Haumia

Haumia, in fuller form Haumia-tiketike, is the Maori and wider Polynesian atua of uncultivated food, principally aruhe, the root of the bracken fern that fed people without being planted or tended. He is a son of Ranginui and Papatuanuku and, with his brothers Tane, Tangaroa, Tu and Rongo, one of the departmental gods that Te Ara, the New Zealand government's own encyclopedia, names as taking charge of a portion of the world once it was forced open between the sky and the earth. Where Rongo governs the tended crop, Haumia governs what the land gives without cultivation, and the fernroot he presides over was, before the kumara's wider adoption, a staple that could be gathered through lean seasons when planted food failed. Tradition holds him, with Rongo, among the brothers whom Tawhirimatea, the god of storms, attacked in fury at the separation of their parents, since a crop battered by wind and rain is exactly the harm a storm does to what Haumia and Rongo provide.