Tu

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.

Tumatauenga's character as the atua of war and of human endeavor generally has carried into contemporary New Zealand military and cultural life in ways that go well beyond old ritual observance. The New Zealand Army's own cultural and ceremonial practice, including its use of karakia, haka, and other Maori protocols in formal military occasions, training and deployment ceremonies, draws explicitly on Tumatauenga as the traditional atua associated with human struggle, courage and conflict, a connection widely referenced in the Army's own cultural materials and by Maori commentators discussing the relationship between traditional atua and the modern institution.

The Maori Battalion, the distinguished New Zealand infantry unit that served with particular distinction in the Second World War and remains a significant point of pride and memory in Maori communities today, is commonly discussed in relation to this same traditional association between Tu and the courage required in war, linking a specific and well documented twentieth century military history to a much older understanding of what it means, in Maori terms, to stand under Tumatauenga's particular domain. This living connection illustrates a broader pattern found across the traditions in this atlas, in which a traditional war god's domain does not remain confined to ancient ritual but continues to be invoked, adapted and given new expression as the community's own historical circumstances and institutions change, from the karakia said over food acknowledging Tu's ancient conquest of his brothers to the karakia said today at a modern military ceremony invoking the same atua for an entirely different, contemporary form of service.