Abstract
Kiwi have had an angular relationship to the British Empire. Their unusual physical features troubled imperial science, confounding the neat assumptions of taxonomic orders. In the early twentieth century, the kiwi was fixed upon, appropriated by colonists, and mobilized as a symbol of nationhood. But while the kiwi’s prominence in the symbolic repertoire of the nation has persisted, that process of meaning-making never erased or undermined the significance of kiwi within te ao Māori (the Māori world), in terms of both environmental understanding and cultural meaning.
Kiwi are highly adapted to their native habitat, where they faced no mammalian predators.