Tu

Tu's conquest of his brothers' domains, already recorded as the origin of humanity's standing over forest, sea and cultivated food, is matched by a living space still marked out in his name at every formal Maori welcome. The marae atea, the open ground in front of a meeting house where a powhiri, the ceremony welcoming visitors onto a marae, begins, is described in Maori protocol as Tumatauenga's own domain; speeches given there are permitted a forcefulness elsewhere considered inappropriate, understood as an expression of Tu's own nature rather than a breach of manners. That domain opens every significant powhiri with a wero, a ritual challenge performed by warriors representing the realm of Tumatauenga specifically. In its full form three challengers approach in sequence: the first lays down a warning baton for the visiting party's leader to pick up, the second a baton simply laid down and retrieved, and the third kneels to lay down a baton that clears the way, then leads the visitors onto the marae itself. Only after this challenge, and the karanga that follows it, do visitors lose the tapu, sacred restriction, that marks first time guests as waewae tapu, sacred feet, and pass from a state governed by Tu into ordinary welcome. The god of war, in this living form, is the gate a peaceful visit still has to pass through.

Tu's standing as actively venerated in a living tradition reaches an institution few other atua in this pass can claim. Ngati Tumatauenga, tribe of the god of war, is the official Maori name of the New Zealand Army today, granted in 1994 with the blessing of the reigning Maori Queen, Te Atairangikaahu, and of the iwi surrounding the Army's Waiouru base, Ngati Tuwharetoa, Ngati Kahungunu, Ngati Maniapoto and Ngati Tuhoe. The grant conferred on the Army a status of iwidom, treating the institution itself as a tribe standing under Tu's own name rather than merely invoking him as a decorative patron. The honor answers directly to the character already recorded of Tu, the brother who alone argued to kill Ranginui and Papatuanuku outright and who afterward subdued his siblings' domains by force. A modern national army bearing his name and holding formal iwi status under a living paramount chief is not a historical memorial to that character but a continuing institutional claim on it, distinguishing Tu's standing sharply from the more genealogical or seasonal forms his brothers carry: his is the one embodied, today, in a standing organization that still trains and still serves under his name.