirement of unmasking modernist metanarratives that validate the belief that euro-
centric constructions of history and in particular, the histories of the colonized, present the
“one true” interpretation. Critic Pihama illustrates the necessity of this move with a critique
of the New Zealand film industry and the film The Piano, which precedes the Whale Rider by
10 years, contending that they are dangerous for Maori (1994, p. 240). She argues that the
film’s portrayal of Maori people is linked solely to a colonial gaze that is uncritical of its
perpetuation of negative belief systems about Maori and reproduction of stereotyped
images. She says, “Maori people struggle for a voice through which to present our own
images, a place from which we can control the re-presentations that are offered
internationally as our realities” (Pihama 1994, p. 240).
In showing how contemporary media is at the very core of identity production in a
globalized context, Shohat and Stam support the necessity of filmic representations which
produce more expansive understandings of diverse peoples, their struggles, and world
views. They suggest that
In a transnational world typified by the global circulation of images and sounds, goods
and populations, media spectatorship impacts complexly on national identity, political
affiliation, and communal belongings. By facilitating a mediated engagement with
“distant” peoples, the media “deterritorialize” the process of imagining communities. Just
as the media can exoticize and “otherize” cultures, they can also promote multicultural
coalitions. And if dominant cinema has historically caricatured non-European civilizations,
the media today are more multicentered, with the power not to offer countervailing
representations but also to open parallel spaces for alternative transnational practices.
(Ella Shohat & Robert Stam 1996, p. 145)
Shohat and Stam pay particular attention to indigenous media, highlighting how it
can be an empowering vehicle for communities struggling against geographical
displacement, ecological and economic deterioration, and cultural annihilation. Writing
306 MARNINA GONICK
in the mid-nineties, they point out that while these media efforts are occasionally
supported by liberal governments or international support groups, the work is generally
small-scale, low-budget, and locally based (Shohat & Stam 1996, p. 150).
However, if as Shohat and Stam argue, the media offer more countervailing
representations than those critiqued by Pihama, the early years of the new century have
also seen a shift in the scale and reach of indigenous media. According to Gauthier (2004),
Whale Rider along with feature films Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) set in Australia and
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) set in the Canadian Arctic are the first indigenous feature
films to reach mass audiences. Whale Rider grossed more than $50 million worldwide
(Calder 2004). It also won international acclaim, winning audience awards at the Toronto,
Sundance and Rotterdam Film Festivals (Message 2003). An adaptation of the novel by
Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, the film was locally written, directed, and produced, although
not exclusively by Maori. This does raise some concerns as respected Maori filmmaker Barry
Barclay notes, “it’s not just the story, but how you make the story, and how you handle it”
(Calder 2004, p. 12). Clearly, the relationship between Maori and the New Zealand
filmmaking industry continues to require major restructuring. While there was some
resistance to the film being directed by non-Maori Caro, and many media interviews where
she was asked to address this concern,
1
Whale Rider was amongst the first to entail direct
involvement of the local community, at Whangara throughout conceptualization and
production of the film (Message 2003). As Morris (2003, p. 19) argues, small nations rarely
see versions of themselves—their history, myths, and obsessions—projected on the big
screen. It took South Pacific Pictures 14 years and financial support from the New Zealand
government to bring Whale Rider to the screen. She argues that the film’s first audience, like
Ihimaera’s book, is comprised of New Zealanders, for whom the genesis, function and
implications of Maori ritual and beliefs in an increasingly westernized country are highly
charged issues, matters of ongoing national debate and I would add Maori activism.
Amongst these initiatives, and it seems partly as a response to the politics around the
production of Whale Rider, Maori filmmakers have developed a program to support Maori
film production (Calder 2004). As Pihama asserts, “there is a need for Maori people to access
production processes with the idea of accumulating indigenous images which give voice to
our own creations” (1994, p. 241). The potential of such a project is the interruption of
dominant colonial discourses.
While Caro’s position as a non-Maori director should not by underplayed, I argue that
the film’s participation in a decolonizing of the screen is accomplished by the
representation of Maori as well as through cinematic techniques, narrative strategies,
and aesthetic choices. While typical western cinematic devices prevail in the film, Caro has
adapted some of the traditions of Maori filmmaking to a more mainstream cinema
aesthetic. For example, Gauthier (2004, p. 70) notes how the film echoes Barry Barclay’s
documentation of Maori life in his feature films where scenes of local rituals and community
rituals are used to chronicle quotidian aspects of Maori life. Caro’s scenes of community
members gathering in the marae
2
or in someone’s home bear a likeness to Barclay’s
foundational images. Whale Rider’s concerted effort to decolonize the screen can also be
seen in its use of varying aesthetic techniques, including point of view camera work and the
use of voice-over narration, to suture the viewer to Pai’s standpoint. The viewer is thus
invited to identify with the indigenous perspective (Gauthier 2004, p. 67). The imperialist
gaze that hierarchically arranges looking relations through exotic fantasy (Pihama 1994,
p. 241) is destabilized. For example, in one scene Koro, the grandfather, explains the
INDIGENIZING GIRL POWER 307
intention a warrior must assume for the bulging of the eyes and unfurling of the tongue to
the class of first-born young boys he is training as potential leaders. “When you extend your
tongue, you’re saying ‘I’m going to eat you.’ Your eyes will roll back in your head, ‘your head
will be stuck on the end of my stick.’ Feel the power. Let them feel the fear.” Although it is
possible to read this scene as merely providing local color, humor or exoticism, as in fact
some American reviewers and audiences did,
3
for local audiences, the scene may also be
read as a pedagogical moment. That is, the scene may, according to Morris (2003) serve as a
way to make the connection for generations of New Zealanders familiar with the sight but
ignorant of the symbolism of the warrior’s pose. The fact that Koro needs to explain the
tradition and its meanings to the young men of his community reveals the tension between
the devastation of colonialism and the project of remembering at the very heart of the film.
Here the use of modern media is used to reorganize and reassemble “the elements of a
cultural practice” into a message that is at once old and new (Grossberg 1996, p. 143). As
Stuart Hall suggests, indigenous groups’ appropriations of “imposed” technologies that
engage with and through global media may be seen as a key tactic in struggles for cultural
and political survival (in Grossberg 1996).
The use of magical realism to tell this gender fable may also be seen as an aesthetic
and narrative strategy that works to effect a decolonizing of the screen. In its interrogation
of western modernist knowledge systems, magical realism is a literary technique that critics
have identified as a bridge between the postmodern and the postcolonial (Glynn & Tyson
2007, p. 206; Hutcheon 1995). The film blurs the boundaries between the supernatural, the
mundane, past, and present through its emphasis on the special connections between the
land, the water, the whales, and the First People. Ormand writes of the historic, emotional
and pragmatic relationship between the Maori, community, land, and sea. This relationship,
she suggests speaks to the connections between the physical environment, individual and
family identity. The land and sea provide the connecting points that fuse self-concept and
sense of belonging (Ormand 2004, p. 244). In contrast to many New Zealand films where
the notion of the white man or woman at odds with his/her environment, with his/her
country and himself/herself, is a central and pervasive theme (Elleray 1999), in the Whale
Rider the land and the water are not represented as dead, objectified or alien. Rather, they
are thoroughly animated by the activities and the spirits of both those who have gone
before and by the supernatural communion between people and other living creatures.
This attachment to the past, to the land, water, and whales is so strong for Pai that she is
physically unable to leave when it is decided that she will go to Europe with her father,
when he returns after a visit. As they drive away, she is seen straining for her last views of
the landscape, looking searchingly into the waves. She finally demands that her father stop
the car, emerging from it exploding with relief. To Pai, history is alive, calling to her from the
ocean (Morris 2003) instilling in her both a profound sense of longing and belonging. Her
special communion with the land, the water, and its creatures is one of the signs of her
capacity as spiritual leader.
The elements of magical realism in the film can thus be seen to link the ancient story
of a whale riding ancestor with that of a young girl and the struggles of her community in
the present. In the process the rigid linearity of western historical chronologies is disrupted
and disordered, while past and present are represented as fluidly intertwined rather than as
a march toward inevitable progress. In adapting and blending traditional ways of knowing,
generic cinema conventions and oral cultural sources, the film engages in a politics of
re-imagination, participating in constituting what Hartley and McKee (2000) have called the
308 MARNINA GONICK
indigenous public sphere. This sphere is a “highly mediated public ‘space’ for evolving
notions of indigeneity” (Hartley 2004, p. 12). As Glynn and Tyson (2007) argue, the
indigenous public sphere is closely tied to a media-sphere marked by the dialectics and
dialogisms of the local and the global that are increasingly familiar from theories of
globalization.
On the one hand, phenomenon such as globally circulated television formats—McTV and
internationally popular genre templates clone and propagate themselves around the
world. At the same time, “the resilience of national cultures” (Waisbord 2004, p. 360) and
indeed of indigenous ones continues to inflect global cultural processes with localizing
accents and to validate such neologisms of globalization theory as Roland Robertson’s
(1992) “glocalization.” (Kevin Glynn & A. F. Tyson 2007, p. 206)
Indeed as Tomlinson (1999, p. 69) notes, Robertson uses “glocalization” in part to describe
“the tendency for the promotion of the legal rights and cultural identities of indigenous
peoples to be coordinated in political movements at a global level.” Similarly, as Ginsburg
observes, “indigenous media productions have increasingly become part of global cultural
flow.” First People’s international production networks hence constitute a broad
“mediascape of social relations” within which indigenous communities and media
producers can “re-envision their current realities and possible futures, from the revival of
local cultural practices, to the insertion of their histories into national imaginaries, to the
creation of new transnational areas that link indigenous makers around the globe in a
common effort to make their concerns visible to the world” (Ginsburg 2003, pp. 314 – 316).
Thus, the indigenous public sphere has very important implications for the national
cinema of New Zealand and other colonial nations. Gauthier suggests that films such as
Whale Rider provide a revitalized vision for national cinema by embracing previously denied
cultural roots and highlighting the multiplicities within the nation. In uncovering aspects of
the colonial past with its close attention to indigenous culture, the film opens up national
cinema to voices that have long been silenced (Gauthier 2004, p. 64). What Gauthier does
not remark upon (much less analyze), however, is that, in both Whale Rider and Rabbit Proof
Fence, the new voices narrating the nation and the stories mediating the postcolonial
landscape, creating a new indigenous public sphere and a decolonization of the screen are
those of indigenous girls. What does it mean that it is the figure of the indigenous girl that is
used to re-imagine national cinema and the nation as a whole? What are the political,
cultural and aesthetic effects of “the girl” as the site in which the boundaries between
tradition, history, memory, and the contemporary are ruptured—and where hope is found?
Girl Power, Indigenous Girls and the Cinemas of Girlhood
Whale Rider is not the first New Zealand film to feature a girl protagonist. As others
(Message 2003; Wiles 2007) have noted, just as it has elsewhere, the pre-adolescent girl has
been a widely referenced symbol in New Zealand cinema, for example, in Vigil (1984), Rain
(2001), Heavenly Creatures (1994), and The Piano (1993). For Wiles (2007, p. 175) the New
Zealand girl character is “metonymically associated” with a nostalgia for an innocent, pure
state. Similarly, in Message’s analysis, “the girl” evokes the intertwined concepts of
innocence and experience, and signifies as a symbol of the transition and transcendence
that is commonly associated with the stages of childhood and adolescence. She claims that
the pre-adolescent girl is a paradoxical character because despite being young, she is wiser
INDIGENIZING GIRL POWER 309
and more knowing than the adult characters, including the men. But, she claims, this wiser
form of knowledge is represented as fleeting, lasting only for the transitional time period of
adolescence.
If Gauthier’s (2004) analysis does not recognize the girl narrator as significant to the
retelling of the story of the nation in indigenous film, neither Wiles (2007) nor Message’s
(2003) discussion of New Zealand girl films render indigenousness as a feature of analytic
importance to girlhood cinema. I want to argue that it is in weaving these two strands
together that the film mediates across the boundaries of globalized discourses of femininity
and the indigenous public sphere. In doing so it participates in not merely asserting existing
identities but in the cultural invention of new possibilities. Specifically, I suggest that the
figure of the girl in Whale Rider is used as a “glocalizing” factor, one which ties the
indigenous public sphere to global cultural processes and at the same time re-articulates
new discourses of agentic girlhood through its decolonizing of the screen. As Glynn and
Tyson (2007, p. 215) argue, to media producers increasingly interested in reaching
international audiences, a hybrid project that combines aspects of familiar generic trends
with the distinctiveness imparted by indigenous sources offers a potentially attractive way
of negotiating the tension between formula and innovation and establishing a kind of
place-based and culturally specific product differentiation.
The social context in which Whale Rider was released is one that has seen a
phenomenal explosion of images of and discourses about girls and girlhood. This has
included a cinematic interest in representations of forms of femininity that go beyond those
of white, middle-class girls. According to Kearney (2002) there has been a significant
transformation in the world of girl-centered cinema. Films about young lesbians, girls of
color, and working-class female youth have helped to expand the representation of
girlhood beyond its traditional boundaries. The context in which Whale Rider was produced
is one in which what has changed significantly is not therefore the presence of girls’ images,
but the kinds of images and stories about girls. Whale Rider both references and deviates
from popularized discourses of girlhood. In it, common sensibilities and social concerns
about girls are indigenized and popularized discourses about agency, leadership, power,
and success are inflected with Maori mythology and oral narrative traditions.
The generic trend most obviously at work in Whale Rider is the discourse of “girl
power,” a complex discourse, but simplified in the popular media as largely an articulation
of a new girlhood (Gonick 2006). Agentic, forceful, and in charge, this is a girlhood that is
presented as a drastic contrast to the passive, demure and reticent image of previous times.
Although some versions of “girl power” are used as a depoliticalization of feminism, in the
case of Whale Rider, the novel’s author, Ihimaera, explicitly sets out to subvert the self-
serving myth of male supremacy in transcultural narratives. He says, “having a girl ride the
whale—which is also a symbol of patriarchy—was my sneaky literary way of socking it to
the guy thing” (Ihimaera quoted in Message 2003, p. 87). In the film this agenda is furthered
by Caro’s decision to shift the male narrator of the novel to the voice of the young female
protagonist (Message 2003, p. 86). This explicit linking of “the girl” to a politics of gendered
social change has been a contested issue within the “Cinemas of Girlhood” (Gatewood &
Pomerance 2002).
4
While there has undoubtedly been a wide array of new representations
of girlhood, the meanings of these representations are often contradictory and difficult to
ascertain. As McRobbie (2004, p. 7) notes, the simultaneous feminization of popular media
with an accumulation of ambivalent, fearful responses is a curious phenomenon for which
an accounting is needed. Currently, it is not therefore, simply a matter of making better or
310 MARNINA GONICK
“different” images of girls but also investigating the ways in which images may be critically
responsive to the ideological conditions of their circulation (Cherniavsky 2000).
It is quite easy to see how Whale Rider fits the new ethos of femininity, with its young
irrepressible female protagonist who holds such strong convictions in her own future.
When Koro assembles the first born boys to begin their training as potential leaders, he tells
them: “you will be tested for your strength, your courage, your intelligence and your
leadership.” It is only Koro who is unaware that Pai has already begun demonstrating each
of these characteristics in her quest to gain his recognition. Her strength and courage is
demonstrated as she learns the art of the ceremonial spear from her uncle, after Koro
barred her from the boys’ training classes. She is seen handily winning in a contest with her
grandfather’s favored student, knocking his spear out of his hands with her own, inciting
Koro’s fury when he catches them. Her ability to lead is foreshadowed in a scene where she
is riding Koro’s bicycle home from school. Previously, he had picked her up from school and
ridden her home, but because he is angry, is no longer doing so. She has the option of
riding on the bus with all the boys in Koro’s training class, but doesn’t. Pai is seen racing
against the bus, eventually pulling ahead of it, while the boys inside are gesturing at her out
of the window. It is clear that she will beat them at any contest.
The film then draws on a generic “girl power” familiar to audiences in other popular
contexts. This renders the film and its central character recognizable and may partially
explain its box office success. While there be may be ambivalence in the representations of
on-screen girls, audiences were clearly open to viewing new images of agentic girls. In
many reviews of the film, Whale Rider is cited in the parlance of a new powerful femininity.
5
It is possible to make the argument, as Projansky (2007) does, that the agentic girl is, in this
instance, met with some enthusiasm by North American media precisely because she is
Maori and not white. According to Projansky, the US popular press’s reception of the film
supports two interconnected cultural narratives. The first is about the backwardness of
Other cultures in comparison to the rationality of US culture and the other is about the
supposed benevolent acceptance of gender equality such that, while feminism may still be
necessary elsewhere, the United States is beyond any need for feminist activism or analysis
(Projansky 2007, p. 192). However, as Projansky also argues her critique of how the film was
taken up by the US media and folded into standard narratives about an ahistorical,
authentic distant culture, does not discount its disruptive potential. What is clear is that
within the Cinemas of Girlhood as well as other cultural products, agentic girlhood is being
coded in contradictory ways, being able to act in both conservative and subversive ways. As
Genz (2006, p. 338) argues, what this suggests is that it may be necessary to expand the
vocabulary of political actions in order to make some sense of how agency is enacted in
moments of discursive uncertainty and political change. In suggesting that Whale Rider
offers such an expansion, I want to further explore the ways in which the film makes use of
“the girl” as a “glocalizing” factor, tying the indigenous public sphere to global cultural
processes as it also offers a re-articulation of indigenous girlhood and the national narrative.
Reinventing Agency: Disruptions in Time and the Project of
Remembering
In modern theories of subjectivity, according to Driscoll (2002, p. 3), the girl often
figures as a definitive failure of attaining the status of subject. Agency was an attribute
deemed beyond the limits of femininity (Davies 2000; Johnson 1993). While the recent
INDIGENIZING GIRL POWER 311
current within popular culture that uses young women as a metaphor for social change
builds on this long history, it also crucially diverges from it. As McRobbie (2000) argues, the
incredible proliferation of images of girls in film and in media stories, is at least partially
related to the ways in which girls have come to represent, for the first time, one of the
stakes upon which the future depends.
6
This notion of a future that is female is played out in Whale Rider, by juxtaposing Pai’s
promise as a leader with the males of her community who live the consequences of
colonialism in particularly damaging ways. It is not just that Pai easily outperforms her male
peers in all the tasks set for them by Koro. It is also that the adult males of the community
seem to have more strained relations to the land, the sea, and the cultural traditions. Pai’s
father has left for Europe to pursue a career as a sculptor and has made his refusal to take
on the leadership of the community clear. Her uncle faces unemployment and drug
addiction, and has according to his mother “become fat and ugly.” Some of the fathers of
the boys Koro is training are involved in gang activity and have histories of incarceration.
The film references what youth researcher Ormand (2004) argues is a sense of hopelessness
in this region of New Zealand. The recent removal of national economic subsidies from the
farming and fishing industry has, according to Ormand, adversely affected the already
precarious community employment. Linda Tuhiwai Smith describes the similar challenges
in the Maori community where she grew up:
Unemployment, ill health and poverty underpin what on the surface look like idyllic
conditions. Many people live on welfare benefits. Once in a while, someone dies violently
... In the mid 1980s also, a government economic restructuring programme began which
took away farm subsidies, privatized state industries and instituted a raft of “user pays”
policies. This signaled New Zealand’s neo-liberal economic experiment, one that resulted
in huge redundancy and tore the heart out of the Maori labour force ... Disillusioned
young people try and make sense of their lives while being put through training
programmes to prepare for work in communities where no one is employing ... Despite
unemployment people still work hard, the young are expected to contribute to collective
needs of their extended families. People are still expected to care for the sick and the
elderly ... Most tribes are struggling to take care of themselves. People are still trying to
survive. (1999, pp. 95– 96)
In a scene that references the community’s vulnerability, while also anticipating Pai’s
future as leader and her commitment to keeping the community strong and infused with
hope, she asks her grandfather to once again tell her about the origins of the ancestors. He
is working on the motor of his boat and uses the frayed rope he is trying to attach to the
motor to explain. He shows her the rope and asks her what she sees. “Lots of little bits of
rope all twisted together,” she answers. “That’s right. Weave together the threads of Paikea
and we remain strong. Each one of these threads is one of your ancestors all joined together
and strong, all the way back to that whale of yours.” He finishes tying the rope around the
motor, pulls it and it snaps in two. While he casually tosses it aside calling it a “useless
bloody rope” and leaves to get another one, Pai picks it up and manages to successfully tie
it together. The words of her grandfather have infused the rope with wondrous meaning
and importance. She attaches it to the motor, pulls it and the motor starts with a whir. But
when she proudly calls out to him that “it’s working!” he responds with anger: “I don’t want
you to do that again, it’s dangerous.”
312 MARNINA GONICK
If the film suggests a future that is female, this scene also signals that the route to the
future is through connection to the community’s history. Given that Pai’s name recalls her
long ago ancestor, she represents not only the future but the past. In bearing the name of
someone who is dead, she is marked as a site of mourning. This is reflected in her
complicated relationship to Koro, who is in perpetual mourning for his diminished
community. Although he clearly loves her, she is also the source of his deep despair. While,
as the scene described above demonstrates, they are closely bound together by their
shared love and respect for their cultural traditions and stories, he is convinced that it was
her birth and the death of her twin brother “when things started to go wrong for us.” The
“girl” is thus complexly positioned in the film, representing more than one register of time.
On the one hand, she is the focus of the film’s narrative emphasis on transition and change.
On the other, her sensitivities to the continuities of the past, and especially her deep
devotion and sympathy for her grandfather, position her as belonging to the past. In
marking out a space that is both the future and the past, Pai may be said to represent a
disruption of time—she is a new time, an interstitial time, both past and future. She is
where the relations of time, memory, and hope for the future are reconfigured. This
complication of time infuses the discourse of girl power with an indigenous sensibility.
Bhabha has called this kind of double marking a “realignment of memory and the
present, [as] a practice of historical ‘exposure’—and a technology of processing,
remembering, repeating and working through” (1996, p. 203). I want to suggest that the
effect of this technology is an expanded vocabulary for the agentic girl subject and for the
enactment of agency. It does so in two related ways. First, in its insistence on the past it
affirms communities of memory that are lived, felt, and interrogated. Thus, remembering is
articulated as a form of agency. Secondly, in suggesting that memory is firmly situated in
the present yet looks toward the future, the importance of learning to live with loss is
articulated synonymously with a sense of possibility for the future. Smith cites particular
forms of remembering as crucial to the very survival of indigenous peoples, cultures, and
languages and to the struggle of self-determination. She states:
The remembering of a people relates not so much to an idealized remembering of a
golden past but more specifically to the remembering of a painful past and, importantly,
people’s responses to that pain. While collectively indigenous communities can talk
through the history of painful events, there are frequent silences and intervals in the
stories about what happened after the event ... This form of remembering is painful
because it involves remembering not just what colonization was about but what being
dehumanized meant for own cultural practices. Both healing and transformation become
crucial strategies in any approach which asks a community to remember what they may
have decided unconsciously or consciously to forget. (Tuhiwai Smith 1999, p. 146)
In signifying more than one register of time, Pai is what Butler (1997) has called a
“melancholic subject.” According to Butler, melancholia is a potential means of subversion
and agency, a site of refusal and revolt rather than uniquely a scene of suffering. The film’s
climatic scene puts into play both these technologies of working through and presents us
with a means of addressing the moral lesson underlying this gender fable. In what ways
does remembering as a form of agency participate in a re-articulation of girl power and a
decolonizing of the screen? Similarly, in what ways does decolonizing the screen, subvert
the terms on which girls and girlhood have come to be recognizable and thus produce new
forms of the agentic girl subject?
INDIGENIZING GIRL POWER 313
The scene is split between Pai’s heartrending speech and the beaching of the
whales. Caro begins with a shot of Pai struggling to deliver a speech she has written to
honor her grandfather. It is about her heritage and was the winning entry in a regional
school contest. She is in tears because although she has invited him to be her guest of
honor, her grandfather’s chair in the community-filled auditorium remains empty.
Standing on the school stage, high above the audience, Pai, dressed in traditional garb,
speaks about her grandfather’s search for a new leader, demonstrating her prescient
understanding of the importance of this quest to the survival of the community. However,
the solution she offers is far more expansive than that sought by her grandfather. Hers is
grounded in a radical democratic politics, striving for a collective, inclusive future. She
says, “we can learn that if the knowledge is given to everyone, we can have lots of leaders
and soon everyone will be strong. Not just the one being chosen.” Interspersed with these
scenes are shots of her grandfather emerging from the house where he has been laying in
bed for several days, bitter and depressed, after the task he has set for the young boys he
is training fails. None is able to successfully dive for the whale tooth he has thrown into
the ocean. Once outside, he discovers several whales who have beached themselves. The
scene draws on magical realism for its force. It is Pai herself who has called to the whales.
Her voice-over explains, “I called to them and they came. But, it wasn’t right. They were
dying.”
This scene of Pai delivering her speech evokes Butler’s (1997) discussion of the
“virtuous disobedient” character Antigone. Discerning political potential in such stagings of
ontological insufficiency, Butler is drawn to figures who exemplify “virtuous disobedience”
as an effective strategy of subversion. Since, for Butler, performativity and melancholia
contain the political promise of radical disruption and subversion, it is those moments in
which the subject exceeds the terms that constitute her/him that are of most analytical
interest. Like Antigone, who ignores the King’s orders, Pai has disobeyed her grandfather’s
instructions over and over to leave his training class to the boys.
7
The public speech Pai
makes in front of her community draws on the language of sovereignty, producing a new
public sphere for a girl’s voice—a sphere that doesn’t actually exist at that time. According
to Mohanram (1996), speaking rights for women in the marae has recently been a hotly
contested issue and one tied to the question of agency. Traditionally women have
the specific role of greeting and men that of speaking. Pai and her grandmother are
shown performing the ceremonial greeting on the marae in the inauguration of Koro’s
school. Mohanram suggests that the western paradigm of what constitutes agency
(speech rather than ritualized greeting) led to the debate regarding women’s speech on
the marae (1996, p. 63).
Towards the end of her speech, Pai recites the chant of Paikea, used, she explains, to
call out to the ancient ones when he was lost at sea and in great need. The power of the
chant has been handed down through the men of her family. She has learned the words by
listening in at the open window after Koro expels her from his class, when she refuses to sit
in the back, behind the boys. And yet, before uttering the words, she respectfully dedicates
them to her grandfather. The citation of power that she performs is one that is used to
produce the possibility of a political speech act for a Maori girl in the name of her desire that
is radically delegitimated by the authoritative figure of the grandfather. She produces, one
might say, a new basis for legitimating speech precisely through deterritorializing, or citing
the norms of power in a new context. She produces a radical crisis for established power. It’s
a critical subversion; a radical re-signification.
314 MARNINA GONICK
For Butler (1997), although the intersubjective, interdependent, melancholic subject
may not be autonomous, s/he is certainly an agent, since s/he is not inevitably bound to
respond to the names by which s/he is addressed. Butler finds potential for agency in the
subject’s responses to an interpolative call that regularly misses its mark. By acknowledging
his or her incompletion and redeploying the terms of discourse, the subject may exploit the
productive nature of melancholia, language, and the law to subversive ends in order to
stage unforeseen and unsanctioned modes of identity. Agency, Butler repeatedly insists,
begins where sovereignty wanes (or where sovereignty is given up), and it always resides
within a law that is multiple, myriad, and self-proliferating.
Pai’s refusal to “be a girl” on the terms which exclude her from learning the
ancient ways in Koro’s class and which deny her the leader’s role, subverts what it
means to be both a girl and a leader. Her ingenious solution to exclusion from inheriting
the leadership position is that she refigures agentic leadership as based on performance
rather than entitlement and in the process rewrites what entitlement means. Pai does
not simply act to become a leader or act like a leader; she acts leadership. As the
community attempts to turn the whales around, Pai climbs on the back of the largest
one and rides with him into the ocean; she becomes the Whale Rider. In her
performance of leadership, featuring spectacular and daring feats, Pai enacts an agency
which works to subvert mythic constructions of leadership as exclusively masculine. In
doing so, a subversion of colonial discourses of Maori is also enacted: indigenous life is
not dead; it is revitalized through “the girl” subject. A counter-memory to official
hegemonic history is produced.
On yet another level, the film itself might also be called a melancholic subject, for it
too does not inevitably respond to the ways in which it is addressed. That is, Whale Rider
defies its naming as a film about girl power by expanding the notion of girlhood to include
indigenous girls as well as what an agentic femininity might entail. Unlike the manifestation
of girl power in many Hollywood films, here agency is not recuperated into a conservation
of conventional femininity. Neither is it about disregarding the past or community
traditions but about a deep understanding and respect of them so that they might be
revised. In the process, not only is a decolonizing of the screen accomplished but also a re-
signification of the term girl power.
In suggesting that Whale Rider be read as a gender fable, I am suggesting that it offers
us an interesting way to think about subversion of gender norms, the expansion of
discourses of girls and girlhood and how both are linked to the question of agency. Pai’s
performance of leadership and positioning as “girl power” within the media, suggests that
the question of agency may be reformulated as a question of how signification and re-
signification work. Like Butler (1997), my inquiry attempts to locate the political in the very
signifying practices that establish, regulate, and deregulate identity. The film poses the
question of how the foundations that cover over alternative cultural configurations of
gender and what it means to be an (indigenous) girl might be disrupted. As Judith
Butler argues,
if subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through
the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected
permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its
“natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.
(1990, p. 92)
INDIGENIZING GIRL POWER 315
Conclusion
In drawing on magical realism, the stories and fables of childhood, Whale Rider invites
its audience into a dream world where the suspension of disbelief means that ordinary
realities are temporarily bracketed. The seduction and perfidy of this kind of narrative,
operates to, on the one hand invite the audience into the realm of the imaginary, while on
the other inducting it into an indigenous public sphere as witnesses to and participants in
the politics of gender subversion and cultural survival. Ginsburg (1993, p. 294) sees such
work as “mediating across boundaries, mediating ruptures of time and history,” and
advancing the process of identity construction. At times, she suggests the work goes
beyond merely asserting an existing identity to become “a means of cultural invention that
refracts and recombines elements from both the dominant and minority societies” (cited in
Shohat & Stam 1996, p. 150). Thus, in reading Whale Rider as a gender fable that initializes
both a subversive and moral story I am suggesting that it mobilizes desire in potentially
empowering directions. Its double project of resymbolizing girlhood and decolonizing the
screen participates in the kind of cultural invention Ginsburg references.
It does so by positioning “the girl” as a loaded signifier which, given the global reach
of girl power discourses, aptly expresses the tensions between deterritorialization and
reterritorialization. In the film, indigenous narratives are read through the frameworks of
the familiar generic story of “girl power,” at the same time as the film continually reasserts
and reestablishes the distinctiveness of Maori connections to Aotearoa, to the land, and the
fight for cultural survival. In the process, girl power is itself reconfigured, its meanings
expanded by the forms of agency (remembering, living with loss, and interstitial time) and
girlhood represented in the film. Whale Rider is thus a film that features local content
inflected with global discourses.
Whale Rider also presents a heroic girl character who is significantly different from the
new generation of female action-adventure heroes whose battles are, according to Helford
(2000, p. 294), fought and won on individualistic terms and who acts to right wrongs
without insisting on greater cultural change. In contrast, as Barker (2002, p. 323) points out,
to identify as indigenous is to mark oneself as a member of a people. Pai’s success is more
than individualized; her community is renewed through her actions. The last pivotal scenes
show the whole community gathering together first to save the beached whales and then
later to celebrate with Pai. The film then can be seen to participate in a political program. It
increases the power of realization of not only the Maori indigenous community but
because of the film’s mass appeal it organizes an emergent transcultural community of
support (Shohat & Stam 1996, p. 167).
As Shohat and Stam suggest, to explain the public’s attraction to a text or medium
one must look not only for the “ideological” effect that manipulates people into complicity
with existing social relations, but also for the kernel of utopian fantasy reaching beyond
these relations, whereby the medium constitutes itself as a projected fulfillment of what is
desired and absent within the status quo (1996, p. 162). In its final scene, Whale Rider
satisfies the wished for signs of the possibilities for hope and a transformative moral order.
In this scene, Pai’s father’s waka,
8
which has been sitting abandoned, and only partially
built, on the beach, is finally finished. Its completion marks the community’s celebration of
its new spiritual leader. As the boat strikes out to sea, the full community is there on the
beach. Pai and Koro are sitting, chanting side by side, while the boat is paddled by the men
and women of the community, including Pai’s father. With a young girl as their new leader,
316 MARNINA GONICK
Maori ways are understood to be both timeless and adaptable to new ways of ensuring
cultural survival. The beginning and continuation of a journey is signaled. The purpose this
time isn’t to find new land, but to re-create indigenous life in the place where they already
live. As Pai’s final voice-over explains, “I am not a prophet, but I know that our people will
keep going forward, all together, with all of our strength.”
NOTES
1. See, for example, Mottesheard (2003).
2. The marae is, according to Mohanram (1996), a far more complex version of the Town Hall,
with spiritual connotations; the marae is a building and the land surrounding it whose most
important function is to symbolize the tribe.
3. See, for example, the review by Karten (2003).
4. See, for example, Stasia’s (2004) discussion of agency and girl hero films and Burman’s
(2005) essay examining the “girling” of agency in the film Amelie.
5. See, for example, Ochieng (2003).
6. McRobbie (2000) makes this argument in her detailed analysis of the British media’s
intensified focus on the problems and issues of young men. She includes examples of the
under-performance of boys in schools and the problems now facing young men in the labor
market.
7. Unlike Antigone, who pays the price of death for her disobedience, Pai lives to be celebrated
by her community and her grandfather who even apologizes for not having recognized her
as his successor as she lays unconscious in a hospital bed.
8. This is a highly decorated, wood-carved large boat.
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Marnina Gonick is Canada Research Chair in Gender at Mount St Vincent University, Halifax,
Nova Scotia, Canada. She is the author of Between Femininities: Ambivalence, Identity
and the Education of Girls (SUNY Press, 2003). E-mail: marnina.gonick@msvu.ca
INDIGENIZING GIRL POWER 319
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