The Whale Rider Study Guide

Biography of Witi Ihimaera

Witi Ihimaera, born on February 7, 1944, in Gisborne, New Zealand, is a prominent Māori author known for his significant contributions to New Zealand literature. He belongs to the Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki, Rongowhakaata, and Ngāti Porou tribes. Ihimaera's literary career began in the early 1970s, and he is celebrated for being the first Māori writer to publish a novel. His works often explore Māori culture, identity, and the intersection of Māori and Pākehā (European) worlds. Among his notable works are "Tangi" (1973), "The Matriarch" (1986), and "Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies" (1994). Ihimaera's novel "The Whale Rider" (1987) garnered international acclaim and was adapted into a successful film in 2002. Throughout his career, Ihimaera has received numerous awards and honors, including the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature.

Historical and Literary Context for "The Whale Rider"

"The Whale Rider" is set against the backdrop of New Zealand's rich Māori heritage and contemporary societal changes. Written in 1987, the novel reflects the tension between traditional Māori values and modern influences. During this period, New Zealand was experiencing a resurgence of Māori cultural pride and political activism, often referred to as the Māori Renaissance. This movement sought to revive and sustain Māori language, customs, and identity in the face of ongoing colonization and cultural assimilation.

The novel tells the story of Kahu, a young Māori girl who defies gender expectations to become the prophetic leader of her people. Through Kahu's journey, Ihimaera addresses themes of gender equality, cultural survival, and the interconnection between humans and nature. The story's use of myth and legend, particularly the figure of Paikea, the whale rider, underscores the spiritual and ancestral bonds central to Māori culture.

"The Whale Rider" is notable for its lyrical prose and its blending of realism with magical elements. Ihimaera's work contributes to the broader canon of postcolonial literature, offering a voice to indigenous experiences and perspectives while challenging colonial narratives and stereotypes. The novel's adaptation into a film further amplified its impact, bringing Māori stories and issues to a global audience.

Want to generate unlimited academic essays?

Unlock endless possibilities for your academic writing!
Our tool helps you craft high-quality, original essays in no time. Whether you're tackling complex topics or need help structuring your thoughts, we've got you covered. Start creating with ease and elevate your academic performance today!

About Rephrasely

Getting your wording just right

Paraphrasing is a natural part of the writing process as it helps you clarify your thinking and suit your words to your audience. Using a Rephrasely helps structure and streamline this work, and our paraphrase tool offers 20 modes, many of them free, for accomplishing just this. The 20 modes we offer are diverse, including a summarize tool, a free grammar checker, a mode to simplify text, and a sentence shortener. There are sentence rephrasers and paraphrase rephrase tools, and we pride ourselves on having both, since our reword generator accounts for context at both the sentence and paragraph levels.

When you google paraphrase you will get a variety of results, from a free Rephrasely, to an article spinner, to a general phrase tool, and it can be hard to determine which of these rephrase tools will best help you complete your work. If you simply need to get a word rephrase, that is, reword only small elements within the sentence, many tools will suffice, but there is the risk that you end up with a tool that does not consider context and produces very awkward and ungrammatical sentences. Rephrasing is very much an art, and we’ve built our paraphrase bot to produce the most correct results in 20 modes in over 100 languages, making it the best paraphrasing tool at an exceptionally low cost. So whether you need to paraphrase deutsch, paraphrase greek, or paraphrase bahasa melayu, the next time you think, I need something to paraphrase this for me, you’ll know where to turn.

From keywords to paragraphs

Generating paragraphs with unique ideas can be challenging, and too often writers get stuck at this stage of the writing process. With our paragraph tool, you can enter keywords and let our AI generate paragraphs for you, so that you can have something to work with, refine the output, and become more engaged in your writing.

A paragraph generator creates links between your ideas, such that the output is sensible, unique, and stimulating, very close to what you would expect a thoughtful human paragraph writer to produce.

Paragraph makers are nice, but what about a short story generator? Because our AI is generalized, it serves a story generator, an essay generator, a poem generator, and much more. To generate compelling stories, you should provide the story generator with useful keywords from which it can develop plot elements, including characters, setting details, and any situational information. To generate reasonably good essays, you should likewise provide the essay maker with details around argumentative positions and any other pertinent ideas. If you more specifically want an introduction paragraph generator or conclusion paragraph generator, you can provide starter text and keywords that will best enable our essay creator to produce them.

You may well ask, “is this essay generator free?” Everything on this site is free within a 3-day trial, so you can test and develop confidence in our products. You may also be wondering where this is an essay automatic writer or if it will take a while to get results. All results appear within a matter of seconds, so you can move through your work as quickly as possible.

You may have professional needs for creating paragraphs as well, such as those needed for cover letter. Most of the time a cover letter template includes information that is not relevant to you; by using your own keywords, we can produce cover letter examples that are relevant to your use case and often require very little editing. By using this service, you can also learn how to write a cover letter and achieve the cover letter format you need.

Plagiarism checker free

Like everything else on our site, you can check plagiarism free within a trial, which is a great opportunity for those who want to check a paper for plagiarism without committing to paying before they see results. This free plagiarism checker is great for students and clearly indicates how to check for plagiarism by highlighting areas of similarity between the two texts. Just to be sure you are not accidentally plagiarizing, be sure to check all of your paraphrases as well.