Asserting Feminist Claims within Māori Culture: Whale Rider (Nicki Caro, 2002)

Through a comparison with the film’s source, Witi Ihimaera’s novel The Whale Rider (1987), this chapter explores why many Māori found the film culturally offensive on account of the way that its Pākehā director, Niki Caro, imposed a euro-centric feminist ideology on the story in the process of adaptation that was at odds with the kaupapa Māori approach taken by Ihimaera in the original. The film is discussed as illustrating a trend whereby national coming-of-age stories would increasingly be subjected to a conventionalized generic treatment in order to reach a prospective international audience sought by funding bodies.